Weekly SEO news: 19 June 2018
Welcome to the latest issue of our newsletter!

Here are the latest website promotion and Internet marketing tips for you.

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please forward this newsletter to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Better mobile SEO: it's not enough to have a mobile-ready website

More than half of all online searches are carried out on mobile devices. If you want to reach all customers, your pages must be listed in the mobile search results.

Being listed in Google's mobile results is the first step to succeed. However, it's not enough if you want to get new customers through your mobile website. Mobile SEO is more than just having a mobile-ready website.

Here are three things that help you to improve the results that you can get with your mobile website:

1. Check your landing pages

Landing pages on mobile phones can be different from landing pages for desktop computers. Typing on mobile phones is difficult and most people don't like it. Make sure that the forms on your mobile web pages require as little information as possible. The easier it is to do the required action on your mobile landing page, the better.

Place a call to action above the fold and make sure that all elements and forms are easy to tap. Keep your mobile landing page to the point. People who view web pages on mobile phones are busy.

2. Clean up your website

Smartphones have small screens. Busy pages with a lot of elements are confusing. In addition, each additional element on a web page increases the load time of the page, which is a bad thing for mobile.

Everything on your mobile web pages should be easy to use and easy to understand. Show your website visitors a clear path with clear call-to-action buttons and easy web page navigation.

Remove everything that isn't necessary: animated backgrounds, background videos, etc. Focus on a single goal on your mobile web pages.

3. Make it easy to find you

Mobile searches are often used to find local businesses. For local stores, the mobile website has two main purposes:

  • Show people where your business is located.
  • Make it easy to call your business.

Include a map on your website and/or include a link to Google Maps so people can navigate to your store with Google Maps. If you want to embed Google Maps on your website, make sure that it is GDPR compliant. A map image with a link to Google Maps might be the better option.

Your address should be easy to find on your mobile website. A "Call now" button also helps people to contact you. Use tel: in your link to make a phone number clickable in mobile phones:

<a href="tel:9876543210">987 654 3210</a>

or

<a href="tel:9876543210">Call us now</a>

Optimized pages get more customers

The tips above help you to improve the conversion rate of your mobile web pages. SEOprofiler offers mobile SEO tools that help you to optimize your website for smartphones. You can create your account here:

Try SEOprofiler now

2. Internet marketing news of the week

GoogleGoogle shares further information about mobile-first indexing
"Google has shared some further information about mobile-first indexing on Twitter.[...]

Google indexes the mobile version, but shows different URLs for desktop and mobile [...] there won’t be ranking changes."

Report: Google and Facebook top advertisers’ list of fears that could impact their businesses in 2018

"Advertisers fear the impact of Google and Facebook on their businesses more than any other industry trends in 2018, according to a Marin Software report on digital advertising [...]

The so-called duopoly prevents advertisers from optimizing their customers’ experience by keeping measurements and performance within its 'walled gardens.'"

GoogleGoogle: we don’t like spam

"Google’s algorithms detect spam automatically. When Google’s algorithms detect spam, Google takes manual action. According to Juan Felipe Rincon, Google sent 6 million manual action messages to webmasters in 2017.

In addition to algorithmic penalties, Google also processed manual spam reports. In 2017, Google took action on nearly 90,000 user reports of search spam."

Google does not use DIV images for image search

"On Twitter, Google’s John Mueller said that Google probably won’t index images that are linked in DIV tags for image search. [...]

Earlier this year, John Mueller said in a video that Google does not index CSS background images. This is similar to another Google statement that Google only indexes regular href links. JavaScript links are ignored by Google."

+++ SEARCH +++ ENGINE +++ NEWS +++ TICKER +++

  • Google My Business guidelines are like traffic signals to New Yorkers –  a (very) rough suggestion.
  • People trust TripAdvisor more than Yelp or Google.
  • Greater transparency and control over your Google ad experience.
  • Google is now A/B testing its new ‘Google Sans’ font in Search results.
  • Google treats hreflang in sitemaps and HTML the same.
  • Google introduces media actions, powered by JSON-LD data feeds.
  • Google testing 3 pack of videos in local search queries.

3. Previous articles

Follow: