For better or worse, we’re in the middle of a digital revolution. With a staggering amount of websites online, brands today must remain strategic and embrace digitization or risk being left behind. According to CEO of Accenture Pierre Nanterme, digital is the main reason why over half of the Fortune 500 have disappeared since the year 2000.
Companies must have a clear understanding of user expectations to stay relevant and above all, continue to evolve their digital experiences. Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google, Maile Ohye last month at WordCamp US talked about some of the latest trends in Google search and mobile that can help your brand deliver a better user experience.
Invest in mobile
In just the past few years, there’s been an explosion in mobile search. In fact, one year ago mobile officially surpassed desktop queries, highlighting a step forward toward a mobile-first world. Ohye recommends that when you think about mobile queries to factor local. A whopping one third of all searches are related to location and location-related mobile searches are growing 50 percent faster than all mobile searches, she said.
This is part of the personalization movement, where consumers expect unique “hyper-targeted” experiences. For brands, one easy way to deliver this experience is to think local — “make sure your site is translated, localized, and conducive to the environment their in, ” Ohye said.
There are currently more than 3.5 billion users online globally. This means that only 40 percent of the world population has internet access today. We can expect this number to continue to skyrocket in coming years. For perspective on the growth trajectory of internet adoption, consider that in 1995 less than 1 percent of the population had an internet connection, and that number has increased tenfold from 1999 to 2013. Even more, 75 percent of internet use takes place in the top 20 countries. There is incredible growth opportunity for internet adoption in countries all over the world.
“From 2012 to 2015, Hindi search queries have tripled,” Ohye said, “however, more than 65 percent of India’s population is not yet online… This means that there are more than 800 million potential users still not only from India alone.”
Users are coming online and yet we don’t have content that serves their needs in their specific languages, she said. This isn’t just about localization and translation, but also overall connectivity. Internet users in India, for example, may have intermittent connectivity that should be a consideration when thinking local.
Artificial intelligence is the future
“It’s clear to me… we’re evolving from a mobile first to an AI first world,” said Google CEO Sunder Pacha.
Voice recognition is 20 percent of the queries that we see, Ohye said. “The Google app today understands 55 languages and is trying to improve how it understand languages like American English with a Hindi accent or how children are speaking.” Voice recognition has become an expectation for users. It’s become an active agent in their lives.
Beyond that, there’s a growing trend in interfaces built around the fact that users should have full utility without having to look at the screen. Think of “Ok, Google” or “Hey Siri” or home devices like Alexa.
“When we go beyond mobile, we have an interface built based around the fact that the user should have full-access without having to look at the screen,” Ohye said.
Another example of AI in action is chatbots. When you consider that there are 2.5 million people who use a chat app on their phone today, it becomes clear that chatbots are the natural evolution of that behavior, she said.
It’s no surprise that users today demand a fast experience online. DoubleClick found that 53 percent of visits are abandoned if a site takes more than three seconds to load. This demand is further seen in the open-source project AMP, where there are currently 600 million AMP pages in the Google Index from 700k domains in 230 countries and 1000 languages.
We’re moving from a desktop-first world to a mobile-first world. AMP provides a constrained format to keeps things fast — which makes the site more maintainable, Ohye said. “So if there a disputes within a company between marketing, design and content, in the end the AMP format will keep you constrained,” she said. While sites can achieve the same lightening-fast out coming by fine-tuning manually, AMP automates this process making it easy to maintain over a long period of time.
Google has made mobile updates to its search algorithms over the past few years to ensure that users are delivered the experiences they’ve come to expect. In April 2014, Google search saw a mobile-friendly update, and today 85 percent of mobile results are mobile friendly. “The next thing we have coming on January 10, 2017 is intrusive mobile, interstitials update,” Ohye said. This will further penalize sites that aren’t optimized for mobile.
As soon as we catch up, we are already behind
The internet is noisy. There are more than 1.1 billion sites online today, roughly one third the number of internet users. Site owners today are fighting for users’ attention, Ohye said. While it may seem important to develop a flashy site, with as many ad placements as possible, users get way more value in a clear and useful, distraction less messaging on sites.
Ohye does however point to three things that will remain constant as we move forward in the evolution of digital;
- Customers are more connected/online
- They want minimal friction( fast and seamless)
- They want increased utility (i.e., entertaining, value affirming, personalized, secure, and/or informative.)
In the digital age, as soon as we catch up we are behind. The key is to continuously evolve and improve your site by innovating and maintaining a user-first mentality.
You can view Maile Ohye’s full talk on wordpress.tv.