Managing Your Online Presence With Google Search

There are four main steps to managing your online presence using Google Search:

  • Be mobile-ready
  • Tell Google about your site
  • Control your site
  • Protect your business

BE MOBILE-READY

Google is moving to a mobile-first index; this means rankings based on mobile content will be more important than the desktop version of your site. And, for the first time, speed is now a Google ranking factor on mobile sites. This means you need to make sure your site content loads quickly and efficiently.

If you would like to test how mobile-friendly your site is, use this Mobile-Friendly Test Tool . Just add your homepage link into this tool and you will see how Google is seeing your site.

There are three types of sites Google supports: responsive, dynamic and separate mobile. Google recommends the responsive site and also recommends that your mobile site and desktop version match; make sure the content, metadata, titles and tags are all there.

TELL GOOGLE ABOUT YOUR SITE

Mark up your site so Google understands your content. This means ensuring your SEO content is all there, as well as structured data. The more information you give Google about the content of your site, the better they can serve your site to relevant audiences. This will lead to more rich results when searching on Google.

Structured data is very important. If you need more in-depth information about applying this kind of data, Google has a developer’s guide to implement structured data. You can copy and paste this code into your site for structured data optimization. Or, if you already have structured data and want to test it, Google offers a free Structured Data Testing tool.

CONTROL YOUR SITE

SearchConsole is a fantastic tool to monitor your site activity. It is a MasterTool offered by Google that is continuously updated. It also shows you issues and error notifications so you can improve your site’s functionality. SearchConsole can help you improve your performance on Google Search, get your content on Google, lead you to Analytics and help you understand how Google Search pages see you. There are also options for improving your AMP, mobile usability and rich content.

PROTECT YOUR BUSINESS

Google My Business is a free product offering that allows local businesses to list their business and be found by local users. This product helps you control how people on Google see your business.

You also need to pay close attention to your website security. Be proactive—use a two-step log-in for safety, keep your systems up-to-date, verify your site in SearchConsole, have a backup of your site, offer training to your employees and implement HTTPS. Chrome has started to mark HTTP websites as non-secure. Make sure yours is HTTPS. (P.S. Check out our blog about HTTPS.)

If you have questions how to make your site the best it can be, contact our digital services director, Ryan, to see how AcrobatAnt can help.

Source: Aurora Morales, Search Outreach Specialist at Google, 2018 Confluence Conference presentation.