This post is part of a series of 2016 predictions from industry experts.
Mobile SEO Drives Local SEO
Marcus Tandler, OnPage.org, @mediadonis
Successful Local SEO always presupposes a great mobile SEO strategy. The much discussed "Mobilegeddon" which hit Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) in April of this year, has been quite a wake up call for webmasters and savvy SEOs alike. Most websites already have more than 50% of their visitors coming via mobile devices, so offering a great mobile user experience is no longer just an option, but rather a necessity
Google has become a mobile first company, with most of their users using the Google search via mobile devices, so offering websites with a good mobile user experience have become a high priority for Google. It's an imperative to have a well-conceived mobile strategy — using responsive design and responsive content, you can adjust your website to fit all types of resolution, so it can be perfectly viewed on all devices.
Also, keep a lookout for Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages project (AMP), which will likely hit the SERPs in 2016. AMP is basically a stripped down version of HTML documents, with no 3rd party JavaScripts allowed, optimizing the whole mobile experience for very last loading times. You just need to point with a rel=amphtml to your hosted AMP document, which points back to your original document with rel=canoncial. Google says, that it won't favor AMP documents in the SERPs, but since we all know how important site speed and a fast mobile experience for users has become, I expect AMP documents to end up ranking higher than "traditional" HTML documents in a not so distant future.
