Tag: Web Visibility

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What to Know About Google Indexing and Ranking

Nancy McCord and Bandit

I recently ready a very interesting article and wanted to share some of the important nuggets with you in Google indexing in this January 1, 2021 post.

First, Happy New Year! 2021 simply has to be better than 2020.

Second, there are the nuggets that I find of particular interest for our clients from this article.

• Google has now verified that it can take two months or more to impact search results when you make a change to your website.

• Google does validate that when you regularly add new content to your website, that the Google Bot spider will focus on the new content and not the old content for its time to index your website.

• If you have poor quality sections on your website, these poor sections can drag down the rating/ranking of your entire website.

• Rankings are determined not by page, but by weighing the entire website.

• However, now the Google team has stated that regularly updated new sections of your website that are of good quality may keep the poor sections of your site from making a strong impact that drags down your website in the rankings. Hmm, kind of conflicting from what has previously said and Google couches this with “it depends on your website.” So, not a conclusive nugget.

• What I find of particular importance in all this is that ranking and changes to your site have far reaching long term impacts that in some cases not seen even in two months from the changes. Keepng your content fresh is crucial to attracting and keeping the attention of the Google Bot spider.

If you are mystified by this, it may be time to visit our website to check our services. When you need a team that is trustworthy on your side to help you understand and then act to improve your website visibility, McCord Web Services is your top choice.

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We Do Recommend Using Chat Apps on Your Website

What to Know About Chat Apps
What to Know About Chat Apps

Seems simple, just install code and you’ve got a chat app. But not so fast. I am finding out from personal experience that not all chat apps are alike.

I started out with Drift and still have that chat app on my website. What I found as I used the app was it slowed my website to a crawl for load time. I think much of this is the code is installed in the head tag as instructions state, but may be better installed before the ending body tag </body>.

What is happening on my site is the page is taking so long to load and the navigation does not operate until the chat app function appears – I consider this very bad. Drift must have made a code change to the asynchronous code recently as the page load time was not an issue before but started about two weeks ago.  As a result I have been actively looking for a website chat app replacement.

I have tried three Tawk.to, MyLiveChat, and now Pure Chat. I am using Pure Chat on my website right now and so far I do like the free version. What I consider important for a website chat app are the following:

  1. Easy to install
  2. Able to configure colors
  3. Has a rock solid mobile app
  4. Does not impact page load speed

So far Tawk.To and My Live Chat  were too complicated for my needs and cumbersome to use.  Pure Chat has easy set up and I do like the mobile app which is simple to use.

I invite you to subscribe to our monthly newsletter to stay up-to-date on things that can help your website performance.

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A Quick Refresher on the GDPR Privacy Controls for EU Visitors

How to Work with Remote Teams
Embrace Privacy with the EU Regulations

Since I last wrote about the privacy updates that are mandated by the EU to cover website traffic on American websites by EU nationals, much has happened.

First, clients who thought that they did not want to update their privacy policy or implement cookie approval for website statistic tracking have changed their minds.

Our team has been very busy updating websites to beef up the transparency of the privacy policy, reveal clearly what is being tracked on websites, offering ways to opt out of tracking, and installing cookie approval scripts on websites.

Several clients have shared their thoughts with us on why the sudden change. Some are listed below.

“I do feel lucky about not getting caught, but also want to be safe.”

“I’ve just had a lawyer call me and I feel like I need immediate action on the privacy updates as I don’t want to end up in court on a new matter.”

“I think it is stupid to do, but I am getting inundated with privacy policy updates from everyone that I do business with, that maybe I do need to do something to my website.”

As for me, my perspective is that it is not expensive or hard to do the implementation to be in compliance with the GDPR. I am risk adverse and feel that eventually the US will institute some controls so we will be ahead of the game by changing our own websites now.

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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.