Category: Google

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How Does Your Website Stack Up in the Mobile Space – Test It!

Screen Shot Showing the Results of the Google Mobile Friendly Testing Tool
Screen Shot Showing the Results of the Google Mobile Friendly Testing Tool

Google continues to push and refine its message as to the importance all websites having a mobile friendly website. Just this past week on the mobile version of Google I started to see tags in front of search listings as to if the site was mobile friendly or not.

Truthfully, I believe the next step is for Google to filter out and not supply sites at all in the mobile search results that have not stepped up to create the proper mobile experience. I expect to see this happen within the next six months.

Google is serious about having a great experience for mobile users on their mobile search platform. If they do not, then users will migrate to other providers who show more relevant results. If they move, Google will lose big in the ad arena. So for Google showing the right mobile friendly results in mobile search directly equates with its own bottom-line. Miscalculate on how Google feels about mobile and you’ll be out of their index.

The great things is that Google moves slowly to make big changes like this, letting users know that they feel is important and provides tools to help site owners. Here is just one of the tools that Google has recently released: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/. It is an online tool to test just how friendly your website is.

Take the tool for a test drive to see just how your website stacks up. For now you have time to fix these problems, but you will not be able to wait forever. If you are using a legacy site, one that is not built with a responsive design and are not using a mobile rendering plugin or application to turn your old website into a mobile friendly one, you’ve just got to take action within the next six months to get there. We can help you get there. I invite you to review our responsive design options today to start on evaluating your options.

 

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Don’t Block Google From Spidering Site Files

Google Partner Badge
McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

Google has recently made some nice improvements in how and what it can spider to get a fuller picture of your website. By upgrading technology, no longer does their robot spider see the web in nearly a text version, but now almost as a browser sees the page.

As a result Google is letting webmasters know to not block spider access to CSS files, JavaScript, and image files. Read the full Google release on this subject.

Personally I think that Google is also looking for CSS for hidden text and other spammy and black hat uses but they are couching this “enhancement” as a way to provide “optimal indexing” of your website.

It has previously been common practice for webmasters to block search engine spiders from certain sections of their website using disallow in the robots.txt file in the root of a website’s hosting server, but Google clearly now wants to “see it all” and is instructing webmasters to not block their access.

There is still a place for considering blocking search engine robots using the robots.txt file in this fashion:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder-name/

One such case may be your draft file folder. If you work with a team and are doing page change drafts you may want to block those working files and old files so they do not get indexed in error.

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Google’s Webmaster Mobile Usability

Image of a responsive website on multiple devices.
Make sure you set the viewport for your responsive website to display it properly on multiple devices.

Newly introduced into the Google Webmaster control panel is a new section found under “Search Traffic” called “Mobile Usability”. With Google flexing its muscles and readying to penalize websites that are not enhancing the mobile viewing experience your site may be getting flagged as not having the viewport configured.

In fact, if you are using WordPress plugins to render your blog or website as mobile friendly, you may need to manually add in a meta tag too stop Google from flagging this issue.

The viewport is a meta setting that helps a device determine how to display the content properly. Without a viewport setting your site can not render as you had expected. Visit this page online to see images where the viewport is set and is not. It is an eye-opener and once you see it, you’ll know why you MUST update your code to show the viewport properly. (Without the viewport set images may be small and the site may not fill the device screen properly. With the viewport set image that you had wanted to be full screen will be and your site rendered maximized for that specific device.)

Adding a meta tag to the head section of your code is easy. Just grab this snippet and install it using the Editor in WordPress or Dreamweaver on your responsive website.

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no” />

Make sure you are using the code snippet that has the attributes separated with commas and not semi-colons. This little detail will assure maximum compatibility. Read this great article to find out why.

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Interesting Data on Mobile Usage and AdWords

Google Partner Badge
McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

I attended a Google Partner hangout this last week with four marketing reps talking about how mobile has changed their marketing plans on AdWords. The comment that really has stuck with me over the last several days is that mobile is used for research before buying and is not necessarily the device that will drive a conversion. Very Interesting!

When I think about how I use my own smartphone, that comment is spot on. Many times I will be with others or sitting in a car chatting (not driving mind you) and I will quickly do a Google search to ask a question or find out more. Although more often than not, I am not looking at mobile ads while I am getting the information I want, I am using my smartphone to perform research that I may follow-up on later.

From an account manager and advertiser point of view, depending on the product or service that you are selling, the research aspect of mobile may be crucial to your overall marketing plan. With the much smaller screen of a smartphone limiting the number of AdWords ads that can show, you’ve got to be in the number one or two spots with your ad to get action.

Although mobile is not the right place for every single business, if the research phase that would be done on a smartphone is important to your business, keep in mind that actively testing your AdWords program in the mobile arena bidding up 10 to 25% of your desktop bid may be a very smart strategy. By testing this approach over a 60 day period (a shorter time period may not be long enough to really evaluate response), you may find that mobile drives conversions and sales on desktops and tablets and the mobile click can be attributed for the actual conversion. Or, you may find that more expensive clicks from smartphones simply padded Google’s wallet and did not drive conversions.

As Google is very bullish on advertising in the mobile space and many marketers are testing mobile AND the data shows that mobile activity is a very new and exciting landscape, it is time to try strategies in your AdWords account on mobile.