Monthly Archives: December 2014

The Importance of a Mobile Friendly Website is Increasing for Businesses

Mobile friendly websites create a better user experience for your website visitors. Having a mobile friendly website for your business is also going to be an important factor for your businesses website to rank on search engines like Google come April 21st. This is simply an attempt by Google to make the search experience of Google users easier, friendly and ultimately better. Displaying mobile friendly websites under a Google users search results allows users to view websites that are easy to read and navigate from their mobile device.

MobileFriendly

Google will mark a website as Mobile Friendly with a simple checklist. The factors Google will be taking into account and what you need to look for on your website:

  • Avoid software that does not work on mobile devices. Example: Flash
  • Use text that is readable on Mobile Devices without having to zoom in.
  • Website content resizes itself so that the user does not have to adjust the screen size.
  • Links should have enough space between each other so that they can be easily clicked on without clicking on the wrong link.

You can test if your website is “Mobile Friendly” by entering your URL here.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Read Google’s blog and guidelines here –http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/11/helping-users-find-mobile-friendly-pages.html

 

(See Below) “Mobile Friendly” will be added to search results in the future, some searches currently have this and some do not. Google is testing this at the moment. The text will appear on search results right before the meta description of the website. Long story short, the importance of a mobile friendly website will increase because it plays a factor in user experience.

mobile-friendly-highlighted

Great Local SEO Strategies For 2015 & Beyond

Looking for some great local SEO strategies for 2015? Read below to gain a few tips on what you should be doing to stand out from your competition.

Besides shopping on giant ecommerce websites such as Zappos.com and Amazon.com, many people search the web to find local businesses to buy products from.

 

This is the advantage of showing up on a search engine for a particular industry related search (for local search), to bring people into your brick and mortar shop. Having done work for a tailor in Chicago that produces the most amazing custom suits money can buy, I will show you how you can help your business reach the first page of search engines for particular local search terms.

 

The company is www.LouiceChicago.com. The owner Adrian Park invested a large amount of time and money branching out from just providing alterations, custom suits, t-shirts, tuxedos and more to also selling an entire hand made shoe collection.

 

The next step in online marketing for Adrian Park (the owner) shoes will be the most heavy lifting. First, we need to make sure the website reflects that De Louice Chicago Custom Tailor is now selling custom shoes. This means building out new web pages and content for those web pages.

 

We do this by building out the website with content that speaks to his new inventory and images that speak to his new inventory. Next we make sure that we are using his keywords throughout the content. So, he now offers Hand Sewn Welt Shoes and we have shown that product on the website. We want to make sure that the Meta description includes those exact keywords, but we also want to make sure that the content on the webpage speaks to those keywords and iterations of those keywords. If we have a dedicated page to that product or products we would also make sure to include title tags that include that keyword/phrase.

 

Once we have done this we create a new site map that reflects the new pages and products, search engine bots will index those pages and realize that Louice Chicago is now selling Hand Sewn Welt Shoes. Additionally, we need to make sure to submit his website to major search engines again. Based on keyword research, not many other people are optimizing that keyword so we should stand a good chance of ranking on most search engines first few pages after we complete a few more steps.

 

We also want to make sure we go off the website to local business directories and include his new products / categories within those directories. Releasing a press release to the local newspaper about the new shoe collection and including those specific keywords/phrases will allow us to gain a great off-page citation and a possible link back to the website, increasing our credibility with Google that De Louice Chicago is in fact, a great place to buy Hand Sewn Welt Shoes.

 

Some additional action items to improve our client’s recognition as a custom shoemaker with a new collection would be to have him create a video about his new collection showcasing his shoes and also providing tips about how to care for these expensive shoes. This will provide prospects/customers with a new way to engage with the product and company, via video. Share our video and press release via social media, and on our customers blog and we have started small online buzz about our customers new shoe collection. Search engine bots will crawl the web again and again and notice these new citations and sources that include our new pictures, keywords and videos helping our client to gain credibility and rankings for his keywords and webpages.

 

These small but tedious efforts will pay off over time if done correctly. Take a few days every month to make sure your pushing out new content on your blog and releasing and newsworthy events to the correct news sources so that they can publish that content to their viewers.