Today searches via mobile device are increases, and experts are declaring that mobile searchers will continue to increase going forward. 1 in 3 Google searches are now mobile. Mobile SEO is more important than every now.
I am sure at some point you have done a search for something on your mobile device and come to a website that is impossible to navigate. You cant’ find the information that you are looking for, and the website is impossible to read because the text size is so small. I know I have. It is so frustrating!
Having a custom built mobile website, or even a responsive website, that makes your website mobile friendly will help to improve the user experience and even your placement in search engine results pages (SERPs) on mobile devices.
Here are my top 5 mobile SEO strategies that will help you increase your mobile traffic and improve mobile user experience.
Top 5 Mobile SEO Strategies
1. Custom Mobile Website or Mobile Friendly Website
The first step in mobile SEO is having a mobile version of your website! This is very important these days. This will not only increase your chances for ranking higher organically within the search result pages (like Google); it will also improve the user experience.
There is a big debate in the online marketing world about which is better, custom mobile website or responsive. I personally find that custom mobile websites are generally easier to navigate therefore leading to a better user experience. Having a better user experience will always generate higher conversions.
That being said, having a responsive website is not a bad thing. It is definitely better than having a non-mobile version of your website, and if setup well, it can still generate a good user experience. Either will help you increase your chances of out ranking your competitors, without a mobile site, within the SERPs.
2. Understand Mobile-User Intent
Adapt your mobile website based on mobile search. Mobile searchers are unique for the information that they are looking for. Users have different reasons for searching for information via mobile devices. It is important that you understand the user intent so that you can provide the appropriate information.
According to Google, 69 percent of mobile users expect businesses to be within 5 kms of their location, and 55 percent of mobile users want to purchase within the hour. Keeping this is mind, providing location information, hours of operation, and contact information are key to increasing your conversions.
3. Easy to use navigation and buttons
Having a standard navigation on a mobile device makes the website almost impossible to navigate. Mobile websites should be easy to navigate. Building a custom navigation for mobile devices is a must.
Adding click to call and click to email buttons are also incredibly import. It is important for users to be able to contact you easily. Don’t bury important contact information on a contact page that the users needs to navigate to . I recommend setting this information at the bottom of the site that is nested on top of the rest of the information and is always available. This will help to increase the amount of leads you generate from the mobile site.
4. Incorporate Clean Design With a Focus on Usability
Design your mobile site so that your users can move quickly and freely throughout the interface. This is important to the effectiveness of your websites usability. Mobile device screens are quite small in comparison to a desktop or tablet. If too much information is included on the page, it can be overwhelming and busy.
This can lead to a poor user experience and users will bounce from your site to a mobile site that is easier to use. Having a clean design with pertinent information will help to increase the user experience resulting in more conversions. Lots of white space will help to focus on the main goals and direct your users to the information that they are looking for.
5. Speed Up Slow Loading Mobile Pages
Page load speeds can have a significant impact on mobile SEO, mobile user-experience and conversions. Because page load speed is crucial to creating a positive mobile user-experience, it is essential to a successful mobile SEO strategy. You can test your mobile load time via Google webmaster tools speed test.
In conclusion, if you don’t already have a mobile version of your website, I would highly recommend that you look into implementing this sooner than later. Your users expect it! Don’t let your competitors win your customers over because your mobile site isn’t cutting it. Get ahead of your competitors, in mobile search rankings and user experience.
The SEO Project Details
The Last Door contracted Longevity Graphics 2 years ago to help with organic SEO, Paid Advertising optimization, and landing page creation/onsite conversion optimization.
The goal of the original contract was to increase traffic by 200%. We were able to blow that goal out of the water with a 500% increase. Needless to say, Last Door is very happy with the results, and we look forward to continuing working with them on their online presence and organic SEO results.
See below for the amazing SEO review provided by Last Door
About the Last Door
The Last Door is a non-profit organization that has been working with youth, families and adults for almost 30 years.
“The provision of the therapeutic environments where individuals and families experiencing addiction can gain support and guidance to restore themselves to mental, spiritual, physical and emotional health.”
Here is the SEO review:
“To Whom It May Concern,
I am writing a letter of reference for Longevity Graphics, they have managed Last Door Recovery Society’s SEO Optimization and Google Ad Words/Organics Account for two years for a website we had designed 5 years ago from a different web designer. Their services have been professional, efficient, productive and beneficial to the organization.
Since the website www.lastdoor.org was optimized for Google and Bing, the number of unique hits to the website rose 500%. Last Door is listed on page one for our target market in Google Organics, while our paid Google Ads are receiving maximum exposure with “call to action” per click.
Last Door intends on renewing its annual monthly maintenance contract with Longevity Graphics and has requested a quote from them to redesign our entire website due to their creative solutions for optimal web traffic. Last Door Recovery Society operates residential treatment programs for individuals with substance abuse issues for 30 years and relies on the internet for informing the public of our services to ensure our programs are utilized every day.
Giuseppe Ganci
Director of Community Development
Last Door Recovery Society”
Thanks again Guiseppe for your kind words!
We are excited to announce that we have a new team member. Ryan Jaeger, a third year student at Simon Fraser University, is Longevity’s first data analyst. Ryan specializes in working with information and creating quality back links for clients. We sat down with Ryan and asked him a few questions about himself. Here is the interview:
B: Hi Ryan, how are you doing today?
R: Hi Ben, I’m doing great. I am having a lot of fun during my first day at work.
Fantastic! The first question I have on my sheet is: what degree are you currently working towards?
R: Right now I am studying environmental sciences at Simon Fraser University. I am pretty passionate about the environment, and I am planning on helping restore ecosystems as a career.
B: What draws you to working in marketing and with data?
R: I have always been a very organized and focused person. Something that I have found I can do better than most people is just put my head down and work on a task, sometimes for twelve hours at a time. It’s kind of strange but I like getting immersed in a task, even if it is something monotonous like entering data.
B: What is your favorite part of marketing?
R: I find back linking relaxing, and I do a lot of it. Having quality back links for a site is paramount for any page that hopes to rank in Google search results.
B: Describe your personality
R: I’m not really sure what to say *laughs – I guess you could consider me fairly outgoing. I’m pretty playful and am usually having fun with whatever I do.
B: What are your hobbies
R: I like to be outside; hiking in North Vancouver is something I really enjoy. I also love skiing and will go whenever I get the chance.
B: Thanks a lot Ryan, I’ll let you get back to your work- Welcome to the team!
What is the hummingbird update?
So, what is the Hummingbird update? The Hummingbird update is Google’s newest attempt to streamline their search engine and create a more user friendly service. Hummingbird is designed to yield more precise search results, and give users a more “natural” search experience.
Google named the algorithm “Hummingbird” because it is “precise and fast. The Hummingbird update focuses on user intent rather than the previous system of matching keywords.
Danny Sullivan wrote on this change in his article: FAQ: All About the New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm: “Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in the query, ensuring that the whole query-the whole sentence or conversation or meaning-is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching a few words”
Google is clearly trying to create a more natural feeling to the search engine. In contrast with the mechanical keyword based style of the previous operating systems, Hummingbird attempts to truly understand what the user is searching for.
Hummingbird was only announced last week, but sources state that the update was put into effect in between late August and early September. It is being touted as the most significant change to Google’s search engine since 2001; It isn’t so much as update, as it is an entirely new algorithm that Google has chosen to implement.
From the same article Danny Sullivan explained the nature of the change using this analogy: “Think of a car built in the 1950’s. It might have a great engine, but it might also be an engine that lacks things like fuel injection or is unable to use unleaded fuel. When Google switched to Hummingbird, it’s as if it dropped the old engine out of the car and put in a new one. It also did this so quickly that no one really noticed the switch”.
What does this mean for business owners?
David Amerland, author of “Google Semantic Search” says: “From a strategy point of view this opens the horizon for companies and webmasters considerably. From a practical perspective, they need to identify the USP of each business and become authoritative within it is now a key criteria for continued SEO success. The comparison element that has been integrated suggests that semantic mark-up may begin to confer an advantage now when it comes to helping index information in products and services.”
What this means is that quality rises to the top. To stay competitive In today’s online environment, business owners need to position themselves as people who have the answers to the questions being asked. Quality “likable”, “sharable” and “tweetable” content needs to be created and shared across networks.
What is the hummingbird update? It is Google’s new algorithm: “hummingbird” has made the leap from being a keyword oriented system, to turning google into a program that understands semantic language. Business owners will need to keep the new changes in mind when implementing SEO and building their brands online.
What is SEO?
Clients who have not done SEO before often have no idea what the term means or what the acronym even stands for. In this post, I will explain what SEO is and why it’s important for any business or organization online.
SEO (search engine optimization) is the optimization of your website with the goal of ranking higher in search engines such as Google and Bing. Your site’s placement in the search engine results is called its natural or organic rank and it is free. This is in contrast to PPC (SEM), which is a sponsored ad. There are two main methods of improving your site’s rank in search engine results: on-page optimization and off-page factors such as inbound links.
On-page optimization
When an SEO professional talks about on-page optimization, they mean that each page is easy for the search engines to crawl (meaning the site loads quickly and does not have an excess of needless code) and that each page is clearly indicating to the search engines what it is about and what terms it should rank for. On-page optimization involves doing extensive research to determine what phrases each page should attempt to rank for and then ensuring that every ranking factor within each page is optimized to support the chosen keyword phrases.
The most important factor for optimizing a page is its content. Every page should have a good amount of unique, quality content that is relevant and useful to the visitors of your site. Everything else that is done for SEO in the back-end (coding) is intended to support the content by sending the search engines the right signals. Search engines ‘listen’ to certain bits of code for hints about the subject matter of a page and SEO is done to make it clearer that the content is talking about a certain topic.
Off-page optimization
Off-page optimization is usually much more difficult than on-page, but it is crucial for any site trying to rank in a competitive market. Incoming links from other sites are the focus of off-page optimization, as search engines see links from other sites as votes of confidence. Having links from credible and relevant sites to your own website can boost your site’s reputation and increase its ranking within the search engines.
Link building has become a potentially dangerous endeavour due to several recent updates from Google, however. It’s very important to be discriminating about which sites you seek links from. Quantity is not better than quality; in fact a large amount of poor-quality links can result in a penalty to your site’s ranking. The best way to build links is to provide high-quality content on your site that visitors will naturally want to share with others. There are strategies that go beyond this, but that’s for another blog post!
Why You Need SEO
The main advantage of SEO is that it has long-term results and your natural ranking in the search engines is free. If you have an existing website that is ranking but not as high as you would like, improving your SEO is the only way to get yourself on the first page of search results. If you have the time to devote to creating great content for your site, SEO can be relatively inexpensive for you.
Basic SEO is straight-forward and can probably be done by any moderately tech-savvy individual once they’ve been educated on the ranking factors. However, basic SEO is not going to help you compete with the companies on the first page of the search results that have hired professionals to do SEO for them. The more competitive your industry is, the more difficult it will be to outrank your competitors. If you want to compete, you will need to use advanced SEO strategies such as the ones we use to help our clients outrank their competition.
If you do not have the time to invest in learning SEO, keeping up to date, or doing the actual implementation on your website, we offer a variety of SEO packages for businesses of all sizes. We also offer SEO consulting to businesses that want to bring their SEO in-house but are inexperienced and do not know how to get the most from SEO.
Negative SEO! What’s that you ask? Well, thanks to our friends at Google and the constant updates to the algorithms, Penguin in particular, some unethical companies and slime balls are using tactics to hurt their competitors. Google rolled out the first Penguin update back in April 2012. The update was aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using now declared black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, participating in link schemes, deliberate creation of duplicate content, and other strategies. The guiding principle for the update was to PENALIZE WEBSITES using manipulative techniques to achieve high rankings.
Generally Google’s algorithms reward websites for doing a good job of providing relevant, useful content for the visitors, or so they say. As far as the SEO community knows, this was the first time that Google began to penalize sites for attempting to manipulate the search engines with shady tactics.
So the big question is, what is stopping people from implementing some of these manipulative tactics on your website? Not too much! Thus we have negative SEO. It’s becoming a reality in the online world, and it’s something that businesses should be aware of, particularly in regards to backlinks to your website.
Over 11 years in the industry, I have had the privilege to work with amazing business owners with high business standards and integrity. We haven’t had to worry too much about this as we have implemented SEO tactics based on Google’s recommendations, and have received some great results. Unfortunately, I recently met a new client that has fallen victim to some bad link backs.
Let’s see what Matt Cutt’s has to say about this here
So what can be done about this? I have done a ton of reading and consulting with other SEO professionals who have had success with overcoming negative SEO.
Here are the steps that we recommend:
- Use these three tools to complete your link mining. Webmaster Tools, Moz Open Site Explorer, and MajesticSEO. These tools will help you to determine which websites are linking to your website.
- Organize the link backs into a spreadsheet, removing duplicate entries.
- Things to look for: low page rank links (3 or less), low domain authority (30 or less), links that are not relevant to your product, service, or geographical region, and finally, spammy anchor text links.
- Contact all of the websites that you would like to have your link removed from. Yes, this seems daunting, but it is necessary. This tool helps to speed things up: Rmoov
- Then you wait. Wait. And wait some more. Give it about a month for website owners to respond. You should see a 5-10% response rate.
- After you have attempted to have the links removed on your own, you can then submit the remainder of your list to the Webmaster Tools disavow tool. Google requires that you attempt to have the links removed first before using this tool.
Yes this is a tedious task. And yes it is necessary if you have been hit with a some negative SEO. Hopefully in the future, Google will release an update that prevents negative SEO from happening. Our recommendation is to run your business with ethical business standards and hopefully this won’t happen to you. If you are one of the unlucky business owners who is affected by negative SEO, then consult an SEO professional to help you. Trying to clean it up yourself and abusing the disavow tool could potentially hurt your site more.
On May 22nd, 2013, Google rolled out the Penguin 2.0 update to their search engine algorithm. Like Penguin 1.0, the update focuses on penalizing unnatural linking strategies. One difference with Penguin 2.0, however, is that it analyzes the backlinks of the internal pages as well as the home page, whereas Penguin 1.0 only analyzed the backlinks to the home page. This detail was only recently revealed by Matt Cutts when he spoke about the update on his blog. It is, effectively, a more in-depth version of Penguin 1.0, and it can cause the same problems for sites that have had black-hat or grey-hat link-building done in the past.
Penguin 2.0 basically looks for unnatural links from low-quality sites and devalues your site based on what it determines to be a black-hat link profile. It makes the assumption that you or someone working on your behalf participated in unnatural link-building strategies, such as paying for links or ‘advertorials’ (paid editorials that link back to your site). Maybe you didn’t do this unnatural link-building yourself, but a competitor has built poor-quality links to your site with the intention of getting your site penalized. This is negative SEO, and it has the same repercussions.
For more information about the Penguin 2.0 updates, check out this link.
Identifying it
So how do you know if this update has affected your website? Check your analytics data (from Google Analytics or any similar service that tracks your traffic) and look for a drop in your site traffic in late May. If you see a sudden and dramatic drop in traffic that can’t be explained by a usual seasonal trend or other logical coincidence, you’ve probably been hit by Penguin 2.0.
It’s also a good idea to examine the backlinks of your site using a site exploring tool such as those offered by SEO Moz or Majestic SEO. Using these tools, you can view the domains that link to your site, the page rank and domain rank of those domains, and the anchor text used in the links. With this information you can figure out if your link profile has the signs of an unnatural, spammy link-building strategy – backlinks from paid directories, links with exact match anchor text (keyword stuffed anchors), and high link accrual velocity (gaining backlinks in large chunks very quickly).
This can be a tedious and time-consuming process, especially for those unfamiliar with SEO and the tools that are used to analyze websites. If you don’t have the time or you find it too confusing, Longevity Graphics can help you figure out if your site has been hit by Penguin 2.0.
What to do
If it’s clear that you have a large amount of crummy backlinks, how do you proceed? The solution is straight-forward, but not necessarily easy or quick. Working from the list of your backlinks, you will need to identify the links that are hurting your rankings and deal with each accordingly. In cases where you have control over the link, like on a directory that provided you with a login to update your business profile, you should be able to delete the link altogether or alter the anchor text if that is the issue. When you do not have direct control over the link, you will have to reach out to the webmaster of the site on which your link appears and request to have your link removed.
There are sites and tools available to help you with categorizing and sorting through your backlinks. Some will even have template letters to help you with sending out link removal requests. https://www.rmoov.com/index.php https://www.removeem.com/.
Not all webmasters will be cooperative and some will even try to exploit you by asking you to pay them to remove your link. In these cases, you can consider using Google’s link disavow tool as a last resort. The tool allows you to suggest that certain links not be counted toward your site’s ranking. Matt Cutts has warned that the Disavow Tool should not be used by most sites and should only be used to clean up a “small fraction” of links after you have made multiple link removal requests on your own. He seems to be suggesting that abusing the tool could result in an additional penalty of some kind to your site.
Hopefully you will have been successful in removing the offending backlinks from your link profile. Either way, you should move forward by focusing on creating new links that follow Google’s quality guidelines and avoid unnatural link-building practices. See here for a useful link explaining what one should not do when doing link-building. Google recommends that you seek out natural links by providing useful content such as infographics or guest posts on relevant, high-quality sites.
If your livelihood has been threatened because this recent update has diminished your site’s traffic, we can help you get back on track. Recovery from Penguin 2.0 is a big job, but we are professional SEOs with a variety of experience that can help to boost your site’s rankings and recover from penalties.
What You Didn’t Know That You Need to Know
It’s common for a business or organization that is new to the web to be unaware of what’s best for their website. It’s even more difficult to know this when you might be lead astray by web designers, web developers and web hosts who don’t really understand or care about your needs. Several of our clients cursed the names of their website hosts or previous developers and designers once we informed them of the limitations of their website. In an effort to help others avoid this, I have a few recommendations for anyone who is looking to have a website built.
Choose Your Host Wisely
Some of the worst horror stories I can tell are to do with the poor quality of our clients’ website hosts. From hosts just being unreliable – meaning the site is down several times a month with no explanation and the technical support is impossible to get a response from – to being outright destructive, sometimes the stories are truly appalling. In one recent case, one of our clients contacted their host to inquire about the frequency with which their site was down. The technical competence or comprehension of the representative they spoke with must have been limited, because our client’s website ended up being deleted. There was no apology, but they did add some time on to our client’s hosting (which really felt like an insult).
The fact is that anybody with an internet connection and some hard drives can be a website host. Regardless of how professional a host’s site appears, the truth is that it might be one guy with 3 computers in a basement who only sidelines as a web host. Protect yourself and do a search for reviews of a website host before you decide to go with them. Also, if you know someone who is a professional web developer, they would be the best people to ask for recommendations. As web developers, we hate dealing with unprofessional website hosts and would be happy to offer our opinion.
Get FTP Access (Please!)
As a web developer, there is nothing more limiting than being forced to work entirely within the confines of a CMS, be it WordPress, Joomla, or something else. For this reason, we like to have FTP access to our clients’ websites so we can take customization to the next level. This will make any additions to the website much easier for us to implement. Of course, you might not realize that your website would benefit from such additions when you first have your site built, but for the sake of conversion optimization and SEO, we often need to get at the bare bones of a website rather than approaching it through the CMS.
It is also useful to have FTP access because it provides to access the .htaccess file (or the equivalent). These files allow us to tell search engines when files or sites have changed names in order to preserve the ranking of the original page or doman. This can be crucially important for SEO. In addition, having FTP access allows us to maintain backups of our clients’ websites, just in case something goes awry (see the anecdote about the crummy web host for an example of what “going awry” can mean).
Use an SEO-Friendly CMS
If you choose to have your site built using a CMS, check the forums on the CMS’s website to make sure it is SEO-friendly. Generally speaking, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal are SEO-friendly to varying degrees (varying based on what themes and plugins you choose to install). However, there are a seemingly limitless number of custom CMSs out there that do not take SEO into account much or at all. The SEO limitations of a CMS are another reason why we like to have FTP access – if the CMS doesn’t provide us with what we need, we can sometimes modify the CMS to do what we want it to.
Our favourite CMS to work with is WordPress. While no CMS is perfect, and WordPress can certainly be the source of much frustration, it has proven to be the most user-friendly and the easiest to customize. SEO with WordPress is a breeze compared to some other platforms out there.
We’re Here to Help
If you’re thinking about establishing a web presence for your business or organization, I hope you will keep my advice in mind. We can help with every step of the process, so don’t hesitate to contact us. We love helping people get established on the web and especially helping them to avoid the pitfalls that some people aren’t aware of because they lack the guidance of a professional web development and web marketing team like Longevity Graphics.
Day 1 at Mozcon 2012
It’s been a couple of years since I have been at Mozcon; 3 exactly. Wow, has it grown! I am always excited to be apart of the community at SEOmoz. Shout out to Charlene from SEOmoz for helping me out with my hotel issue. Alright,let’s get to the good stuff…today was a full day of great speakers.
Here’s my top 3 picks for today:
Paddy spoke on 35 Ways To Get Links. He talked about many simple and some in-depth strategies to get external link backs to your website. This is why I love coming to conferences. Sometimes I get so stuck in routine that I forget about some of these really simple strategies that work. If anyone has done link building in-house or for a client, you will relate to my love hate relationship with link building.
Wil Reynolds | SEER Interactive
Wil talked about Real Company Sh*t (RCS). Loved it! Loved it! Loved! To sum it up, Will talked about the difference in real content that was meaningful and genuine vs link building schemes that give what we do (SEO) a bad name. I absolutely agree with Wil in regards to being inspired by companies that stand for something and the marketability of these companies.
Rand Fishkin | SEOmoz
I always love what Rand has to say. Rand kicked off the conference today and talked about the future of SEOmoz tool set. Not only that, but Rand added value through out the day with some great questions for the rest of the speakers.
All and all, I am never disappointed when I attend an SEOmoz conference. More to come tomorrow.
Lindsay Viscount
Owner/Creative Director
[email protected]
If you work in web design or web development, then you probably can’t help but snarl when saying “Internet Explorer”. You might also share our aversion to any IE-related applications such as Microsoft/Yahoo’s Bing search engine. We have largely ignored Bing in favour of Google, but we keep our minds open to anything that might affect SEO.
Just this month, Bing has released the ‘Phoenix’ update for its Webmaster Tools. The interface has been overhauled and optimised for usability. At first glance, it is definitely reminiscent of Google Analytics, but Bing’s interface is more straightforward. Data is much easier to access with fewer clicks required to get more in-depth information.
New (beta) features include the Link Explorer, which allows you to view the backlinks of any domain, and the SEO Analyzer/SEO Reports, which can perform an analysis of the on-page SEO of any page from one of your verified domains. The Link Explorer allows the checking of backlinks to a URL, with an option to check backlinks to any page on a domain.
The Bing Webmaster Tools also include a tool for doing keyword research with organic search results (results that exclude data from adCenter), as well as a built-in markup validator with results that display the page you validated as it appears in the browser with convenient annotations that contain deeper information you can access simply by hovering over certain data.
While these tools exist elsewhere on the internet – and many of them are available in Google Adwords or Google Analytics – it is very handy to have such tools integrated to an SEO suite. As a package, it’s very attractive. It was attractive enough for me to test it out with our site. Initially, because of a bug, I wasn’t able to view any data. At the time of posting this, however, the bug seems to be fixed and I can really see the value of using Bing Webmaster Tools.
The value of Bing-specific data.
Google dominates search; there’s no doubt about that. However, Internet Explorer is the default browser on any new computer running Windows. Since IE has integrated Bing as its search engine, Bing has a large automatic user-base made up of people who either don’t know the difference between – or don’t know how to change – browsers. However, Bing is nowhere close to Google in terms of their users.
Google has about 60-70% of the market share while Bing has roughly 20-30%. Is it worth doing two sets of keyword research when the keyword research I can do through Google is relevant to 60-70% of searchers rather than the 20-30% using Bing? If keyword research results from Bing are different from Google’s, should I simply ignore the data altogether?
The question on my mind is how relevant the data I’m getting from Bing really is. How similar Bing and Google were regarding how they rank and index pages? I found a great article on SEO moz detailing the commonalities between Google and Bing. To summarize their findings, Google and Bing are quite similar, with the two becoming increasingly more similar as time goes on (more likely a case of Bing become more like Google than the other way around).
I take the findings as confirmation that it’s not a waste of time to play with Bing’s Webmaster Tools, which makes me happy because I really like the simplicity of its interface and the depth of the data it provides. I wonder if we’ll see some changes from Google Analytics and Google Adwords in an attempt to provide a similar application that merges the two. Exciting!