It’s the time of year for predictions, and I’m wary of them, because a year ago I confidently told anyone reading that social signals would become a major ranking factor in 2012, and that hasn’t obviously happened. So take what follows with the appropriate pinch of salt.
If I had to name the single thing I think matters most going into 2013, it’s mobile, and specifically the shift from treating mobile as an afterthought to designing for it first.
This has been the year mobile stopped being a slide at the back of the deck. The traffic numbers crossed a line for a lot of businesses; a fifth, a quarter, sometimes more of visits coming from phones, and rising every quarter. We spent 2012 reacting to that, bolting a mobile experience onto sites that were designed for desktops. My hunch is that 2013 is the year the smarter teams flip it round and start with the phone.
Designing for the small screen first is a useful discipline even if most of your traffic is still desktop. It forces you to decide what actually matters on a page, because you haven’t got the room for anything else. Everything that survives the phone layout is, more or less by definition, the important stuff, and then you add back the space and the richness as the screen grows. It’s the reverse of how most of us have built for a decade, and it’s harder than it sounds; deciding what to cut is always harder than deciding what to add.
The other thing I’ll be watching is the fallout from Penguin and the disavow tool. 2012 was the year Google got serious about link spam and then handed us a dangerous instrument to clean it up with. I don’t think that story is finished; I’d expect more of the same in 2013, more pressure on the cheap tactics, and a lot of businesses still working through link profiles they built in more innocent times. Search itself keeps getting more personal and more local as well, which makes a flat “what position do we rank at” a shakier question than it used to be.
That’s my best guess at it, anyway. Ask me this time next year whether mobile-first turned out to be the story of 2013, and do remind me about the social signals thing if I’ve got it wrong again. Merry Christmas.
