SEO – Page 4 – The Web Authority

July 10, 2019July 5, 2019

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?

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.
Use two and three word search phases as the focus of your content. Voice search will not be focused on the long tail phases.
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.
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.

June 27, 2018June 21, 2018

Should You Worry About the July 2018 Chrome Site Insecure 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.

For more important and interesting tips on how to manage your business online subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter.

March 12, 2018March 9, 2018

It’s the Page Speed Load Time, Stupid

No offense intended, but to not be paying attention to your website load time is simply not smart 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.

Find out more about Page Speed and what we’ve found out on Wednesday.

March 5, 2018March 2, 2018

Mobile Page Speed Now Becomes a Crucial Consideration

Mobile Page Speed Matters to Google and Your Customers

Google sent me an interesting tool this past week and I wanted to share it with you. You can view and use the mobile impact tool online https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/mobile/. This tool allows you to measure the speed and monetary impact from the speed of your clocked website with just a few additional insights about your average sale, website traffic, and conversion rate online.

Not only is Google getting serious about letting website owners know that page speed on mobile device impacts sales, but they provide the tool to help you understand that even improving your site by a second can improve your sales results; and now you can see that in monetary terms.

Add to this information the announcement that in July 2018 Google will use mobile page speed as a ranking indicator for organic placement and the push to make your site speedy becomes crucial to success. Read the article by Search Engine Land on Google’s announcement.

This focus on mobile impacts not just e-commerce stores, but informational websites. Although the key focus and significant impact is to those that make their living selling products on the web.

Don’t tear your hair out, although Google says speed is important, the do provide additional details.

“Google today announced a new ranking algorithm designed for mobile search. The company is calling it the “Speed Update,” and it will only impact a small percentage of queries, Google reiterated to us. Only pages that “deliver the slowest experience to users” will be impacted by this update, the company says.”

My recommendation is that if you are selling online – start your focus on speed. And if you are really in the service or consulting business, know that speed is important and should be a strong focus when you do a website redesign.