🔍 Google's advice for sites switching over to mobile-first indexing

Jan 23, 2020

Good morning search marketers. Mobile-first indexing is inevitable, but mistakes don't have to be.

Google has updated its guide to mobile-first indexing to emphasize hosting the same content across desktop and mobile site versions. New guidelines were also added in a number of areas, including crawling, structured data, visual content, and best practices. Remember, you can't opt into or out of mobile-first indexing, so ensure that your content is crawlable and provides a fluid experience — regardless of the device your users are on — to keep both them and search engines happy.

Shifts in inventory and the structure of your digital storefront have to facilitate the customer experience while signaling relevance to search engines. To aid e-commerce marketers, Arsen Rabinovich of TopHatRank.com and Aleyda Solis of Orainti shared ways to make your category pages more competitive and adapt to changes in inventory. You can learn even more ways to future-proof your product listings and create evergreen product and category pages at their session at SMX West in San Jose on February 19. I can't wait to see you there.

If you feel like a lot of your day is spent doing the same tasks, it might be time to think about finding ways to streamline. Josef Sperzel, the group director of SEO for Horizon Media, has turned to Python to pull in data, visualize and help with day-in, day-out SEO and analytics tasks. During a discussion with our very own Barry Schwartz, Sperzel talks about how he got into technical SEO, site architecture, spider crawling issues and more. Watch the full discussion here.

Keep on reading for a Pro Tip on how to automatically prevent advertising more than you can fulfill, as well as your daily Search Shorts and to find out what we're reading.

George Nguyen,
Associate Editor

Pro Tip

Stop paying for clicks when you've hit conversion capacity

"A conversion onslaught. The issue that some businesses can only dream of, while for others it's a nightmare made real. Having more leads than you can qualify or orders than you can fulfill is a recipe for disaster as your overstretched staff try to deal with under-serviced (and inevitably unhappy) customers," explains Daniel Gilbert of Brainlabs. "What's more, if you continue to run PPC ads after you've hit capacity, you're basically throwing your money down the drain. Tell the capacity controller script how many conversions you can handle, and it will stop serving ads (and spending money) once you've hit that number. And to make sure you're not wasting any opportunities, it can automatically re-enable these paused ads at midnight so you're back up and running for the next day."

Get the script »

Build Brand Humanity by mastering empathy at scale

More human communication leads to demonstrably better business results. But putting humanity into action is easier said than done. Technology can help businesses forge more human connections between consumers and the brands they love. That's why Braze commissioned two powerful studies conducted by Forrester Consulting to dig deeper into this important topic. Join this webinar with Braze and Forrester where they discuss the latest Brand Humanity research findings.

Read RSVP today »

Search Shorts

Image search ranking tips from Google's John Mueller

Image SEO video. Google's John Mueller made a short and sweet SEO video on image search rankings. You can watch it here.

Natural links. You're overthinking it, according to Google's John Mueller when it comes to natural links. "If the link is natural, then it's a natural link."

SEOs do a lot. "There are so many interesting facets of what SEOs do," Mueller said. According to him, the role of SEOs spans endless areas, like marketing, Python, writing, HTML, JS, usability, links, design, UXR. The list goes on.

Are you MVP-quality?

Become a Search Engine Land MVP, refer your friends, and you could win a cool MVP prize pack, including a Search Engine Land t-shirt, sweatshirt — even a FREE ticket to SMX!

Learn more »