Category: Google

Posted on

Your New Website: Why Page Speed Matters

Nancy McCord a Google Partner and Bing Partner
Nancy McCord a Google Partner and Bing Partner

I will open with a quick case study to illustrate my point on how important page speed is to Google. We did a SEO site evaluation for a client on his new website. The site looked nice and appeared very professional, but on running the site through the Google Page Speed Tool, the desktop score came back with a 24 out of a score of 100 and the mobile score came back with a score of 51 out of 100. Google rated both of these scores in the “red” zone.

Why is being in the yellow zone (70’s) or green zone (90’s) important?

Google AdWords uses scanning tools and will actively disapprove ads where they consider the page speed experience low. I have seen advertisers with red page speeds have ads disapproved. The only way to improve your page speed is a site redesign or difficult overhaul of an existing site. Google evaluates the domain, not just the landing page. So, Google AdWords considers a quick loading site an important Quality Score indicator.

Google has just released notice that in July 2018 they will be using website page speed as a ranking indicator for their organic index. As the Google organic index is now based solely on the mobile version of your website since early last year and Google no longer has a desktop index AND a mobile index, page speed of your mobile site is even more important to garnering organic placement.

This particular issue of page speed and the use of the mobile index to rank sites is also why AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages, a Google initiative to speed up the Web, is so very important to embrace on any new website design.

In conclusion, page speed is crucial for organic performance for websites and one of the most important factors you should consider as you choose your WordPress theme or website backbone.

Check back next week for more information on website redesigns selections.

 

Posted on

Google States Mobile Page Speed Will be a Ranking Indicator

We Are a Google Partner Specializing in Search Marketing, Mobile, and Display.
We Are a Google Partner Specializing in Search Marketing,, Mobile, and Display.

Well that cat is finally out of the bag! Google has stated that in July they will now be using the mobile page speed of your website as a mobile index ranking indicator.

This is very important news. Google had already moved to using just the mobile index for determining the organic ranking for all platforms and no longer had a separately ranked desktop index. The announcement released on Wednesday January 17th goes even further.

Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.

The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.

The key takeaway on this announcement is that page speed is important to Google and should be an important factor in the selection of any new WordPress theme or website design or web design platform.

Page speed will not be going away and site owners need to really start a review and efforts to address their slow loading websites.

Posted on

Our New Social Media Bundles

Be on target to assure you make the right impression with your social media.
Be on target to assure you make the right impression with your social media.

Social media bundles are now available at a special price on our website. Due to popular demand and customer requests, we now have options for your Twitter, Facebook and Google+ writing needs.

This service is best for clients who want to start connecting online and soft-selling their products using Facebook, Twitter and Google+ our bundled services provide the best cost value.

We bundle our programs for a flat monthly rate instead of billing by monthly service dates and even provide 2 free event or holiday postings a month in addition to your regularly scheduled content.

Priced at $575 to $875 a month, now you can cover all your networks with professionally written and managed content.

Find out more by visiting our social media bundle page today.

Posted on

How to Use AMP on Your Blog for Google Part Two

We Are a Google Partner Specializing in Search Marketing
We Are a Google Partner Specializing in Search Marketing and Now Mobile Too.

Continued from Monday.

Once you use AMP on WordPress, and if you want to use AMP pages on your regular HTML site, you’ll need to do a little research. There are lots of sites and information from Google on how to set up and how to validate your new AMP pages.

This is what I have learned in the process of working on my own website pages.

The original and new AMP page need to be pointed to each other. The AMP page points to the original page using a canonical reference telling Google that the non-AMP page is the original. The non-AMP page then points to the AMP page so that Google can discover it using a special meta tag amp reference.

There are specialized AMP image references and specialized CSS references. Additionally, Google will require that the viewport be set in the page head section to validate the page.

It is not complicated to set up these static AMP pages, but it is complicated to get them to validate. That being said, the future for Google is all about AMP and mobile. With a little effort you can make your blog and website more attractive for Google to index (and cache) in this new “Mobile First” world.

Visit our website to find out more about our services and how we can help you be more visible on Google.