Difference Between a Website that Doesn’t Render on Mobile and a Non-Responsive Website:

Doesn’t Render: Often, due to technical errors, incompatible elements, or server issues, the website fails to load or display correctly on mobile devices, making it unusable.
Non-Responsive: The website loads but is difficult to navigate and read on different mobile devices due to the lack of responsive design. The site is usable but offers a poor user experience on mobile.

What It Means for a Company’s Website

This change in ranking criteria means having a mobile-friendly design is no longer optional—it’s imperative. Websites that do not render on mobile will experience a notable drop in search engine rankings. This change will directly affect a company’s online presence, traffic, and potentially its revenue. As users increasingly use smartphones and tablets for browsing and shopping, a mobile-friendly website creates a better user experience and higher engagement rates.

Should a Company Care?

Absolutely. Here are a few reasons why companies should prioritize a mobile-responsive design:

1. Search Engine Visibility: As of February 2024, almost 60% of all worldwide website traffic is from a mobile device. Without a mobile-friendly design, your site won’t be indexed, leading to a loss of organic traffic from search engines.
2. User Experience: Mobile users expect a first-class experience. A mobile responsive design ensures your site is accessible and user-friendly across all devices.
3. Competitive Advantage: Companies adapting to mobile-first indexing can gain a competitive edge over those that don’t. Being mobile-friendly can improve your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
4. Customer Expectations: With more than half of global web traffic coming from mobile devices, users expect websites to be optimized for mobile use. Not meeting these expectations can result in higher bounce rates and lower engagement.

How to Prepare

Preparing for mobile-first indexing involves several key steps:

1. Responsive Design: Make sure your website uses a responsive design that adjusts seamlessly to different screen sizes and devices. You can test your website’s mobility design with tools like Google Page Speed Insights and MobiReady.
2. Content Parity: Ensure that your mobile site’s content matches your desktop site’s content. This includes text, images, and videos. Google crawls the mobile version of your content for indexing, so it’s crucial that the mobile content is complete and of high quality.
3. Structured Data: Verify that structured data is present on your site’s desktop and mobile versions. Structured data helps Google understand your pages’ content and can improve your search visibility.
4. Performance Optimization: Optimize your site for speed and performance on mobile devices. Use techniques like image compression, lazy loading, and leveraging browser caching to enhance load times.

The Future of Mobile-First Indexing

The move to mobile-first indexing is just the beginning of a broader shift towards prioritizing mobile experiences. The online search experience is being influenced by societal, technological, and competitive forces like never before, so here are some future trends to consider and plan for:

1. Voice Search Optimization: As mobile devices are commonly used for voice searches, optimizing for voice search will become increasingly important. This change involves focusing on natural language, long-tail keywords, and answering specific questions users might ask.
2. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs): PWAs combine the best of web and mobile apps, offering fast, reliable, and engaging experiences. Adopting PWAs can further enhance the mobile experience and keep users engaged.
3. AI and Machine Learning: Google’s algorithms will continue progressing in AI and machine learning. It is imperative for companies to stay current with best practices and emerging SEO and web development trends.
4. Enhanced User Experience: As Google emphasizes user experience (UX) metrics like Core Web Vitals, companies must prioritize UX in their mobile design strategies. This focus includes aspects like loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability.

Google’s decision to enforce mobile-first indexing marks a significant juncture in the future of the web. Companies must adapt to this change by ensuring their websites are mobile-responsive, user-friendly, and optimized for performance. By embracing these practices, businesses can maintain their search engine visibility, meet customer expectations, and stay competitive in an increasingly mobile-centric world.

If you are concerned about your website’s mobile design, contact Power Marketing for a free analysis and consultation.

The post As of July 5th, 2024, Google Will No Longer Index Non-Mobile Websites appeared first on Power-Marketing.

What Are Cookies?

Cookies are small text files stored by your browser when you visit a website. They serve multiple purposes, including:

● Storing login information

● Saving preferences like language and font size

● Keeps track of shopping cart items

● Identifying users with a unique ID

● Tracking the pages you visit

Cookies can be temporary (expiring after a session) or persistent (stored until you delete them).

Why Are They Called Cookies?

The term “cookie” comes from “magic cookies,” a computing term referring to an exchange of information between two programs. Lou Montulli, a developer in the mid-90s, introduced the term “cookie” in the context of the internet. Like a fortune cookie, which contains a snippet of advice, internet cookies contain important information about your activity on a website.

First-Party vs. Third-Party Cookies

Websites you visit create First-party cookies, which can only be accessed by that site. These cookies improve user experience by remembering your preferences. For example, an e-commerce site might use cookies to keep track of your shopping cart items.

Third-party cookies are created by websites other than the one you’re currently visiting. They track your activity across multiple sites, gathering data about your browsing habits for advertising purposes. This “tracking” is how ad networks know to show you targeted ads. For instance, if you’ve been searching for flights, you might see ads for hotels and car rentals on other sites.

What’s Changing?

First-party cookies remain unaffected. However, most browsers are now blocking third-party cookies. Privacy-focused browsers like Firefox, Brave, and Safari have done this for years, and Google Chrome started blocking third-party cookies by default in 2024. Given Chrome’s dominance, this change is significant.

On January 4, 2024, Google began blocking third-party cookies by default for 1% of users, with plans to increase this to 100% by Q3 2024.

How Will This Affect Your Business?

While other browsers have weakened third-party cookies, Chrome’s upcoming phase-out marks a significant shift. Chrome will continue tracking users through different methods, with anonymized and categorized data sent to Google or other parties. Learn more about The Privacy Sandbox initiative.

Meta’s Pixel defaults to first-party cookies but still uses third-party cookies for cross-website tracking. Meta can still determine users’ interests with data from its own platforms, and its Conversions API helps fill tracking gaps.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is designed for a cookieless world. It relies only on first-party cookies and uses statistical modeling to fill tracking gaps.

Overall, the most significant impact will be targeting accuracy, not attribution. Publishers may feel a bigger impact than marketers since advertising networks rely heavily on third-party cookies. If you don’t run programmatic advertising, there’s less cause for concern.

Digital Marketers anticipated this gradual change for years, and platforms have adapted accordingly. More importantly, there’s no reason to panic. If you’ve been using third-party cookies for your marketing campaign, most seasoned digital marketers are prepared with marketing alternatives based on privacy concerns.

If you have questions about third-party cookies or digital marketing strategy, contact Power Marketing.

The post The End of Third-Party Cookies: What You Need to Know appeared first on Power-Marketing.

Here’s what these changes mean for business owners and how to ensure your emails are more likely to land in the right place.

Understanding The New Rules

Demanding the Sender to Authenticate

Google and Yahoo will enforce email authentication protocols—like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC—for all sent mail. This is tech talk for confirming your identity to providers and protecting your reputation by showing you are a real company and not sending out suspicious emails. It’s the digital equivalent of an ID check for every message you send.

Zero Tolerance for SPAM

Mailbox providers are battling a tidal wave of spam that erodes user trust. By making authentication mandatory, they provide a shield against scammers, ensuring that the floodgates to user inboxes are managed, not melted.

The Why Behind the Changes

Protecting User Privacy and Experience

The digital landscape demands that providers like Google and Yahoo be the keepers of the gates, ensuring customer inboxes remain pristine. These changes are a direct response to the overwhelmingly negative effects of unsolicited, fraudulent, and pesky emails.

Authentication isn’t just about managing access; it’s about building trust. These initiatives aim to elevate the standards for legitimate senders, ensuring their messages are less likely to be confused with spam.

How It Impacts Your Business

The Line in The Sand: Legitimate vs. Spam

With these new requirements, your email’s ability to reach your audience is at risk. Mislabeling as spam—or worse yet, being filtered or blocked altogether—can devastate your communication strategy and, ultimately, your bottom line.

The Credibility Equation

Your ability to satisfy these demands speaks volumes about how your business is perceived. If you can’t—or don’t—meet these minimal requirements, you might signal to providers (and, in turn, their users) that your email may be suspect.

Optimizing for Enhanced Deliverability

Revising Your Email Sending Strategy

Actively revising your approach to emailing is crucial. From tightening your permission policies to focusing on high-quality content, every email choice matters more than ever.

Technical Compliance

Ensuring your email systems are technically compliant with these new requirements is non-negotiable. This might involve updating your email-sending infrastructure or configurations. Tools like HubSpot can guide and automate much of this process.

Engagement as a Conscientious Sender

Ensuring your audience is engaged with your content signifies to providers’ algorithms that your emails are wanted. Practices like regular list pruning and providing clear unsubscribe options are as important as ever.

Monitoring and Adapting

Will My Emails Reach Their Destination?

You may be left in the dark. If your emails are bouncing or blocked from a recipient, your email provider will notify you. But, if your emails are going to SPAM, it may take you some time to figure it out. Suppose you have a CRM system such as Hubspot or Salesforce. In that case, you can more easily monitor your deliverability, adjust your strategies based on performance, and ensure you stay in the good graces of mailbox providers.

Continuous Improvement

As the email environment changes, so must your approach. Staying informed of best practices and provider policies will help you evolve and fortify your emailing strategy over time.

Conclusion

These new email authentication requirements are significant steps in the battle against spam. They also allow business owners to reaffirm their trustworthiness in the digital space. By embracing these changes wholeheartedly, you’re not just securing the delivery of your emails—you’re also ensuring your place as a conscientious and reputable member of the online business community.

Remember, this is not just about technical compliance; it’s about demonstrating the integrity of your business and the value of your communications. So, take the time to understand and implement these changes. Your customers and your bottom line will thank you.

If you want to learn more about the new email requirements, contact Power Marketing for a free consultation.

The post The New Email “Epidemic”: Google and Yahoo Change the Rules for Email Delivery appeared first on Power-Marketing.

This is where SEO has traditionally come in. Websites have been trying to manipulate the algorithm that determines these search results since we learned about the algorithm in the first place. Initially, this led to articles crammed with keywords, hoping they’d act like internet lighthouses, bringing in visitors.

Google has continually updated their algorithm for search results, sending SEO experts scrambling to stay ahead of the curve. Recently, Google has tried to reward useful content over robotic keywords simply peppered throughout headlines and paragraphs. This effort has just taken another huge step forward with Google’s new Helpful Content update.

We’ll dig into the specifics of this new update so you know exactly what to expect and how you can make it work for you.

What is Google’s Helpful Content Update?

As we said above, the purpose of this new update is for Google to get better at returning articles, videos, and other content that is actually beneficial to users. Content that it deems to have been written for search engines will be downgraded.

As stated by Google themselves:

“Google Search is always working to better connect people to helpful information. To this end, we’re launching what we’re calling the “helpful content update” that’s part of a broader effort to ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results.”

The rollout of the Helpful Content update is set to begin the week of August 22nd, 2022 and could take up to two weeks to fully implement.

Users have become frustrated with articles that are obviously written with the sole purpose of ranking high in search results. These articles don’t offer value to readers or visitors, only serving to frustrate them as they continue to look for answers to their questions. This new update looks to correct that, which means many websites will see some drastic changes to their search rankings.

How Does the Helpful Content Update Impact Search Results?

Google’s system will automatically begin scanning websites, webpages, blogs, e-commerce listings, and more. They’ll be looking for content that is unhelpful to the user. Anything that doesn’t offer value will be negatively impacted, reflected by a much lower positioning in search engine results.

“Any content — not just unhelpful content — on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that’s better to display. For this reason, removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content,” said Google.

Websites that have well-researched, informative articles that offer immediate value to users will be rewarded.

If you’ve spent a lot of time writing with SEO practices in mind, it’s well worth the effort to update your content. This classifier will run continuously. New websites will be assessed, as will existing websites. It might take a little time to regain your positive standing in search results, but it can be done by replacing unhelpful content geared toward the old algorithm with new, quality information.

How Can You Use the Helpful Content Update To Drive Traffic to Your Website?

In short: Write better content. That might sound reductive, but it’s the most straightforward way you can raise your search result rankings. Offer content that will satisfy users–the days of writing to please a computer are long gone.

Google provided some questions you can ask yourself to determine if the Helpful Content update will reward your website. Every time you answer “yes” is another step toward advantageous search result rankings.

• Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
• Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
• Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
• After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
• Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
• Are you keeping in mind our guidance for core updates and for product reviews?

This new update will greatly improve the experience of every Google user. And if you want to be there for the ride, you need to be sure your content provides value. Audit your existing content and update or delete anything that doesn’t clearly and sufficiently answer the question it is supposed to answer. Contact us to discover how we can help you with your Helpful Content.

The post What You Need To Know About Google’s Helpful Content Update appeared first on Power-Marketing.