Three Things That Shifted in 2022

The shape of the year

Three changes mattered for a small business site, and they arrived in February, March, and August.

Two of them confirmed advice that was already correct, which is the usual pattern and is worth saying plainly.

One of them set a date that requires action, and that date is now seven months away.

Everything else during the year was noise, adjustment, or a matter for larger organisations than yours.

February: the desktop signal

The page experience signal, which had applied to mobile since the previous year, was extended to desktop searches in February.

That meant speed, stability, and general usability on a desktop became a ranking consideration alongside the mobile version.

For most small sites this changed nothing, because a site built to work on a phone is almost always adequate on a desktop.

The businesses affected were those with a heavy desktop version and a stripped mobile one, which is now an unusual arrangement.

If you did nothing about it, that was probably correct.

March: the measurement deadline

• A date was set for the old analytics to stop.
• 1 July 2023 for standard properties.
• The replacement works differently.
• Historical data does not move across.
• The practical deadline is much earlier.

This is the one requiring work. The replacement does not carry your history, so anybody wanting year-on-year comparison after next July needs the new property collecting data well before then.

August: the content update

An update in late August targeting content made primarily for search engines rather than for people.

It was described as a sitewide signal, which was the unusual part, meaning weak pages could affect how a whole site performs rather than only failing themselves.

For a business publishing about its own work from its own experience, the correct response was to change nothing.

For businesses carrying pages produced in volume by a supplier, it changed the reasoning about keeping them.

The effect on individual small sites was mixed and frequently invisible, which is worth remembering when reading anybody's confident account of it.

What it adds up to

Two of the three rewarded what a sensible small business was already doing.

Sites that load properly, work on a phone, and say something specific about real work were unaffected by February and helped by August.

That is the pattern most years, and it is the argument for ignoring most announcements and doing the ordinary things well.

The exception is anything with a date attached, which is why March is the one to act on.

A deadline is different from a signal, because a signal adjusts and a deadline arrives.

A worked example

A business asked in September what they should do about the year's changes.

Their site was reasonably fast and worked on a phone, so February needed nothing.

Their eleven service pages were written by the owner from experience, so August needed nothing either.

They had sixty pages produced by a supplier which they had been meaning to deal with, and August gave them a reason to.

And they had not set up the replacement analytics, which was the one genuine outstanding item.

The whole year's response was one afternoon of pruning and one hour of configuration.

Read your own year first

A better use of an hour than any of the above.

Pull your traffic and enquiries for the twelve months and compare them against the previous twelve, month by month rather than as a total.

Mark on that the months where something happened to your business: a page published, a price change, a supplier problem, a quiet period.

Almost always the movements line up with your own events rather than with anything on the industry's calendar.

That exercise tells you what to do next year, which no summary of announcements can.

What did not change

Worth listing, since it is most of what matters.

Being findable for what you actually do, in the area you actually cover.

Answering the questions customers ask, with figures rather than adjectives.

Being contactable, quickly, by whatever route somebody prefers.

Having reviews, and having them somewhere a stranger will look.

None of those moved this year, none moved last year, and a business doing them well has been insulated from every announcement in both.

What is already visible for next year

Two things, without speculating further.

The analytics date arrives in July, which makes the first half of next year the period to be ready in.

And a conversational tool released last week has attracted a great deal of attention very quickly, which is worth understanding rather than reacting to.

That second one is a subject for the coming days rather than a line in a summary, since the proportionate response is not obvious yet.

Everything else is speculation, and the ordinary work remains the same regardless.

The pattern across two years

Worth noting, since this is the second of these summaries and the shape is the same.

Both years produced a handful of changes, most of which rewarded sites that were already sensible, and one or two with dates requiring action.

Both years also produced a great deal of commentary about changes that turned out to affect very few small businesses.

The businesses that had a difficult year in either had difficulties that were local and ordinary: a supplier failing, a site breaking, a person leaving.

Which suggests the useful annual review is of your own year rather than of the industry's, and that this summary is worth less than an hour spent on your own figures.

The counter-case

Summaries like this flatten a year.

Individual businesses had specific problems that mattered far more than any of these: a hosting move, a supplier failure, a bad month.

The industry also over-attributes changes in traffic to announcements when the cause was usually something local and ordinary.

And a business with a good year should be careful about crediting the correct handling of an update it may not have been affected by.

Set up the replacement analytics, deal with any pages you already knew were weak, and ignore the rest.

Into January

1. Check the new analytics is collecting.
2. Note the July date in the diary.
3. Check your site on a desktop for speed.
4. List pages you would be embarrassed by.
5. Check those for links and conversions.
6. Leave the rest alone.
7. Record this year's figures for comparison.

Step one is the only item with a deadline behind it, and doing it now rather than in June is what makes the comparison possible afterwards.

Last year's version of this is covered in what changed on the web this year.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.