Category: Search Engine Optimization

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What Happens to Sales and Traffic When Your Website is Not Mobile-Friendly?

McCordWeb.com Results
McCordWeb.com Results – Our Site is Fast, Speedy and Mobile-Friendly

In our new world where over 65% of all Google.com searches are done on smartphones, what happens to a website that is not mobile-friendly in regards to lead conversions, store sales, and organic placement?

The PPC Picture

Google has lots to say on this topic of mobile friendliness. For sites that are not mobile-friendly and the business owner is advertising in Google Ads, Google flags the account with messages such as this:

“Avoid losing customers on mobile devices by improving your mobile site. Recommended because 98.57% of your mobile clicks go to non-mobile-friendly pages on your site. 68.97% of clicks from all devices come from mobile. 98.57% 138 of 140 clicks go to pages that are not mobile-friendly.“

As Google Ads is incredibly focused on relevance and offering the best user experience, I expect in the future ads that are not showing mobile-friendly pages to start to receive very poor quality scores driving up the click cost and reducing exposure due to a low ad rank.

Google has been pretty forthcoming in regards to page speed as well. A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. For a store generating $60,000 in sales a month, that is a loss of $4,200 in monthly sales. In a year, that translates into $50,400. A non-mobile friendly site is not optimized for speedy download and may be virtually impossible to use on a smartphone driving away potential customers. Many will never come back to visit. This is a very serious impact for Google Ad activity.

For sites that do not have a mobile-friendly website, conversion numbers are dropping in Google Ads. Mobile activity is a very big part of the conversion path now for sales and leads.

WordStream has done a very nice visual on sales, conversions, and cost per conversion in mobile and it is clear that mobile is big business. Without a mobile website you are missing out on a huge sector of growing and converting traffic.

For some websites that are not mobile-friendly using Duda Mobile to do a scripted redirect to a Duda Mobile mini site worked – but no longer. Google Ads is aggressively disapproving ads for our clients that are using this approach and we are now having to remove the code from those websites effectively making them now not mobile-friendly for organic or for pay per click activity.

The Organic Picture

For organic traffic, know that Google now spiders the mobile version of a website and this is the content that now determines your site’s organic ranking on Google.com for all devices, not just mobile.

By not updating your website to be mobile-friendly Marketing and Growth Hacking says you can kiss your Google rankings good bye.

Additionally, Marketing and Growth Hacking states “Based on the blogs Google is putting out, we can confidently assume companies who don’t optimize for mobile will see their rankings disappear. At the same time, companies who adopt and take advantage of mobile-friendly sites early-on have and will continue to see higher rankings.”

I agree that if you mean to be in business, grow sales, and compete effectively, your website and store must be mobile-friendly.

For more information about our services please visit us at www.McCordWeb.com.

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Slow Website Page Speed Means Missed Sales

Monitor Your Page Speed
Monitor Your Page Speed

Google says that as your site load speed increases from 1 to 7 seconds, your bounce rate increases 113%. Missed opportunities; bounced prospects means missed sales.

I tested my own website against a number of other sites on the Google Test My Site tool and here’s what I found.

My site www.mccordweb.com – 3 second load, excellent rating, low loss of visitors. My site is a responsive design in PHP and only uses WordPress for the blog.

Industrial company legacy HTML website that is over 8 years old, but the owner is not ready to do an update yet. 7 second load time, fair rating, 26% estimated visitor loss.

Service industry company legacy PHP website that is over 10 years old, but the owner is not ready to do a site update yet. 6 second load time. fair rating, 24% estimated visitor loss.

Doctor’s practice  redone responsive WordPress website, but the owner was not speed-focused. 7 second load time. fair rating, 26% estimated visitor loss.

Technology business newly redone responsive WordPress website with a very glitzy look, but the designer was not speed-focused. 10 second load time. poor rating, 29% estimated visitor loss.

What I have found is that the WordPress sites with the slide show on the home page are not testing well for speed. The PHP based websites that do not have a slide show cover and are more text focused and utilize created AMP pages are testing as speedy.

Need help with your website? Check us out to see how we can help you get a speedy rating and not risk visitor loss.

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Why Page Speed is Important

Image of Clocked Page Speed
Image of Clocked Page Speed

How fast your website page loads in a smartphone or browser is really important.  Not be paying attention to your website load time is a huge error in the world of Google today.

This is why knowing and working to improve your page speed and site load time is crucial.

Google has a new tool called “Google Test My Site”. This online tool will test your URL, compare your site to others, give you a rating, and even give you a free report and recommendations to follow to improve your speed.

Google says that your site will lose one-half of all your visitors while the page is loading. Know that 70% of visitors globally are surfing the web on 3G or slower speeds until 2020. Want more business? Speed up your website!

Test your own site out today now at Google Test My Site. Then touch base with us about purchasing a new fast responsive PHP website. Our own website at www.mccordweb.com clocks at a 3 second load, received and excellent rating, and has low visitor loss.

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Should You Worry About the July 2018 Chrome Site Insecure Warning?

What to do when July comes about the Chrome browser warning.
What to do when July comes about the Chrome browser warning.

Coming to the Web in July is a change to the Google Chrome browser that will now mark any website that is not using https as insecure. Should you be worried if you are not selling online?

Personally, if you are not selling product online, I would not worry about the site insecure warning. This warning will appear on your site if you have a contact form, but I personally do not feel that your submissions will drop.

In most cases now, my clients and prospects contact me by phone or by chat. I have very few customers who contact me via my email form. Most like the immediacy of a call.

If you are flush with cash, moving to https could be good for you to prevent any insecure site warnings to be ultra safe. Cost for an SSL certificate is about $149 to $199 yearly. You will typically need to have a dedicated IP address which will run $7 to $15 a month and your web host will most likely charge installation fee for the SSL certificate. So, there are moderate costs associated with the move to https.

If you sell online https is mandatory. No consumer will buy and provide their credit card information via http.

So, the bottom-line is that really you have an option if you are not selling online as https and the additional costs are not a requirement to continue to have website traffic. Your site will still appear in the Google search results and other browsers will not trigger a warning.

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