SEO Wash-up Monday 26th February

Mobile scorecard and impact calculator tools to show importance of mobile page speed

For a long time, Google has focused their attention on getting marketers and site owners to improve site experiences. At a Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google has announced that they are releasing two new mobile benchmarking; a new mobile scorecard and a conversion impact calculator. The new tools are aimed to give marketers a clear visual that will help them get buy-in from stakeholders for investment in mobile site speed.

Mobile Scorecard uses the Chrome User Experience Report data that helps compare the speed of multiple sites on mobile. This is the same database of latency data from Chrome users that Google has been using in its PageSpeed Insights Tool. It has been said that Google’s Mobile Scorecard can report on thousands of sites from various countries.

Impact Calculator is designed to show just how much conversion revenue a site is missing out on because of its slow loading speed. It shows how a change in page load can drive revenue up or down after marketers put in their average monthly visitors, average order value and conversion rate.

The Impact Calculator conversion is based on data from The State of Online Retail Performance report from April 2017 that showed each second of delay in page load on a retail site can hurt conversions by up to 20 percent.

Multiple new languages, distribution and skills to be added to Google Assistant

Google is growing the distribution, scale and capabilities of their Google Assistant. They are adding new languages, handsets, carriers and some new cross-device tricks. Against their competitors for the smart speaker, Google’s smart speaker will have more as it currently has eight languages but will have 30 by the end of 2018.

In a recent blog post by Google, they have mentioned that the Google Assistant will be reaching 95 percent of Android phones around the world and previously Google has reported that the Assistant is on 400 million devices globally.

Deeper integrations

Google is planning a deeper integration on Android phones and with mobile carriers. Google Assistant was initially only deeply integrated into the Pixel. But last year December, Google made the Assistant available on a range of Android phones and tablets. The Deeper Assistant integrations will be available to new devices from Sony, Xiaomi and LG.

Carriers will also be able to use Google Assistant to help answer user questions about plan details and other carrier-related services. So in theory the carriers will be able to offload some of their customer service functions to Google Assistant. This will give carriers a new way to support their customers and reduce their response time. At the moment the participating carriers include Vodafone, Sprint and Telus.