Image showing how a responsive site resizes to fill the device screen.
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Google is serious about forcing you to address smartphone compatibility on your website. In fact if you do not design now to accommodate smartphones Google is now actually lowering your Google AdWords Quality Score for your landing page. Now there is an even bigger penalty in Google Mobile Search.
On the Google blog this past week, Google showcased this image showing how it will now be tagging results in the mobile search results showing when a site is using a tool like DudaMobile or other service that simply redirects a user to the home page of a website and not the page mentioned in the actual search results.
That’s a huge black eye and sure to now kill any mobile traffic for sites that are not properly serving up mobile optimized content. With Google predicting that smartphone searches will eclipse desktop and tablet searches this year, Google is getting serious about search quality for smartphones.
You can read the full article from the Google blog and see a large photo of the return in the results red flagging sites that are not mobile responsive and redirect mobile users to the site home page not the real content.
Google’s been pretty frank with webmasters in that it wants sites in its index to offer the best experience for all users and that means for mobile users too. In the algorithm that racks and stacks website, Google is looking to supply the very best site and one that is optimized for the viewing device.
That means if you do not have a mobile optimized website, you could be losing big traffic and big placement in the months to com. With smartphone use skyrocketing and mobile search activity eclipsing desktops and tablets, what’s a savvy website owner to do?
1. Move to a responsive website design. If you are looking to upgrade your website design, make sure you are planning for the future by embracing a responsive site design. This means that code that renders the page renders different page layouts based on the size of the device screen. Using JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) the same exact content seen with a desktop is automatically reformatted to fit the screen of a smaller device.
2. If you cannot or will not move to a responsive website design for budget reasons or your site is still not “old” or “tired” then make sure that you are using a mobile site “bandaid” tool. Use something like www.DudaMobile.com to create a mobile friendly design for your website now. If you do this, make sure to watch this video from Google’s Matt Cutts to follow Google’s best practices.
In continuation from Tuesday in this blog post on trends for business website marketing and visibility, I’ll talk about Google+ Local pages and YouTube.
Google+ Local Pages Also Known as Google Places
Big changes happened last year for Google+ Local pages. First, Google removed many of the fields you can use to add information, removing any degree of optimization you could previously do on keywords. Once the account is set up, what the customer sees about your business is limited. Google now returns listings not based on optimization or the number of reviews but based on the smartphone user’s location. For desktop searches, Google Places/Local Page listings are shown based on proximity to your location and possibly in some markets based on the number of reviews and possibly again on click through rates.
What a business owner used to be able to do to get placement on location specific keywords is gone. We do still recommend a regular update of videos and pictures on the account, but there is simply not a lot of updating to be done once the account is set up. In fact in the last three months, Google even removed the owner’s comment field where promotions and specials were listed.
YouTube Videos
For many businesses we work with, YouTube is still “undiscovered country”. Many business owners feel that they have to pay to have professionally created video for YouTube, but actually even videos made with your phone or camera are considered the same to Google. Videos that show your products, explain your services, explain briefly a concept are still excellent for business owners to use for exposure. As videos may be shown in with organic results and not even associated with a link to your website utilizing YouTube better should be a New Year’s resolution for business owners for 2014.
Product Listing Ads Now Called Google Shopping Campaigns in AdWords
If you have an ecommerce store and are an AdWords advertiser and are not using Product Listing Ads – soon to be called Google Shopping Campaigns, you are missing out on one of the best things that Google has brought to the AdWords arena. Google shows pictures of products within the organic results and you pay be the click for activity on your store products. Although the data feed is onerous to create and requires much more than just a download of your products (it requires the use of Google’s own taxonomy for each product,) implementation can really boost your individual product sales. Your competition is already embracing Google Shopping Campaigns!
2013 has brought us some sweeping changes at Google. It will be interesting to see how these important changes will impact business and visibility as we enter 2014.
