Tag: seo

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SEO

6 Reasons Your Pay Per Click Campaigns Are Failing

Not getting the results you hoped for from your PPC campaigns? Seeing either little-to-no results or high costs per click? While it’s easy to blame the niche or the internet as a whole, the reality is most of the reasons you aren’t seeing a return on investment (ROI) are things you can control. I’ll help you better understand this complex issue in today’s post.

Your Keywords are All Wrong

It’s not that your keywords are all wrong; it’s that you’re probably using too many. As you assess your campaigns, take a look at which are actually converting. Take the top 12 percent and redirect your budget to those and those alone. Seriously. Ditch the rest.

Most research statistics reflect that the top 12 percent of your keyword list gives you most sales. The other 88 percent are eating up around 60-some percent of your total marketing budget.

What a waste!

It’s still important to experiment and test new keywords. Make sure your campaigns aren’t limited to broad-based keywords. Include longtail terms that are specific to your niche, products, and target audience as well. The goal is to find the best performing keywords and direct your budget accordingly.

Your Bid Budget Needs to Be Adjusted

We’d all like to believe that setting a low bid for clicks is the way to go. It will save you money, right? Well…yes – and no, too.

In the beginning, you should actually allow for a higher budget — possibly even higher than Google recommends for your keywords.

A lack of clicks makes it impossible to determine which of your keywords are performing better (see above). The more clicks you get, the easier it is to collect the data you need to analyze your campaign.

Let’s say, for example, the recommended budget for your keyword is $12 per click. Instead, set your budget at $30 per click. You’re not likely to end up paying that $30; you’ll probably spend a few dollars over the initial $12.

Consider this an investment. Take the data you get in that first week, adjust your budget, and watch your visibility improve.

Your Ad Text is Weird

You only have a limited amount of space for your ad text, so at first it may seem like you need to get creative. This really isn’t always the case. You are better off with clear, concise wording that describes exactly what you have to offer than something witty but vague. Save the creative word play for your landing page.

This next tip matters: the text you use needs to be clear and concise, but it also needs to directly relate to what your audience will see. Don’t, for example, set up an ad about warm winter boots and then send your customers to a landing page advertising your spring special on cute flats. No one likes feeling misled. Your headline and your destination need to match.

Your Landing Page is Tripping People Up

It’s not uncommon for a subpar landing page to be the true culprit when it comes to a lack of conversions. Your PPC ad may be great, but you won’t see any sales if the ad drives traffic to a boring, slow, or unorganized destination. It takes the average web user a mere 10 seconds to decide if the page they’ve landed on is worth exploring. It better not take more than half that time for your entire page to finish loading.

Your landing page needs to load quickly and feature relevant content. Contrary to popular belief, less is more when it comes to content. Vibrant graphics, great video, and easy-to-navigate text are key. This doesn’t mean you can’t include a lot of info, especially if it’s necessary, but what you do add should be organized and skimmable.

Don’t forget to test landing pages, too. Create a couple of different versions and conduct regular A/B split tests. Direct your ads to the one that does best while you adjust the second version or come up with something new. You may even find you have different landing pages for different keyword groups, based on the way those individual audiences react to the unique ways you present information.

You’re Asking for Too Much

What’s your actual goal? Do you want a potential lead to call you for information? Do you want them to download a free form? Should they click on the landing page to complete a purchase online? Maybe you want them to sign up for an email list so you can continue to cultivate the sale.

I’ve seen a lot of landing pages where all of the above are incorporated in different areas. The truth is your visitors aren’t going to perform multiple actions. They’re looking for clear, concise instructions and will likely do one thing for you. Be clear about what that thing is and your action conversions will skyrocket.

Your Audience Targeting is Off

Your marketing team has probably spent a lot of time discussing company goals. You have great ad campaign ideas, timelines for rolling out new products, and targets for conversions.

So what’s the problem?

It’s all about you. Your customers don’t care how many widgets you want to sell this quarter. They don’t even care about your cute marketing graphics. They want to know what on earth your widget is going to do for them. Why do they want it? Do they really want it? What would they rather see instead?

Your landing page needs to answer all of these questions and more. It also needs to offer solutions for potential customers who have more questions. Can they trust you? Can they speak to someone with additional questions or concerns? Make sure your customers are receiving the educational information they are really looking for.

Boosting PPC conversions isn’t difficult, but it can be time consuming. You need to be dedicated to assessing, reassessing, testing, and adjusting your campaigns on a regular basis. Your keywords, ad text, audience demographics, and landing page layout should all be subject to regular scrutiny. The more flexible you are, the less likely your campaigns are to completely flop.

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SEO

How to Get That Coveted Google Featured Snippet Spot

Let‘s preface this article with a small task (no hard labor, we promise).

Bring up Google search; type in “how to tie a shoe.” Hit search.

Now, look at the top of the page. Instead of showing regular results when people ask “how to” questions, Google now includes the featured snippet — a clear, concise answer to the posed question. These are usually short, surface-level explanations that get right to the point.

Why snippets? It‘s all about being useful to the searcher. Users get the information they need quickly, making them far more likely to click through and explore connected websites in more detail. In regard to SEO, this should and does change your goals slightly. Instead of focusing on only the top search result, you should target Google’s featured snippet spot, too.

So how do you land one of these coveted spots? There’s nothing you can do other than create good content, really, but most research shows that ensuring you optimize your pages for Google can help. Whether that means specially-formatting a question, recipe, DIY, or something else, we’ll teach you how to do that in this post.

Know Your Own Niche

Let’s say you’re a veterinarian. What types of questions do you commonly get from pet owners? Are they asking you what to feed their cats or how to stop their dogs from jumping? Try Googling some of the most common concerns you hear about and see what comes up in the snippet spot.

Is the content already yours? If so, congrats!

If not (far more common, frankly), take a look at the question as well as the “People also ask” section to check out similar questions. What type of content page could you add to your site that answers the same question but in a more concise, detailed manner? Can you better utilize keywords or create stronger visuals? Study what your competitors are doing and then do it better.

Answer New Questions

Tools like Answer the Public make it easier than ever before to figure out what people are searching for online. Type in a simple keyword and you’ll see some pretty specific examples outlining what people are looking for. Which of these is most unique? Pick an angle and start writing.

Format Your Pages Carefully

One of the things Google looks for when creating a snippet is a quick answer to the question at hand. This means your intro paragraph needs to be short, sweet, and concise, with an exact answer. You can expand on the subject and flesh out the details in the body of the article or blog post, but you need to make sure the opening answers the question. Period. Keep the answer or list short and sweet so it shows completely in the search results.

Use Different Types of Content

Google doesn’t only look for paragraphs of text to feature in the snippets. The algorithms search for other “signifiers,” too.

When you see featured snippets, you’re likely to see:

  • Short paragraphs answering specific questions
  • Numbered lists (e.g., steps in instructions)
  • Short bulleted lists complementing a brief paragraph of text
  • Tables showing rankings or other details in the form of a list
  • Clips from YouTube videos associated with the topic
  • Text from one website with images from another (dual exposure)

Combine different types of content on your website and evaluate which are performing best in terms of reaching the snippet position for your keywords. Make adjustments to some of your other pages based on your results. You may find it helpful to combine content types to increase your odds of having your page appear in the top position.

Do Your Homework

The majority of featured snippets aren’t based on simple, single-word keywords. They’re more likely to be cemented in long-tail keywords as parts of questions or longer search phrases. It often seems as though some of the snippets are filled by keywords with lower search volumes, too. For this reason, it’s important to include both popular and low competition keywords.

Build a FAQ Page

Answering multiple questions in one place is a great way to increase your odds of being featured in the snippet section. The best way to do this is to build a comprehensive FAQ page for your website. Each answer should start with a short, concise statement that gives a simple but clear answer to the question. Sentences or paragraphs after that can expand in more detail. Again, it’s important that a clear, factual answer be included in the first part of your text. Get rid of the fluff and be as direct as possible.

Create a Chart

There are a lot of great chart and table tools out there; use these to insert either or both right inside your on-page content. Google loves lists and tables. They’re structured and easy to read. Be sure to clearly include product or service names, brand names, prices, weights, or anything else commonly asked on your lists.

Utilize Images

As noted above, sometimes Google will choose a snippet text from one website, but an image from a different website. In some cases, they’ll even grab an image as the answer, especially if it is a graph or contains informational text. This is why it is important no only to create great content, but to make sure your image meta tags are properly completed as well. The more more information you can give the search engine crawlers about the content on your page, the better your odds of being featured.

The reality is that the featured snippet spot isn’t something you’re going to obtain easily. It takes a lot of work and concentrated effort, but the benefits are certainly worth the work. In the process you’ll create and discover a ton of content ideas, improve the quality of your on-page content, and ultimately improve your site’s traffic over time.

Have you been featured in a snippet? We’d love to hear about your achievement and how you got there!

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SEO

14 of the Best Tools for Auditing Your Website’s Performance

Websites aren’t “set it and forget it” marketing tools. They need constant attention, ranging from technical function to the regular review of content. Speed, storage, SEO, and content relevancy are critical to ensuring that the right person sees your content at the right time — without becoming frustrated by endless loading delays.

In fact, a few short months ago, Google revealed their intention to start penalizing sites with slow speeds. That leaves you, the website owner or developer, in a perilous position; what if your message never makes it to your audience simply because your website’s performance suffers?

The best option for ensuring success is to partner with a professional consultant or marketing agency like Sachs Marketing Group. In the meantime, here’s 14 helpful tools to help you get started. 

Google Search Console

This is a free tool offered within the Google Webmaster app. It’s easy-to-use, which makes it great for those who are new to website management and auditing. However, Search Console only offers very basic information about page-load speed, broken links, and general errors in your HTML markup. While Google Search Console is a great place to start, you must switch to something more advanced as your business grows.

Screaming Frog

Admit it — just the name alone is intriguing, right? Screaming Frog is a tool that emulates search engine crawlers. This tool looks for technical errors that will impact your SEO, including duplicate content pages, canonicalization errors, metadata issues, and more. The free version limits you to 500 pages, but that should be more than enough for smaller and newer sites.

SiteAnalyzer

This is another free tool, allowing for up to 20 website checks per month. (You must upgrade to the paid version for more.) SiteAnalyzer reviews 50 separate parameter settings, including SEO, content, design, performance, and accessibility. Each section will receive a score, and the dashboard will let you know which items need attention while flagging the critical items for immediate review. This is an excellent tool, but there is one major drawback — it does not work well for multi-language sites.

MySiteAuditor

This is a helpful tool for agencies as it can be integrated onto a website and used to generate leads. MySiteAuditor is based on Google’s algorithms. While its features offer deep checks, much like the other tools on this list, it also completes extra keyword reviews to further enhance your SEO strategies and efforts.

Moz Crawl Test

The Moz Crawl Test tool works brilliantly for combining website functionality and SEO into the same neat little package. It’s great for identifying redirect issues with your server, and for finding problems that are preventing the search engines from crawling your site on a regular basis. Like the others, though, it isn’t foolproof – you still need to interpret the results and apply the appropriate fixes.

SEOPTIMER

SEOPTIMER is a Chrome extension you can download, install, and use from your browser. It takes a few seconds for it to crawl your website; then it passes along handy suggestions for improved SEO. SEOPTIMER is unique in that it provides information on SEO, usability and performance while analyzing site security and social integrations. If you use this tool to analyze your site, you can also download white-label reports loaded with helpful information.

HubSpot’s Website Grader

This tool is amazing for analyzing website metrics. HubSpot’s Website Grader looks at all elements of performance, mobile readiness, SEO, and security. Missing your SSL certificate? The grader will let you know. You’ll receive a score between 1 and 100 along with a detailed report with suggested updates.

SEMrush Site Audit

One of the best features of the SEMrush Site Audit tool is the historical analysis function. This browser-based tool saves reporting information after each crawl. You can then track what changes you’ve made and run a comparative report to identify exactly which revisions helped and which hurt. Use this auditing tool to identify (or even reverse) negative SEO influences.

Woorank

The free version of Woorank is limited (you can only run a certain number of reports), but it’s still useful. It analyzes website data and provides you with several presentation, creation, and slide organization options. It’s best for entrepreneurs or agencies who need to present clients with statistics or monthly reports.

Alexa Site Audit

Yes, Alexa…the one and only Amazon audit platform. She can turn on your lights, play music, and even conduct a SEO audit for your website, if you’re so inclined. Alexa Site Audit lets you schedule audits and then prompts you to review them – so you never forget to take action on a negative evaluation or performance. Afterward, Alexa will issue a report highlighting opportunities to improve best practices, suggestions for solutions, and tips for prioritizing your updates.

BuzzStream

BuzzStream is a great tool for monitoring your site’s link building efforts. It lets you monitor whether links pointing to your site are active or not. It also tracks communication and customized emails sent out to site owners. Use it to create and issue custom emails from within the platform or use the search function to find industry-related sites to approach.

Benchmark Hero Solution

Running an e-commerce site? Benchmark Hero Solution works well for managing online stores. It reviews your product pages to make suggestions with helpful improvements for both traffic and conversions. You’ll receive a site audit, a report comparing your site to top competitors, and a list of action steps. Best of all? It’s free.

DeepCrawl

DeepCrawl’s performance reports contain a ton of detail. It can also crawl hundreds upon thousands of pages at a time. Your dashboard highlights your domain’s overall score, page-loading times, and a myriad of other useful details that can help you make informed decisions about how to move forward. Use DeepCrawl to manage your entire SEO team, creating, assigning, and managing tasks right from the dashboard.

Check My Links

Check My Links is a simple tool for web designers that crawls internal and external pages to make sure they’re working. It’s packaged with plenty of capability; use it to review link-rich pages or quickly find which links on a page work and which are broken. Make corrections as needed before you make new pages go live.

There are dozens of great tools you can use to analyze your site’s performance. These are just some of the most promising on the market right now. Take advantage of some of the free options and trials before committing to a tool for the long-haul. No matter which you choose, you’ll be pleased with how easy they are to use and how quickly you are able to improve your site’s performance.

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SEO

Setting S.M.A.R.T. Goals for Your SEO

Understanding SEO is one thing, but setting actual goals beyond “organic traffic” is another. They key is to make sure you are setting S.M.A.R.T. goals – goals that are realistic and purposeful. Making sure your goals are properly focused will ensure your company vision meshes well and is incorporated into your overall marketing strategy.

But hold on – how exactly do you do that? The answer to this question isn’t exactly straightforward. At least, not until you break it down like we did right here in this post.

Let’s dive right in, shall we?

What are S.M.A.R.T. Goals?

Let’s start with what S.M.A.R.T. goals actually are. S.M.A.R.T. is the acronym used to define the elements that make up each of your goals.

Here’s the breakdown:

  • S is for Specific. Vague goals will never get you anywhere. How many new email subscribers do you want to earn this month or year? How many app downloads do you want to see? What is your goal for the number of qualified leads you’d like to contact? How many actual sales do you want to make? Assign real numbers to your goals.
  • M is for Measurable. Goals don’t mean much if there is no way to measure your progression. Your website’s analytics should be able to show you a month-over-month and year-to-year comparison of whether you’ve hit your visitor goals. Your newsletter subscription numbers will clearly show you how many new subscribers you gain. Order histories detail whether or not you’ve sold enough of your target product. Goals like “visibility” aren’t measurable and don’t mean anything to your bottom line.
  • A is for Achievable. Having specific and measurable goals are great, but only if you are able to act upon them. For example, wanting to rank for one of the most competitive keywords in your niche may be specific and measurable, but it isn’t an actionable goal if you don’t have the budget necessary to compete for that term. Finding that your goal isn’t achievable isn’t a failure; it’s simply a sign you need to make adjustments.
  • R is for Realistic. Let’s say you’ve decided you want to have a million new email subscribers in the last quarter of the year – a pretty lofty goal for a three-month period. Can it be done? Maybe. Do you have the resources to get the job done? Probably not. Is it a realistic number compared to other quarters, or is it a number someone pulled from the air? Likely the latter unless you’re a celebrity, Apple, Google, or some other large-scale corporation. A 20 percent increase over the previous quarter’s new enrollments is much more attainable.
  • T is for Timely. Your goals need to be achievable within a specific amount of time. Wanting to rank on the first page for a certain keyword “someday” is not timely. Wanting to rank organically within six months is more realistic. It’s tough to set specific timelines for SEO, but having a starting point on your calendar will help you to make the adjustments necessary as you move along, whether that means altering the goal or extending the timeline.

Keeping S.M.A.R.T. SEO in Mind

You can apply S.M.A.R.T. principles to just about any area of your business. Using this formula to come up with SEO goals not only gives you a set of metrics to work with, but can also help you to better compare your organic SEO, paid digital marketing, and offline marketing goals to ensure they all remain aligned with your organization’s core values and overall strategy.

Think of it like a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid rests the company’s general goals and desires for collecting leads or making new sales. The marketing team then creates a strategy for meeting those goals in the form of an email campaign, social media campaign, television commercials, radio spots, or straight-up ads. Marketing is responsible for creating the artistic vision that points everyone in the right direction.

SEO sits at the bottom of the pyramid, creating a solid foundation for everything else. It’s a support structure. Your SEO strategies create the foundation of your business’s website while also supporting your marketing team’s goals. The organic SEO work you do takes time, so it may not always be tied directly into short-term campaigns, but the way you choose the keywords you target will have an impact on the bottom line. For example, broader keyword targeting may get you initial visitors; narrow-targeting often shows gains in return traffic instead.

Measuring S.M.A.R.T. SEO Goals

So how do you actually measure your specific SEO goals? Your website’s rankings matter differently depending on your business type. A small local business might focus on local rankings alone, but a local business looking to start shipping product needs to expand from local rankings to include national keyword targets. A larger brand may even want to go global. Where are you starting and where do you want to end up in terms of your chosen keywords and their visibility?

Ranking and organic traffic often go hand in hand, but this isn’t a hard and fast rule and you should never assume it’s always the case. Ultimately, the true answer depends on whether or not you are ranking for popular keywords. Ranking for a great term that doesn’t receive as many searches will produce results – sort of.

The problem with low-competition terms is this: you’ll show up higher in the search engines for the term, but just won’t get as much traffic. Organic traffic is a measurable number and is impacted by the type of keyword you’re targeting for rank.

Link metrics are also measurable. It’s easy to run reports to find out how many root and deep links point back to your website. Keep track of this number and the ratio of strong authority links pointing at your content versus spam links that could be holding you back. We probably don’t need to tell you that you should aim for more strong links than weak links!

SERP statistics, search volume, branded keywords, and even referral traffic all make up the kaleidoscope of factors agencies consider in every SEO strategy. Take the time to stop and look up the funnel at your company’s overall goals. The more in tune you are with the big picture, the easier it will be for you to drill down into the specific components of your SEO strategy to create a strong and supportive strategy.

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SEO

E-A-T in SEO: What Does It Mean to You?

Expertise. Authoritativeness. Trustworthiness. These three components make up the E-A-T acronym, one of the most important acronyms you need to keep in mind when you are developing your website’s SEO campaign.

The concept of E-A-T was first introduced back in 2014. Quite by accident, actually. Someone accidentally leaked some of Google’s Search Quality Guidelines and the SEO world went a little nutty over it. Time has shown us just how important the theory is when it comes to overall page quality.

Is this theory completely new to you? It’s time to start paying attention.

E is for Expertise

Let’s say you are running a website dedicated to helping people better understand their finances. You’ve identified this as a strong niche and have a great marketing plan. You have a team of writers and you are working to create quality content.

The finance niche is pretty specialized. So when a reader lands on your page and starts reading your articles or blogs, how will they know you have the expertise to actually give financial advice? Do you have an industry expert contributing content? Do you you have an industry expert offering critiques? Are you citing industry experts as sources within your page content?

What are you showing on the page that tells your readers (and Google) that someone with actual financial experience is behind the content being shared?

This isn’t to say your writers have to be financial experts. They do have to be professional enough to find real expert sources to quote within your articles. They have to be expert fact-checkers. Pair your quality writers with a top-notch editor and you’ll have content that oozes with expertise.

A lot of websites mess up in the expertise category because they publish vague content. A true expert can provide specific details and flesh out ideas, not just gloss over the topic with hasty generalizations. You honestly can’t be an authority in any area of expertise without experience.

A is for Authoritativeness

It’s not enough to simply have expert writers on staff. You need to make sure you are giving them credit in order to add an air of authority to your site.

If your writer is a financial expert, you should add a byline with his name and job title. A short two to three line biography outlining their financial experience and credentials is perfect. Include a link to your expert’s professional website or include a link to a full bio within your website if the writer is a regular, full time-contributor to your website.

Your writer doesn’t necessarily have to be an expert on the subject. They can still contribute authority to your pages as long as they are citing their sources. Google actually loves it when you link back to relevant content. Include the author’s name and very brief biography that highlights their experiences writing on the topic.

In both cases, including a photo of your writer as part of the formal built-in bio section creates a sense of transparency your readers will appreciate.

Another way to establish authority is by finding influencers who are willing to share your message. When Google sees those who are already considered authorities linking back to your content, the search engine will see it as valuable. Why would someone already ranked ahead of you link back to you if your content were not?

T is for Trustworthiness

Why should your reader trust you? Why should your reader choose your content over the content shared on another website? And – ultimately – why should your reader choose to do business with you, buy a product from you, or click on your affiliate links instead of partnering with a competing website? Why is your site more trustworthy than the rest?

The most important thing to remember is that your content is being developed for the reader, not purely for “SEO” value. That’s a hard pill for some to swallow. Your content needs to share quality information, share a specific point of view, entertain, or provide some other form of value.

Yes, keywords are important. No, you can’t keyword stuff in the hopes that Google will prioritize your page in the search engines. Naturally weaving a few good keywords into your content ( at least where it makes sense) is far more beneficial than adding the same keywords over and over again throughout your content.

When your reader lands on your page, will he feel as though he’s found something of value, or will he feel like he found a keyword stuffed landing page that was merely designed to guide him towards a sale? The answer really needs to be the former. The latter will come naturally.

E-A-T and YMYL Websites

E-A-T is an important concept to keep in mind when developing any website, but it is most important on YMYL sites (Your Money or Your Life). YMYL sites are websites that Google views as having the potential to actually influence a person’s “life, income, or happiness.” In other words, if your advice could make or break a person’s finances, you’d better have expertise and authority on your side.

Your Money or Your Life site examples:

  • Any site that talks about finances, especially when it comes to investment advice, taxes or retirement savings
  • Any website that talks about personal issues like estate planning, family law, divorce, child support, or immigration
  • Websites that could be dangerous if the information contained within them is inaccurate. For example, sites teaching someone how to change the brakes on their car or how to install a ceiling fan in their home

E-A-T Should Be Your Best Practice

When it comes to establishing your website’s best practices, E-A-T needs to be a part of the equation. It’s going to play a huge role in how Google determines your site’s overall value. Meeting a need or solving a problem are excellent goals – but only if your site’s practices are transparent, not spammy, and specific.

Expertise. Authority. Trustworthiness. Make sure every piece of content you put on your website meets this standard and you’ll find your organic rankings and traffic improving at a notable rate. But there is another side to the story – and that’s how to strategize your SEO to best fit your content. Reach out to me here to talk about how I can help you achieve your goals.

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SEO

Mobile Wins: Google Using Mobile-First Indexing

In November, Google started using mobile-first indexing. This move is the first stage of the death of the desktop in terms of ranking sites. Under this process, Google looks at the mobile version of your website first to determine the ranking, and then falls back to the desktop version when it cannot locate a mobile version. Marketers and SEO professionals have known this was coming, as Google made hints at it more than a year ago, but they made the announcement on their own blog. As time goes on, the search engine will continue to place more importance on mobile-friendly sites.

Why? Google gets more queries from mobile devices than it does from desktop devices every day. Before the shift, Google used the desktop version of a website to determine the ranking, but as more mobile searches come in, it just makes sense to evaluate the mobile version in determining what ranks when and where.

After all, there are a lot of mobile pages out there with less content than the desktop version. When the crawlers are evaluating the desktop versions, rather than the page the user actually sees, that can lead to some quality issues with the results – and thus degrades the user experience for the searcher. We preach all the time about how you have to have a stellar user experience online, regardless of industry or niche – and Google is making this change to keep their user experience a good one.

What does this mean for you?

Google will look at mobile websites first to determine ranking, and serve those results to users regardless of whether they are using a mobile or desktop device to initiate the search. There won’t be any [additional] mobile-friendly adjustment, and if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, your rankings will be affected even with desktop searches.

Right now, this is a testing phase for Google, but eventually, it will roll out for everyone. That means you need to make sure you have an optimized mobile presence so you’re ready for when the changes become the new norm.

 

I Don’t Have a Mobile Website?

If you don’t have a mobile website, there’s no need to panic because the algorithms will rely on your desktop version. But, you may want to consider investing in a mobile website just to make sure you can address your users’ needs. Take a look at your analytics data to determine how much of your audience is coming from a mobile device. If a significant portion of your audience uses mobile devices, then you want to make sure you have a mobile-friendly website.

There’s no need to spend a lot of time and money building a completely separate mobile version since responsive design takes care of it for you. It automatically adjusts everything to the appropriate screen size for the querying device. If you’ve already got a responsive design, or a site that otherwise sends dynamic content with equivalent markup regardless of device, there’s nothing you need to do.

If you are building a mobile version of your site rather than opting for a responsive design, don’t launch it until it’s ready. Since your desktop site will be indexed in the absence of a mobile site, it’s better to allow a full desktop site to index than a partially built or broken mobile site to be indexed in its place.

Once you have a mobile website, if it’s not a responsive website, make sure the content and links remain similar enough to maintain the correct rankings so it can be ranked the same way as the desktop version will be. You’ll also want to make sure you’re serving structured markup for both versions of your website. You can use the Structured Data Testing Tool to make sure the structured markup is equivalent for both desktop and mobile versions. Type the URLs of both versions into the tool and compare the output. As you add your structured data to the mobile site, avoid adding large amounts of irrelevant markup. Use only what’s appropriate for the specific information in each page.

If your mobile site has less content than your desktop site, it could affect the ranking of your site simply because there’s no guarantee Google will see both versions of your site when it crawls. The basic theory is that if the content isn’t important enough to be on your mobile site – then you likely aren’t the best result for that query or content.

This is why the responsive design approach is best – all pages remain the same in terms of content and links. You can use the Mobile-Friendly Test tool to determine whether or not Google thinks you have a mobile-friendly website. If you do, but the testing tool thinks you don’t, take steps to remedy the issue, like making sure the crawling bots aren’t blocked in your robots.txt file.

 

My Website Has Expandable Content… How Will I Be Affected?

If your desktop site has content hidden in tabs, expandable boxes, or in accordions, it won’t be weighted highly. But, on the mobile version of your site, as long as the expandable content is done in such a way that it is necessary for, or enhances the optimal user experience, it will be weighted fully. The reason for this is because expandable content makes more sense on mobile devices than on desktops.

 

When Will the Full Roll Out Happen?

The roll-out began in November 2016, and will take months before it is complete. There is not a date for when the full roll out will occur, simply because the company is still testing code. Google will increase the number of searchers once they know the mobile user agent crawler is working well. As more information becomes available, I will update this post accordingly.

 

Mobile Website Optimization Tips

  • Speed: Though recent news suggests speed isn’t going to be an initial factor in the mobile-first indexing, it’s still worth considering overall. According to this YouTube video, you should aim for a site that loads in under half a second. If it goes over two seconds as an e-commerce site – you’ve got work to do. Optimize images, compress your code, cut down on the number of redirects, and make use of browser caching to improve your site speed. Test it with the Mobile-Friendly Test Tool, here, or here.
  • Mobile Design: While I’m a huge fan of responsive design, regardless of which mobile design approach you take, here are a few pointers: stop using popups – you’ll frustrate users, leading to a higher bounce rate and decreased ranking; don’t use Flash – it won’t work on Apple devices. Use HTML 5 or Java instead; and make sure your design is “finger-friendly.” People are scrolling, zooming, and clicking with their fingers, not a computer mouse. Remember that.
  • On-Page Optimization: There’s less room to work with on mobile screens, so keep titles and descriptions concise. This helps the bots understand your site faster, and helps users, too. As such, you’ll likely end up with higher click through rates, which can help improve your rankings.
  • Local Optimization: In September, Google released the Possum update, which was a major change to the local search algorithm. Mobile search plays a major role in helping businesses bring more foot traffic into the store. Research from the search engine giant itself shows that local searchers are ready to act. Half of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visited a store within a day, as do 1/3 of the people who use a computer or a tablet. Local businesses stand to gain a great deal from mobile-first indexing. If you’re a local business and you want to increase mobile visibility, make sure to include your business name, phone number, and address. You’ll also want to include your city and state in the:
    • Title tag
    • H1 heading
    • URL
    • ALT tags
    • Meta description

 

Will Mobile-First Indexing Cause Major Ranking Changes?

Google representatives have said this really shouldn’t cause any major ranking changes. The company hopes the changes will be minimal, but it’s too early to tell. Their goal is to not have the change in indexing to impact rankings much.

If you’ve followed the advice thus far – Mobilegeddon in April 2015 greatly penalized sites that were not mobile-friendly – then you should be in good shape over the course of the index change. Because of the ranking boost mobile-friendly content has already been given, if yours isn’t already, you’ve likely already suffered the ranking hit you were going to suffer.

 

How Can I See What Mobile-First Indexing Bots See?

Use the Fetch and Render tool in the Google Search Console. Make sure to specify the mobile:smartphone user-agent, as this is the mobile bot. Look at what displays after the fetch and render is complete. What you see here is likely what the mobile bot (Google) sees and indexes from your site. If you notice content is missing, take steps to fix it. Once it’s fixed, run the tool again and see what changes. You are aiming for a desktop and mobile experience that is nearly identical, for best results for not only search ranking, but overall user experience, as well.

You can also test your robots.txt file, to make sure the mobile agents aren’t blocked from crawling your code. Use the Robots.txt Tester Tool. Submit URLs – as there may be some you don’t want the bots to index – to see whether or not the robots.txt file has them properly blocked or crawable.

 

Will the Desktop and Mobile-First Indexing Converge?

Right now, and for some time in the future, there will be two separate Google indexes – one for mobile-first, and one for desktop-first. Some people, though it will be a relatively small group, will get results from mobile-first indexing, while others will get results from the desktop-first index. Users will have no control over which index their results are served from.

As Google starts to see the mobile bots and index as useful and reliable, we expect to see the mobile-first index become the only one in use. However, if the results of the mobile-first experiment don’t work the way Google wants – it’s possible they’ll go back to a desktop-first index as the only option. In their blog post, they say they’re only experimenting with mobile-first at this stage.

 

Don’t Wait Until the Change is Official

There’s still a great deal to learn as Google continues their experiment with mobile-first indexing. But, taking action now can help ensure you have great visibility in mobile and desktop search, regardless of whether there are separate indexes or not. There’s no need to wait until an official change to take action.

Has the shift to mobile-first indexing created any havoc for you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo credit: iStock

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