Category: Google

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Google’s Webmaster Mobile Usability

Image of a responsive website on multiple devices.
Make sure you set the viewport for your responsive website to display it properly on multiple devices.

Newly introduced into the Google Webmaster control panel is a new section found under “Search Traffic” called “Mobile Usability”. With Google flexing its muscles and readying to penalize websites that are not enhancing the mobile viewing experience your site may be getting flagged as not having the viewport configured.

In fact, if you are using WordPress plugins to render your blog or website as mobile friendly, you may need to manually add in a meta tag too stop Google from flagging this issue.

The viewport is a meta setting that helps a device determine how to display the content properly. Without a viewport setting your site can not render as you had expected. Visit this page online to see images where the viewport is set and is not. It is an eye-opener and once you see it, you’ll know why you MUST update your code to show the viewport properly. (Without the viewport set images may be small and the site may not fill the device screen properly. With the viewport set image that you had wanted to be full screen will be and your site rendered maximized for that specific device.)

Adding a meta tag to the head section of your code is easy. Just grab this snippet and install it using the Editor in WordPress or Dreamweaver on your responsive website.

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no” />

Make sure you are using the code snippet that has the attributes separated with commas and not semi-colons. This little detail will assure maximum compatibility. Read this great article to find out why.

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Interesting Data on Mobile Usage and AdWords

Google Partner Badge
McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

I attended a Google Partner hangout this last week with four marketing reps talking about how mobile has changed their marketing plans on AdWords. The comment that really has stuck with me over the last several days is that mobile is used for research before buying and is not necessarily the device that will drive a conversion. Very Interesting!

When I think about how I use my own smartphone, that comment is spot on. Many times I will be with others or sitting in a car chatting (not driving mind you) and I will quickly do a Google search to ask a question or find out more. Although more often than not, I am not looking at mobile ads while I am getting the information I want, I am using my smartphone to perform research that I may follow-up on later.

From an account manager and advertiser point of view, depending on the product or service that you are selling, the research aspect of mobile may be crucial to your overall marketing plan. With the much smaller screen of a smartphone limiting the number of AdWords ads that can show, you’ve got to be in the number one or two spots with your ad to get action.

Although mobile is not the right place for every single business, if the research phase that would be done on a smartphone is important to your business, keep in mind that actively testing your AdWords program in the mobile arena bidding up 10 to 25% of your desktop bid may be a very smart strategy. By testing this approach over a 60 day period (a shorter time period may not be long enough to really evaluate response), you may find that mobile drives conversions and sales on desktops and tablets and the mobile click can be attributed for the actual conversion. Or, you may find that more expensive clicks from smartphones simply padded Google’s wallet and did not drive conversions.

As Google is very bullish on advertising in the mobile space and many marketers are testing mobile AND the data shows that mobile activity is a very new and exciting landscape, it is time to try strategies in your AdWords account on mobile.

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New Ways to Use AdWords Scripts

I watched this Google Hangout this past week and wanted to share it with you as you may really like some of the pre-made scripts (like the broken link checker that this video shows how to set up). You can watch it online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqQ19h7OwYs&feature=youtu.be


I am no programmer, but I will definitely be trying out some of the easy to configure out of the box scripts that run at the Account level and even MCC level.

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On Page SEO Demystified

Image of a laptop
Craft better page content and user experience for on-page optimization.

If you thought that organic placement was all about keyword density you’d be right on one count, it is the keyword but no longer the density; search engines are just too smart to accept spoon-fed content.

Welcome to the world of advanced keyword tactics and how search engines are using them today.

1. It’s no longer density or repeating keyword phrases in your content, it is about natural language and keeping one page on one topic. The actual terms are TF-IDF (term frequency – inverse document frequency) and semantic distance and term relationships. What this means if that Google understands what your entire website is about by reading all your pages. They understand synonyms and the phrases that you use. This makes it key to organize your website into smaller blocks of content; stick with one topic per page. Not only will this work better for search engines, but mobile users will love you too.

2. Page segmentation is important. Understand that what you put in sidebars, navigation, headers and footers is less valuable for Google ranking that what you put in the page’s main body content. Help Google to understand your page’s content better by using only one H1 tag per page and breaking the content into subheadings and bulleted text sections. Know that your main theme should be mentioned in the first sentence, or at least the first paragraph, so that Google understands clearly the importance of your terms or concepts. Write with style, following the guidelines of using an introduction, body, and conclusion when you create your content.

Even if your page has been crafted to these specifications, there are off-site factors that will impact where you appear in the search rankings, number of links, number of links from authority sites, and relevancy of your content to the user’s search query, just to name a few. Google has over 200 signals that it evaluates as part of positioning your website in the organic search results; some are known and some are not.

The first step is to build the best content-informative site you can that answers questions that readers would want to know about your products and services.

If you need help identifying areas of opportunity for your site, I offer a paid site evaluation and report. Use my experience to create a roadmap to identify areas of opportunity for your website as you plan to position it in the organic results.