Introducing TestMySite…. What Google Wants You To Know About Your Website

Mobile devices are dominating the digital world. Last year, for the first time, mobile searches outnumbered desktop searches. It is important to take that into consideration when creating your digital marketing strategy. It is no longer optional, your website must perform optimally for mobile devices. There are many handy tools online to let you know how you measure up and another one was just released today. Google has launched a website testing tool that is geared toward small businesses. It is simple to use and can be found at testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com. The cool thing about this tool is that you just type in your website URL and up pops your results letting you know how your site is performing for mobile and what the strongest and weakest points are. It calculates mobile friendliness, mobile speed and desktop speed on scales such as “good”, “fair”, and “poor”.  The tool offers a free score report of all three categories that can be useful to any small business owner or marketing manager, even one with little tech background. It also will email you a more detailed report to share with your webmaster, whether in house or outsourced to a company like Cobalt Digital Marketing, where we are masters of our trade.

Mobile Speed

Google has told us for the last 6 years that speed is important for search rankings. Why? Because we, as users, expect speed. With the rapid growth of small businesses all over the United States, it’s important to have a strong, mobile friendly website to compete online. The internet is booming with people searching for services, things to do, and products to buy. The last thing you want is a customer to navigate away from your site because he has lost patience waiting for the site to load. You can to create a quick, smooth user experience. It’s all about the speed because, according to Google, about half of all visitors on mobile sites leave the page if it does not load within 3 seconds. Yes, I said 3 seconds! At Cobalt Digital Marketing, we can look at the results you get from testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com or another reporting tool and help you increase speed and keep customers.

Mobile Friendliness

Being friendly has always been great trait and a key to customer service. So, why not be “friendly” in your web design and user experience? It’s important to consider every detail from selecting the right size font to avoiding problematic plugins. Google’s new testmysite tool will help to identify the problem areas and can help increase the amount of traffic that comes to your site via mobile devices.

Desktop Speed

Of course, you also want to be aware of how things are running on the desktop side, they aren’t obsolete just yet! When it comes to using desktops, the speed of the internet isn’t always the main factor. There may be other issues keeping the website from loading. It could even be the way that the website is built. Structural issues and programming glitches can be severely impact the loading speed.  Use one of the online tools to evaluate your site, identify if you have issues and then you can jump on getting them fixed.

At Cobalt Digital Marketing, we are all about optimizing websites for user experience. We know that your website is a digital reflection of your company and your goal is to convert site visitors into customers. We can help. Let us know what Google’s testmysite report says about your website. Forward the email report to catalysts@mauriciop8.sg-host.com. One of our Catalysts can develop a plan to help you improve website speed and mobile responsiveness. The internet is constantly changing and we are always on the lookout for new tools and new ways to make sure you are ahead of the pack. We are here to help you grow.