web development

Has Google Mobile Indexing Killed Your Business?

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Google Mobile Indexing You may have spent thousands of dollars designing, building and marketing your business website. How do you know if it’s working? You can track traffic to and leads from your site. You can search for your keywords to see how you rank. But it may change day-to-day, not just month-to-month.
Trust Lone Bird Studio to keep your website ranking high, as we know what to look for. Google continually changes its algorithms in ways that directly impact how it ranks your website. So what is Google mobile indexing and why does it matter to you? Let’s begin by tackling the first part of that question, so you get an inkling of whether it’s killing your business or boosting it.

What Is Google Mobile Indexing?

Sometime in 2014, the number of people using mobile devices to search the internet passed the number of people using desktops and laptops. And all of a sudden, mobile users became vital to your business. Actually, mobile users have been trending up almost since smart phones were invented.
Google has acknowledged the trend and made mobile-friendly websites rank higher than those that don’t have a mobile website design. It makes sense, as more and more people access the internet on mobile devices. Google mobile indexing means that Google looks at your mobile site first. If it’s unresponsive or incomplete, you’re ranked lower.

So if you haven’t given your site a mobile web design, your site is going to suffer in Google searches. Since Google accounts for more than 90 percent of all internet searches (in October 2018), you can’t afford to rank lower. You’ve worked hard at SEO and design. If you neglected to include a mobile web design, then Google mobile indexing will kill your business!

How Can You Implement Mobile Website Design?

To be compliant with the Google mobile indexing, your website simply has to work — it has load quickly, work perfectly and look great — on a device as small as a smartphone. Lone Bird Studio knows that mobile sites need to do certain things to save space (which is at a premium) and time (ditto), such as:

• Choose a mobile-friendly design template, not just a mobile-responsive design.
• Confine your web design, graphics and content to the screen size, not to an arbitrary frame or page width.
• Optimize all your images for fast loading.
• Resize the graphics and the copy so both are readable and not overwhelming.
• Make sure your mobile version has all the information your full site offers.
• Remove hovering elements, which don’t render on a mobile device.
• Delete any Flash and pop-up elements. They don’t work on mobile devices either.

If you ignore Google mobile indexing, your search ranking will suffer, which directly translates into business-killing lost sales. To get and implement a mobile website design and restore your website to its place on Page 1 of Google searches, contact Lone Bird Studio.

Web Design 101

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The 3 Main Steps to Web Design and Search Optimization

A complete web project has three important parts: 1 – research, 2 – design and optimization and 3 – the launch. Unfortunately most just focus on the first, what the site is going to look like. Few have clear goals other than they “want to be found”.

All of our web projects cover THE 3 BUILDING BLOCKS of a complete web design.
This gives you a maximum chance for success and a solid foundation on which to build your Web presence.

1. Research and keywords

This is possibly the most important step. Why? Because the proper choice of keywords crucial. This list is one of the most valuable pieces of information you will get. Your keywords are not just for Google but you will need them everywhere. You will use them to optimize the site, you will use them to list the site, and they will go in your content, advertising, sales materials and your socials. You get the idea. They are very important and they change so need to be updated every six months or so.

Without keywords you cannot tell the search engines where to list you. True you don’t necessarily need a keyword Meta Tag but you do need the words for everything else. By that I mean page titles, file names, header tags, content, link text, listing and indexing and your advertising. See why it is so important?

2. Design & Optimization

This is a two part step and you can’t have one without the other.

Part A is the visible human side containing the design. The graphic design and how the web site handles are very important to the conversion rate. Your web design should be both pleasing and functional. This is where Chris’s marketing and design backgrounds play an important role.

Part B is the code side, what your browser and the search engines see. Google has very strict rules for page load times, content placement, content to code ratios etc. Using the keywords from above this includes page titles, file names, header tags, content, link text, and descriptions. It is very important to have the optimization and design work together here. One of the values of Lone Bird is the ability blend these two parts together. This save time, money and produces a much more effective end result.

3. Initial Launch

By far the most overlooked step of the three and it is every bit as important as the first two. Listing your site is really important. The big mistake frequently made is not properly listing the site, even with Google. Just going “live” with the website is not enough. Google alone can run 8 weeks before indexing the site. You will want to list your website as many places as possible. Putting the site up and not “working it” is the kiss of death and voids all the above.