Is Your Website Using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)?
Is your website AMP’ed? If it is you most certainly know that I am talking about Accelerated Mobile Pages, and Google loves them.
If you are not, it is relatively easy to create an AMP page template for your HTML website. Just follow some of these links to learn more and to see examples.
As AMP’ed websites are important from Google viewpoint and Google is actively showing AMP pages in the mobile index, it is important to know and understand why your website needs to embrace AMP now.
Errors, they may your heart beat faster and stomach clench especially when they impact your website. But, not all errors that are reported in plugins such as Yoast or even WordFence are real errors.
For example, today the Yoast SEO plugin flagged my site as not having a home page that was visible to search engines. But on additional testing and review of files; both the robots.txt and .htaccess file there was not issue. Additionally, on testing in the Google fetch feature in the Google Search Console – no errors were triggered. The Google bot was fully allowed even though Yoast said it was not.
Sometimes errors you see are false positives. But, that does not mean you can simply mark them as ignored or disregard them all together.
All website errors should be reviewed and corrected if found to be true. Don’t guess make sure that you do not have a problem each time one is brought to your attention.
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 blog (for now). 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 </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:
Easy to install
Able to configure colors
Has a rock solid mobile app
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 will be doing additional testing in the weeks ahead and when I settle on one, I’ll post it on my blog.
As a Google Partner, I get access to interesting information, statistics, seminars, and trend notifications. One of the most interesting I have received lately is that of “right now” searches are trending up.
For example, searches like pizza place open right now, flower shop open now, and other similar searches showing a desire to act immediately are trending strongly upward on Google.com. Another term “best” is also trending and surprisingly “near me” is trending down.
Here’s why these terms are “hot” for searches – consumers are using smartphones more and more for search. The desire for immediate information that is immediately actionable is driving these numbers. In fact, traffic for terms that contain “open now” have tripled in the last two years alone.
“Near me” is a term that is trending down as mobile phone users now expect to see data that is relevant to their own personal location and so no longer feel the need to specifically state “near me” in a search query. You may still want to use those terms in AdWords for now but not for much longer.
“Best” is another term that appears to be trending up at this time in addition to immediate-related terms.
How can you leverage this information?
Make sure you are using these terms in your query strings in AdWords and in your ad text. Know that immediate, now, and best are surfacing strongly showing that users want to be able to take immediate action.
Make sure you are using a chat function on your website to help feed this need to interact with you and your sales team on a moments notice.
If you need a savvy professional on your side, make sure to check out our website for the services we offer “right now”!
