Get Ready for Voice Search – It’s Coming!

Beautiful woman talking on phone
Get ready to connect with prospects via voice search.

Voice search – it’s coming faster than you think, and I am already having clients ask how they can get ready now.

Here is some information to get you started thinking about what you need to do to be ready for voice search.

First what exactly is voice search?

Voice search is where you speak into a computer or smartphone and the device then performs a search for you returning relevant information and reading the most relevant information to you.

So how can you even get ready for something like this?

  1. Make sure you take time to do a content review. Clean up, slim down content, review page titles and page meta tags and slim and trim what you have to be concise.
  2. Use two and three word search phases as the focus of your content. Voice search will not be focused on the long tail phases.
  3. Make sure you have your full address including city and spelled out state and your phone number that is clickable on all your website pages. To place on near me searches you have to have your location spelled out! Search engines will deliver your content for near me searches only when you are in close proximity to the end user.
  4. Work to improve relevancy of your content and start to strip down your pages and break long content into multiple pages so that pages are on one topic, searchable by search engines and deliver answers to questions.

GoDaddy did a nice article on this topic and I encourage you to check it out for more information.

If you haven’t really looked over your website lately, it may be time to get a consultant to help you make changes. Find out more about our services at https://www.mccordweb.com.

New Website Launch

Our team has been working hard this past week and through the weekend on launching our new website. Our blog already has a new look.

We are rolling out https, a new responsive design, and new content. Although all pages may not be completed yet, we were so excited to change our site that we boosted our time to at least get what we have in place posted.

In addition to the design change, we will be making sweeping changes across all our social media profiles in the weeks to come. We will be changing how we create and post content and the frequency when we do post.

Stay tuned for more site improvements and customer engagements.

We Do Recommend Using Chat Apps on Your Website

What to Know About Chat Apps
What to Know About Chat Apps

Seems simple, just install code and you’ve got a chat app. But not so fast. I am finding out from personal experience that not all chat apps are alike.

I started out with Drift and still have that chat app on my website. What I found as I used the app was it slowed my website to a crawl for load time. I think much of this is the code is installed in the head tag as instructions state, but may be better installed before the ending body tag </body>.

What is happening on my site is the page is taking so long to load and the navigation does not operate until the chat app function appears – I consider this very bad. Drift must have made a code change to the asynchronous code recently as the page load time was not an issue before but started about two weeks ago.  As a result I have been actively looking for a website chat app replacement.

I have tried three Tawk.toMyLiveChat, and now Pure Chat. I am using Pure Chat on my website right now and so far I do like the free version. What I consider important for a website chat app are the following:

  1. Easy to install
  2. Able to configure colors
  3. Has a rock solid mobile app
  4. Does not impact page load speed

So far Tawk.To and My Live Chat  were too complicated for my needs and cumbersome to use.  Pure Chat has easy set up and I do like the mobile app which is simple to use.

I invite you to subscribe to our monthly newsletter to stay up-to-date on things that can help your website performance.

Our New Website is Coming

We are in the middle of updating our website. The change will be big and we think the new look will be well received. Our site will be using HTML and PHP in a responsive site design. The look will be fresh and innovative.

Launch date is set now for the end of July to early August. If you have been reading Nancy McCord’s web posts on WordPress of late, you will know that she has selected to not build in WordPress due to theme updates, plugins that lose compatibility over time and slow load speed.

We’ll keep you posted with messages as we get closer to launch.