Digital Marketing Bites
– Latest Issue
News you can use to sell more, convert better and rank higher. Weekly updates you can action for quick online marketing wins.
In This Issue
Web
Is Your Phone Number ‘Click To Call’?
Most websites now get at least 50% of their visitors on mobile phones. So if phone calls are important to your business then you want to make calling you super easy.
You can do this by simply making the phone number on your website into a link. But instead of a regular ‘https://www.somewebsite.com’ link, you make the link (not the text) ‘tel:01-234-5678’. Then if someone clicks that link while using their phone, it will call your number.
Yes, it is possible to highlight a number that hasn’t been properly linked in this way and call it. But it’s fiddly so people can’t be bothered. And a lot of people don’t know they can do this anyway!
So do not underestimate the power of laziness. If it’s easier to go back and choose another company to call instead of yours, people will do that. This can double your business overnight.
P.S. If your website was built in the last 5 years and doesn’t already do this, I’d be very concerned.
Search / SEO
Google Switching All Websites To Mobile-First Indexing
It’s already been gradually happening (since December 2017). But the big ‘G’ has finally announced that from September 2020 all websites will be indexed primarily as mobile.
If anyone still thinks that mobile is not important for their particular business, let me just share with you this quote:-
“Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device.”
That quote is from Google themselves, from way back in November 2016.
So if you still have an old website design that does not work well on mobile devices, well, now you have an even more urgent deadline to work to.
Google Image Search Upgrade
Images are important both on and off your website. Google are now starting to show extra icons in image search that tell users what’s ‘behind’ the image.
So if someone searches for images of ‘double chocolate chip cookies‘ (don’t do it… 😉 ), they will now see little icons in the corner of the images. These indicate if this image is from a recipe page or a product page for example. Kinda matters if you actually sell cookies rather than want to tell people how to make them, right?
Check how images for your products and services show up. If they don’t appear, or don’t have the icon, you may need improvements to the code on your web pages.
How Do You Tell If Your Website Is Mobile Friendly?
There are two ways you can do this.
Firstly, try it on your phone! If the text is too small to read without zooming in, or parts of your site disappear off the screen – the answer is a firm ‘no’!
But it’s more than that. Can you get around your site easily? Do pages still load fast enough? Can you read the title/headline of the page without scrolling down past an enormous image or rotating carousel of images. Do popups, chat functions and your contact form still work properly?
The second way is to use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tester (don’t only test 1 page). Just bear in mind that Google is a computer. It is pretty darn good at spotting problems but it’s not a human. So trust your human eyes first, and this tool as a backup.
Do You Need An Email Newsletter?
Newsletters can take a lot of time and expertise to do well (trust me 😉 ). And they’re not right for every market.
Sometimes it’s better to just talk to your audience as you would a friend. Share some advice, a tip, a story, some interesting new thing that just happened in your industry. It can be a paragraph that takes 5 minutes to write. Just be interesting.
…it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.
Marilyn Monroe
Do this just once a week and you’ll have a far more engaged and interested email list than if you publish a stuffy corporate newsletter. Or worse, don’t get around to sending anything at all because it’s too much work.
Questions?
If you have any questions or need further help/advice with anything covered here, please do get in touch. You can always hit reply to any email from us, or use our contact form.