Small business SEO Course – Part 2

This course is designed for small business owners to help them understand small business SEO, so that you understand the basics and are not ripped off by unscrupulous SEO companies. Or even so that you can manage your own SEO without having to pay anyone else to do it for you.

Review of part 1

In part 1 we learned what “Off Site SEO” and “On Site SEO” and “Local SEO” are, how you can give your website a huge boost by choosing your domain name. How keywords are broken down in to short tail keywords and long tail keywords, what they are and how to use them, and what Keyword Research is.

In part 2 we will look at a few “On Site SEO” factors that are vital to ranking in Google: Mobile Compatibility, SSL, and Website Speed.

Joseph started up in Website Design in 1998 and started working on Search Engine Optimisation in the early 2000’s. So has a great deal of professional experience spanning more than twenty years, which he is willing to share with you here.

Mobile Compatible Websites are required by Google in 2024

If you have had a website for your company for 10 or 15 years there is a good chance that your first website was only built with desktop computers in mind. This is because almost everyone visiting your website was using a desktop or laptop computer. However as an ancient book of wisdom says “the scene of the world is changing”. For the first time, the majority of visitors are now using mobile phones or mobile devices to visit your website.  The current statistics in mid 2024 estimate between 56% to 65% of all internet traffic is now from mobiles. If your website is not fully mobile compatible, then you are alienating well over 50% of the potential customers looking for your products or services on the internet.

“I’ve been told my website isn’t mobile compatible, but I can see it on my mobile phone?”

What do we mean when we say “Mobile Compatible”? A website that is mobile compatible, has a version of the website that has been designed specifically to be viewed on a mobile phone. It automatically is laid out in a way to fit the screen on a mobile phone and be easily read on the smaller screen. 

Although it may be possible to open your website and zoom in to read it on your mobile phone, it is not designed for mobile and most people will not put in the extra effort to do so. They will simply scoff at your website from the dark ages and move on. For this reason and others, Google has adopted a policy of dropping from its index (the list of websites that it shows to people) any website that is not fully mobile compatible if the person ios searching using a mobile phone.

Just think about that, well over 50% of the people searching for your business will not even be shown your website in the list on Google, if it is not fully mobile compatible!

A website that is NOT Mobile Compatible

Notice what the website above looks like on a mobile phone, the writing gets cut off and you either need to pinch or zoom in to try to read it.

Now compare that to a website that has been designed to be displayed correctly on a mobile phone:

A website that IS Mobile Compatible

So if your website is not mobile compatible this means that Google wont show it to anyone else that is on a mobile phone, so what do we need to do?

Redesign the website to be fully mobile compatible, preferably fully mobile responsive.

“Why can I see my website on Google then even though it isn’t mobile compatible” basically Google knows that it is either your website, or that you already visit the website a lot, so it will show it to you, but not to anyone else that doesn’t already have it in their recent web history.

So if you used to get a lot of visitors to your website from Google but they have dried up, and your website is not full mobile compatible, that is why. You need to redesign it to modern requirements.

SSL Secured Websites are required by Google in 2024

As technology has developed, so have the methods used by scammers and those who would like to either steal information or use other people’s website to spread viruses. So the need to secure your website has become standard, and Google now requires that websites are secure. While there are still websites that are not secured in Google’s index, when it has a choice between a website that is secured with SSL and one that isnt, Google will prefer the secure website. 

How do you know if your website is secure?

You need to look at the website address in your web browser, firstly look for the website address. If the website address starts with http then that website is not secured. It should say https, however even if the address does say https, it may still not be secure.

Look at the Website Address in your web browser which of these does it look like?

If you have a locked padlock like in the image, and the website address starts with https, then your website should be good. however it is important to note that some pages of your website may be secure and other pages might not. So you need to force SSL encryption on your website to be certain. 

Many browsers will now automatically block access to websites that are not properly secured using SSL so as to protect people from hackers, trojans, viruses and other dangers. If your website is not loading from https:// with a correctly configured SSL certificate then the visitor may see a warning like this:

A browser warning that the connection to the website is not secure

What you should do if your website has pages that are not secure.

You need to install an SSL certificate, most hosting companies can do this for you, some make a charge and others provide free SSL certificates.

Website Speed

Because Google wants to only serve up websites that will give a good experience, and will satisfy what the user is looking for, they require that your website loads quickly. If a website is slow to load, many people will give up waiting for it to load and will simply click back to Google and try a different website. This is referred to as “Bounce Rate“. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who after visiting your website, immediately leave again without staying to read it.  As if they have hit your website and immediately bounced off again.

There are a number of reasons why a visitor might do that. If for example they can instantly see that the website is not what they were looking for they will likely quickly leave, (unless you have something in place that grabs their attention and make them want to stay and check it out) but one of the highest reasons for a high bounce rate is a slow loading website. If people are impatient in day to day life, they are 10 times more impatient on the internet. So unless you want all your visitors to give up waiting and Google to decide that your website is too slow to show to people, you need to make it load as fast as possible.

Tools to measure your websites performance

There are a number of tools that you can use to test the speed of your website, including:

https://tools.pingdom.com/

Pingdom speed test results

Pingdom allows you to change the location that you are testing from, so you can select United Kingdom, which then simulates how fast your website will load for someone here in the UK. The location and speed of the hosting server can make a big difference to the load speed times. Preferably you want a good fast hosting server that is located in the UK.

Another option for testing your website speed is GTMextrix.com however you will need an account to see the results.

https://gtmetrix.com/

GTMetrix.com speed test results for youtube.com

GTMetrix does provide great detailed information that you can use to identify exactly what is slowing your website down. However as we can see in the results of a test of youtube.com, if you don’t have an account they withhold the information that you are really looking for. Like Pingdom you can select where the test is run from and you can choose a variety of platforms & browsers to simulate, but only if you have an active account.

Probably the best option however when it comes time to test your website and actually fix any website page speed issues is Google’s own tool, “PageSpeed Insights”

https://pagespeed.web.dev/

Google’s tool PageSpeed Insights – Showing the Core Vitals of YouTube.com

As you can see this tool allows you to test a website and then it shows the results for mobile and desktop and it breaks down the website’s score showing what areas need to be improved and offering suggestions on how to fix any issues. I highly recommend that you use this tool and learn to understand all of the features. Google is basically telling you what it thinks is wrong with your website when it comes to Page Speed.

So lets assume that you have discovered that you have a problem with a slow loading website. Now you need to do something about it, we will come on to things to check to speed  up your website in the next section of this course.

RECAP

So lets just quickly recap what we have learned in this second part of the course:

• Google requires that your website be “Fully Mobile Compatible”
• If your website is not fully mobile compatible, Google wont show it to people on mobile phones.
• Because unpleasant people exploit websites that are not secured they can be infected with dangerous viruses
• Google requires that websites are secured with SSL and ranks those that are better.
• Websites secured with SSL start with https://
• Each page needs to be tested for SSL separately as some pages can be secure and other pages may not be.
• How fast your website loads on mobiles and desktops is a ranking factor in Google.
• You can use tools to test your website’s “Pagespeed”.
• The faster your website loads, the better chances it has of ranking well in Google.