Google and User Experience South Canterbury

Heads up Timaru! So you might have heard that Google’s latest algorithm change is causing some disruption in the SERP (search engine result pages). The team at Branded Kiwi has gathered some helpful information to help you understand what this means for you.

The update, which was implemented on June 10th 2021, aims to weed out spammy sites and provide better search results for users.

Google’s latest algorithm release stresses the importance of User Experience (UX) and various other factors that influence the ranking of websites in search engine results. This is good news for you, as a client of Branded Kiwi, who wants great rankings.

If your site ranks highly on Google’s SERPs (search engine result pages), more people in Timaru, South Canterbury will see your website than ever before. Perhaps their eyes will land on one of the great services you provide or an image of a great product you sell.

The latest algorithm from Google will analyze the User Experience of your website. User experience is one of the main factors that makes a successful online presence. If your website makes it difficult for people to understand what you’re selling and how they can buy it, that isn’t good for business. At Branded Kiwi we are constantly implementing updates affecting our client’s SEO.

So what exactly will the updated algorithm rank your website on?

Page Speed

Huh? What does page speed have to do with where I rank? What is page speed?
Page speed is all about how quickly your website will load on a screen, whether it is a desktop PC that you are using or on a mobile phone. The slower it is, the more likely users will go somewhere else. There are many resources to identify your page speed – click on this link to check yours.

Google is aware that users will leave at the first sign of a slow website, and thus offering great content is no longer enough to get a result in Google’s search engine results for your target keywords. Your User Experience (UX) must be up to par to stand out from your competition and keep users on your page. Google has specifically stated that pages that load slowly will be penalised.

Responsiveness

What exactly does Responsiveness mean?
Mobile User Experience and User Interface Design. It’s an important one. And it’s not just about making sure a user can access a website from their mobile device. User interface design has come a long way since the days of small screens with limited bandwidth. Mobile devices are becoming increasingly smarter, and with the advent of 5G mobile networks, access to information is much much faster.

Page responsiveness is all about how dynamically the look of your website change depending on the screen size and orientation, ranging from tiny mobile phone to huge desktop monitors.

One of the things that you will need to check is how the page elements reshuffle to fit on different screen sizes. Does it look a bit weird when the page is scaled down to a mobile phone screen? That’s a good indication that the page responsiveness could do with a bit of improvement.

Why is this even important? Research has shown that more and more users are accessing websites via their mobile devices. In fact, as of Q1 2021, 54.8% of traffic on websites has been initiated from a mobile device. This number is set to increase as mobile devices get smarter, and users move away from the traditional desktop PC and onto tablets.

At Branded Kiwi, our websites are built mobile-first. Mobile-first design is an approach in which our web designers start product design for mobile devices first.

Safe Browsing

Isn’t this just a standard practice these days? Aren’t all websites secure?
Not all websites are created equal. Google has Safe Browsing technology that scans billions of URL’s on a daily basis looking for unsafe websites and will penalise unsafe websites.

Google will look to see if your website has a valid SSL Certificate. This is a simple way to make sure that the new algorithm doesn’t penalise your page. If there isn’t a closed padlock beside your website in the address bar, this is an easy fix.
If you run third party ads on your website, these will also need to link to a secure site. The algorithm is pretty smart and can recognise ads that are misleading or may be considered as Spam.

Conclusion

Google is always trying to improve User Experience and with the new update; there are now more ways that users can access a website through other devices. If you have an existing website and it isn’t mobile-friendly then these will be a priority.

Essentially, the new algorithm is all about User Experience (UX) and if you need help with making your website is up to it, give us a yell at Branded Kiwi. There are a lot of aspects to SEO that could potentially be affected by this, and we can help you update them all with the same goal in mind – getting you back on top. Get in touch with us today and let’s talk about how we can make sure your site ranks at the top for what it should!