Mobile-First Indexing, Best Practices with Chris Burres and Matthew Bertram #437

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of E-Web Results. My name is Matt Bertram. Also, one of the owners of E-Web Results and the SEO king. If you're watching on video, punch in the face to our YouTube watchers out there. He said it, not me, guys. He said it, not me. SEO king. It says it right. It's clearly defined on the shirt that you're wearing. Is that what that is? Okay. You have assumed a very royal position in terms of height. I'm standing on a chair, guys. I don't think I have the ... I do have the ... All right. This is podcast number 437. As always, we do have a tip from our previous podcaster, Pad Cash. You don't even know what it is. You weren't on it. I have no idea. You weren't on it. I wasn't on it. So, influencer marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy. I believe I was actually on that podcast. You were on that one? Yeah. I was on that one. Okay. So, yeah. Influencer marketing is a really powerful way to market your business. You want to make sure that you're using it incorporated into your marketing strategy because it's an incredibly powerful subscribe, follow, boom. And if you are an influencer marketing ... If you are an influencer marketer, please reach out to us and let's talk. We want some influencer marketing. We would like to be influenced. We want to buy your services. We would like to be influenced. We want to be influential ... Influential through your influence-ness. Yes. We want to be part of your ... I don't know. Group, crowd. Yeah. The elite. Okay. I don't know. All right. All right. Anyways. You get the point. Matt, yeah. If you're an influencer, contact us. Yes. That's the point. All right. So, hey, I wanted to jump into this. We are your ... Results! Results! Results! You can tell it's live because we don't edit it. There is zero editing.

Yes. Are you suggesting there's some part of your portion of the podcast already- Actually, Chris, I am glad that you said that because I did hire an editor this week. Oh, you did? I hired a few people, actually. That's the one person you didn't tell me about, so that makes it- Well, he's the videographer. Okay. Okay. Very cool. Is he going to work on the podcast? Yeah. Oh, wow. He's going to work on the podcast next week. We are moving at a rapid pace here at eWebResults. I really can't keep track of who's hiring ... Well, I know who's hiring. I just don't know whom and how many, and it's exciting for me and everyone on the team, and maybe even more so Matt. Speaking of Matt, I have a review from Matt Williams, who Matt spoke with. Yeah. Matt on the phone. It is, of course, five stars. It says, recently had a great website analysis call with Matt. I really appreciate his candor and feedback on our project. I felt no pressure for a sale, just lots of great information. I would not hesitate to hire them or recommend them to others. Punch in the face to you, Matt, and to you, Matt, for punching all around. Thanks, Matt. This is good. Hit me up. By the way, a punch in the face is a good thing. Hey, if you're- Oh. Yeah. Punch in the face. Patoof. All right. Punch in the face. Punch in the face market. Are you hiring somebody to run around and punch people in the face? Is that what- Sort of. No. No. Damn. I get one idea. We've designed the mascot logo. Okay. Yeah. It's a platypus with boxing gloves. I like it. We have that. We'll get it on the t-shirts at ewebresults-swag.com-swag. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. You type it. You'll find it. By the way, that page loads painfully fast. It's not our fault. It's not our fault. It's Shopify. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I was talking to the guy who helped us put that

together, and we'll figure out a way to fix that, because it's important to fix that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't really remember what I was about to say or say. The platypus. But before that. And then swag. Oh. The punch in the face. The punch in the face. Yes. Yeah. The box goes, it's a punch in the face. You do realize that platypi have little poisonous barbs that they- Well, okay. Okay. So hold on. So has anybody out there heard of Perry the platypus? Yes. Perry the platypus. Okay. So Joshua Cummins, Dan Cummins, buy your new used cars from him. He's awesome if you're in Kentucky. Referred me to the intro video of Perry the platypus, which I've never seen before. And it was awesome. Awesome. It was phenomenal. We were going to have to somehow get rights and include that in stuff. He's basically a secret agent, like Agent P, I think. Agent P. I think that's what it is. Or was it Mr. P? It was one or the other. Yeah. Perry the platypus could potentially be the mask. I guess we can't- I mean, I feel like they're buddies. Conceptually. I feel like, yeah. Well, we don't. Yeah. He's not the same. They don't look exactly the same. Right. So, because we got him with the logo- That would be a problem. Yeah. We came with the logo before. Yeah. And then I was like, oh my gosh, he's got a friend that's a badass too. Yeah. And I was like, yes. Yeah. Agent P. Agent P and we got, yeah. Yeah. And Agent E. Co-promote. He's our influencer. If you are returning to this podcast, you are wondering, what the hell is going on? This is true. Who's Perry the platypus? And why are these guys talking about that and not internet marketing? That's a very good question. If you're back though, you're probably interested in some tips, maybe something like five online marketing mistakes that can tank your business. And yes, you can get there by going to ewebresults.com slash- Mini

dash guides. And SEO tips. SEO tips. We'll take you to the mini dash guides. I tested it today. You did not know that, did you? No, I knew that. I knew that. I did it. That's too easy. I did it. I knew that. My eight-year-old kid does that to me. You didn't know that. Yeah, I did. Well, I'll tell you though, there's more resources there, but I mean- Oh, a lot more. Yeah. Yeah. There's more than the negative ones. Yeah. Yeah. But the negative ones actually work better. Better. That's a SEO tip. All right. All right. So we are covering ... It's not an article today. It's a first. This is an absolute first for the podcast. Podcast number 437. By the way, if you're near some sort of electronic device and you can do some tweet something or other and get on Facebook- Hashtag Google. Right. Yeah. Hopefully it'll connect with us. Hashtag SEO podcast. This is podcast number 437. Tag us at bestseopodcast, at ewebresults, at mattbertramlive, at ewebchrisburrus. Wrong. At chrisburrus eweb. Yes. Somebody has to know something wrong. No. I'm telling the article. You got to give a shout out to Google. Yeah. Because we're actually covering a page that is in the Google documentation. If you've ever spent any time kind of perusing Google documentation, normally trying to solve a problem that you ultimately don't solve by reading the literature and end up going and- Hey. That's not nice to Google. You need to find the answer. Someone that wrote the article that explains it better or the YouTube video. So we're doing this podcast, Best Practices for Mobile First Indexing. Very true. If you're in the SEO industry, you're probably seeing in a search console that there's lots of people who are now being mobile first indexed, right? And so Google has given you a notification for each of the domains where that switch is happening. So the switch is really on right now. There's all sorts of posts about, hey, 47 of my clients got switched over. And

so we thought it would be a good time to review Best Practices for Mobile First Indexing and- How to take your basis. Straight from the horse's mouth. Okay. Fair enough. I like it. Straight from the horse's mouth. Google, at Google.com, that's what we're going to be covering here shortly. I bet they've done a logo. You know how they change the logos all the time? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Google as a horse. Google as a horse. And we could get that as the thumbnail for this one. Yeah. I don't know. Or the platypus. That's the horse's mouth. It would be the open mouth. And then- I don't know the platypus. Never mind. Scratch that. Yeah. Platypus. I like the platypus. I can picture the platypus with his big flat tail. Platypus is, if you look it up, we're going to add to it the 10- I think it's platypi. Is it? I don't know. I think it is. The 10, like there was this article. It was like the 10 bad-ass things about platypuses someone sent you. Yeah. Well- And they can do all kinds of cool stuff. Yeah. Like they have poisonous barbs. Like that's good. Give me two. They have a tail that can smack you. That's awesome. All right. Let's get into this. I think there are also marsupials or something like that. People are trying to fast forward and rewind to get to the real information. If this is the first time you've been to the podcast- We're sorry. We apologize. And we say howdy- Howdy. As we always do. Because I'm going to tell you now. Howdy. We run a contest each and every week. And the way the contest works is if we get a review, which we just read, and we get 10 Shikos- Shikos. A share, a like, or a follow. And a Shiko, when you give us a Shiko in your head, in the back of your head, you should just hear the sound as you're clicking that like button. You should hear, Shikow! Shikow! That's what Shiko

really sounds like. Yes. We've actually made a t-shirt about that, actually. A t-shirt that you can- And we have logos about that because it's so important. Trademark. No, I'm just kidding. So the way it works, if we get 10 Shikos and we get a review, then we skip the section where we tell you how to connect with us and give us a review. So we're going to skip that. I think we just move straight to t-shirts. No more- T-shirts are available, ewebresults.com slash- No, we're getting contests for t-shirts, not- Oh, that's right. There's a contest for t-shirts. Like that, you actually get something when you win the contest. That's true. That's true. Because moving it to the end, woo, if you type in ewebresults, you can find us everywhere. So we're still doing this, right? So we've extended it so the next five people who submit- Because we haven't got our shipment of t-shirts yet. Yeah. At all. We ordered a bunch. We ordered a whole bunch. So we'll send you a t-shirt, one of our t-shirts. You kind of select the t-shirt if you're one of the next five who submits for a website analysis. And you're a podcast listener. You've got to mention it. Yep. And you do also get a website analysis in that process. You do. They're actually really good. I might even get a book if I'm feeling generous. And if you want that website analysis just by itself- Oh, oh, oh, sorry, sorry. I got to self-promote. Here. Next Thursday. Thursday. Okay, what's next Thursday? Next Thursday- I have no idea. So today's the 21st, I think. So if you add seven and subtract one- 27th. 26th. Is it 26th? I think it's 27th. Anyways, I am running a free promotion on Amazon, okay? We're doing a review drive. We'll call it a review drive. Yep. Because my reviews on Amazon are sad. Yes. Chris still hasn't left a review. He comes in and as he's hiring people, he has a tear in his eye. Because no one, well

not no one, but not enough people have written reviews for his book. I think people are just still reading it. That's why they- I swear I wrote a review. I did. It was there. And then I had to close my browser. All right. So it's the bottom line on Kindle. Yep. Okay? On Kindle, on Thursday, it's free. If you have Kindle Unlimited, it's also free. And then I'll have the Audible version. Yeah, that's a big miss. And like two weeks, because people are like, hey, like I don't- I'm giving your book- I don't read. That's why I listen to your podcast. And they're sticking it away. And they're saying, let me know when it's going to be on Audible. I'm like, well, give me the book back. You're not going to, you're not going to read it. Yeah. So, but everybody out there that's buying the book, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. I guess you're just reading it before you leave the review. That's okay. Amazon won't let me get your email address so I can email you to say leave a review, so I'm telling you now. Please do it. Yep. Yep. That's it. That's all I'm saying. All right. So let's jump into this best practices for mobile-first indexing. I'm not aware, Google's been talking about this for quite some time. Historically, it has indexed primarily on the desktop version of your website. And now they're changing to the mobile version. Yeah. So a lot of times people would put a bunch of words, okay, on their desktop version because they could fit them in. Lots of space and layout's easy. Right. And then they're mobile, they wouldn't keep all the words and they would kind of hide them away, tuck them away, and it would be a really thinned down version. Right. So for people that have done that, unless you go in and add all those words back and re-design it- You need to control Z. You need to undo that. Yeah. Your website's going to ... Your mobile

version's going to tank. Well, your ranking is going to tank. Yeah. Your ranking's going to tank. Because previously, Google was based off the workstation desktop version. Desktop. Yeah. Now it's going to be mobile. Mobile. Yeah. Yeah. So Google has always ... So people have asked, maybe you could have two indexes, right? Where you index ... One index is if somebody's on a desktop version and you're showing them that content, the other's mobile. They continue and will continue to use only one index. Well, think about it. Double indexes for the whole world? Yeah. That's a lot. Google can do it. They could. Look what they're already doing. It's like, okay, times two. I believe in a line of code that's like the star symbol and then the number two. That's true. That's true. That's true. It's so easy for me. Google primarily crawls and indexes pages with their smartphone agent, right? So that's basically saying that it's mobile-first index. Here's, again, from the horse's mouth, as we said, we transition sites slowly to ensure a good experience for site owners and users. We evaluate each site individually on its readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the best practices and transition the site when the site is ready. This is basically like a, what is it called, a tension announcement or what is it? A customer service announcement. I feel like there's the right word. A public service. This is a public service announcement. Is a bomb threat a public service announcement? I feel like it's a bomb threat. But this is a public service announcement that you need to check your site and make sure your mobile version lines up with your desktop or you're going to lose some serious rankings in all the work you did. So- It's like warning. Yeah. This is warning. Site about to tank. Yes. Warning. Rankings. Tankings. That is basically this whole podcast. Yeah. All right. So let's cover what's changing. Yes. Again, this is directly from this and it says we're going to talk about the different types of

websites from the indexing perspective. All right. Let's do it. So what if you have a desktop-only website, right? The implication here, because the next line item is responsive web design, the implication is that the desktop-only is not responsive. And what it really says is you don't have to worry you're going to be indexed exactly the same. It's true. What I would argue is you need to worry a lot because you have the same version and the same version isn't going to interact with the user the same way on your workstation or on your iPad or on your mobile device or on whatever, whatever you're going to be on. You got to test it. And also I've actually seen two different size screens, right, that are mobile responsive. It'll move some of the navigation bars into like a funky space. Also if you're using like Unbounce out there, there's the mobile friendly version that doesn't have the words. If you're running a landing page, don't worry about it. But if you're running a website or you're trying to rank text-wise, there's definitely some things you need to look out for. That's the desktop version. The next is responsive. So just so you know, responsive really means that the content that is on the page gets adjusted, right, based on what the size of the device that you're on. And so if you ever kind of messed around with this, you can get really granular and you can say, okay, so if it's this size device, we tend to throw things in classes if it's a mobile device, if it's a tablet device, and if it's a workstation device. In both of these cases, whether you've got a desktop that is responsive, that isn't responsive, or you've got a website that is responsive, there's really no change. So also, there's a little Chrome extension where you can kind of see different phones and what it'll look like on different tops. It's actually built into Chrome, it's not even an extension, yeah. It's a piece of Chrome. I

use it, so... You assumed I installed it for you? This is really geeky. Chris must have put this here. I was like, this thing's awesome. Where is this? Click, click, click. So if you right-click anywhere in the space of a website and you go down to inspect, right, that'll open up a screen. I think the default... No, that's not what I'm talking about. Oh, you're talking about something else? There's a little icon that you can pick the different phone device. You don't have to do it the old school way. Oh, that is an extension. See, you're... I'm doing it the default way. You're doing it the old school way. I'm like, click a button, pick what phone or whatever I want. You do realize that that extension is selling your data, right? Guys, you already have all my data. I got a bunch of free apps on my phone. So if you wanted to do it with a native Chrome, you right-click, you hit inspect. It'll actually pull up... I think the default is it pulls up on the right, like a right sidebar. And then you can... There's a button somewhere that looks like a mobile device. Yeah, you can do that. And it does help if you want to get geeky. Or you can search, you know, extensions, Chrome, mobile emulation probably. It's a generational thing. Yeah. I'm cool with that. By the way, this is saying that there's no change with desktop, right, if you've got a non-responsive or responsive site in terms of what you need to do. One thing to note, though, if you've got competitors out there who have mobile and desktop versions and their mobile versions suck, then you're probably going to see an increase in your ranking. Yeah. Yeah. If you lose rankings, it takes a while to crawl back up. Well, no, in this case, think about it. If their mobile sucks and your mobile and desktop are the same, as they're ranking tanks, you can move up. For sure. That's going to happen a lot.

There's going to be a shift. But don't count on that. Let's just do the right things. Make sure that you're responsive. All right. Yeah. Don't optimize for their keywords, you know, on your site. Punch in the face to Troy Prescott for joining us on Facebook Live. Yeah. Hey, Troy. Woo-hoo. Thank you. All right. Let's see. All your webpages are created in AMP HTML. I don't even know what that means. I don't know many that are doing that. I don't even use AMP. I don't know many. In fact, in this case, it doesn't matter. There's no change. Now, if you have separate URLs, right, so this is called the m-dot, and the reason it's called the m-dot is because you might have a subdomain, you know, where your regular domain is dub-dub-dub or non-subdomain, and then your mobile version is m-dot, you know, your domain name. Yeah. So in this case, Google is going to switch from indexing your workstation desktop version, your workstation version, and it's going to switch to the mobile version. So Google now prefers the mobile URL for indexing, and you need to read the best practices, which we're about to cover. Yes. Well, the one thing I will say here, that was a pretty standard practice about five plus years ago. Yes. Okay? Yeah. So if you haven't updated your website in, say, five years, this will affect you. Call us. Call us. We'll help you redesign your website. We're seeing a lot of that. Yep. Okay? We can take your old website and just turn it into a responsive website that's in a nice platform. Yeah. I don't know. Like WordPress. But just like mattresses that study. Yeah. Yeah. The study. The commercial. That's your mom, right? She read that study. My mom read the study and told me, she's like, you need a new bed, because I read this study. I was like, you mean the ad on the radio? She was like, oh, was that what it was? Yeah. No. In all reality, probably not. It's kind of

like people reading your book, right? Yeah. More will read it once the audio book comes out. They listen to it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, bottom line is, five years and back, this is going to affect you. You probably need a new website anyway. A lot of our clients, three to five years is kind of the window, just so you know, for new websites. If you're out there past then, you need to look at this. Also, if you have a lot of traffic or leads coming from your website, you need to take a look at this. It's important. We can do an evaluation for you. That's separate URLs. Okay. Next is dynamic serving. There's a way where when you request a page, you're actually sending information to a server. In that information that you're sending to the server, in addition to the page that you would like, is the fact that you're on a mobile device or you're on a workstation, and so then the server can decide to send you a different page. Awesome. Interesting. Super geeky. Just know that if you created those pages differently, then you could suffer severe consequences. Meaning, if the mobile version that your server decides to send ... He got the vote. He got the vote? He got the book. Thank you. Punch in the face. Punch in the face to you, Tony, for ... No, Troy, for getting the book. If the pages are different, again, know that Google's going to stop indexing your desktop version. It's going to start indexing your mobile version. Finally, AMP and non-AMP, because you can have multiple types of pages. In fact, it's very typical for a news outlet to have non-AMP pages for workstations and then AMP pages for mobile devices. Just know that Google's going to prefer the non-AMP URL for indexing. I will say this. We're really good at a lot of things, but AMP websites are not one of them. If you need a way ... You're in desperate need of an AMP website? Do not call us. We

cannot help. No. We have not got on that train. We've had problems with it. We got off it. Haven't got back on it. We've turned it off on some sites because it was problematic. You need somebody else. We might be able to help you there. Yeah. All right. Now, a couple of these may apply to you. We're going to jump into the best practices for dynamically serving pages, separate URLs. If your site has separate desktop and mobile content, so this could be MDOT or if your server is sending it, here's things that you need to be aware of. Your mobile site should contain the same content as your desktop. It's interesting how Google very politically correct says, you should consider updating your mobile site. No. You should update your mobile site. You should not consider updating your mobile site. There's no part of this process, if you want to maintain your rankings, that says you should consider it. You should update your mobile site so that its primary content is equivalent to your desktop. That's not just content. We're not just talking about the text on the page. We're talking about the image, the alt attributes, the videos. All of those need to be on the mobile version as well. Yeah. You've got to do it. It's all about user experience, so videos, pictures, text, and the same information that's valuable for a desktop user, Google believes should be valuable for a mobile user. Now I do think that people search differently on desktop and mobile. They definitely do. I do. Really, there's some strategy in how you want to do it, but for SEO purposes, if you lose that content, you will lose your rankings, bottom line. Structured data should be present on both versions of your site. You may not have taken the time to make sure if you've got two separate sites, oh, we really need schema, this is really going to help our search engine optimization, so you take the time to put proper schema code on your desktop version, and

then you never got around to mobile, you're going to pay a price. Also, you can use the data highlighter. Make sure you do the data highlighter, so that's a search engine, I mean, it's a search console tool. Chris, I think that this is a really good nugget. Why don't you teach the audience here about the data highlighter and how awesome it is? Okay. It's pretty awesome. It's an alternative to actually getting proper schema code onto your particular site. What you can do, the best example that I can think of is, let's say you've got some table, you have a calendar, right? You want to go into Google, you go into this highlighter, what is it called? The data highlighter, which is in the search console, and then you grab pieces of data and tell Google exactly what that information is. You're like, well, here's the date of the event, here's the time of the event, here's the cost of the event, and here's the location. Now the next time Google comes back and indexes that page, it knows what to look for in order to identify that information as the date, time, cost, and location. It will look for it on all your pages, too. On all your pages. Think about those searches that you see where there's events below it, and more information. More information is better, higher likelihood of people clicking and knowing what they're looking for. Schema's powerful. A lot of people aren't doing it. We should probably do a podcast on schema, all the different kinds, the reviews. I'm also thinking we probably should have events on our homepage of when the podcasts are that people can tie into. We're on Eventbrite. We're going to be on schema. Yep. Or we can use the data highlighter. Although we have a coder, so we just, hey, Jay, make this happen. Metadata should be present on both versions of the site. So I was interested in which pieces of data they mentioned, because we kind of know titles and meta descriptions are the

important ones, and that's the only ones that they mention. So you want to make sure that your titles are proper. Yes, titles are important. So again, if you fixed your titles on your desktop version and never got around to it on your mobile version because it didn't really seem to matter, because it didn't, now it's going to matter. So make sure you get that right. And then additional best practices for separate URLs. Again, this is the m.type URLs. Verify both versions of your site in Search Console. So you know that you can put in the actual URL, and if it's true that m.ewebresults.com is different than ewebresults.com, then you want both of those in the Search Console, and you'll get feedback from Google on those. So this is the kind of update that was like the SSL certificate update. This is a big update, guys. That's why we're spending and belaboring this, because this is so important. It's going to affect a lot of people. Remember when SSL hit, and you were non-secure in the big pop-up, and it was bad. It was bad. So get on top of this. Next. So that's verify both versions in Search Console. Check your hreflang links, right? So this is your language link. So this is where you can actually say, hey, if the current browser is in Spanish, then I want them to go to, say, m.example.com slash es. And what it's saying is, if they're on a mobile version, make sure that you're afresh lang. It'd be very easy to just put one hreflang or to not code that properly. And so that if they're in, say, a mobile version, your hreflang is sending them to the desktop version. You want to make sure you're not doing that. Take the time to get that right. Ensure your servers have enough capacity. So think about this. Often there were services in the past that would actually make a mobile version of your site for you. And if they're kind of now slowly going out of business, because

so many of you are going to responsive and maybe not dedicating enough server resources to where your mobile page is and Google's now indexing that page and not the other server, just be mindful that you might want to consolidate that. Just be aware of that could be a problem. You also want to verify that your robots.txt files are relevant to both the mobile and the desktop versions. Why don't you talk a little bit about that as well as the sitemap? I'm seeing a lot of websites coming in and people are not having a sitemap. They're not having a robots.txt file. Why is that important? How do you do it? Just kind of educate the audience out there. So can you get away without a robots.txt file? Absolutely. You can get away with it. You usually want to do it, say, on a WordPress site, you want to keep people, in general, keep the bots. Although you've got to be careful about this because there's ... You want to block some bots. Yeah. But not all the bots. Right. Because part of generating the page is ... And actually, I got a little confused with kind of server-level passwords. With the bots, you want to tell them, hey, stay out of this area. There's no reason for you to be in the admin section. You don't need to be on my shopping cart pages. On the product pages, yes, but not on the shopping cart pages. So go ahead and let those bots know, hey, stay out of this place. There's also so many bots out there that you can get tons of traffic that are just bot-related and you can fix that with your robots.txt file. Now, this does presuppose that those robots actually listen to the information that's in your robots.txt file. Yeah. Well, and they just slow down your page. So you just say, stay away, little buggies, and potentially drain your server. Then the next that we're talking about is the sitemap. Yeah, the sitemap. The sitemap is a really ... It's

the right way to very easily submit your entire site to Google, and you definitely want ... It's one of those things, when we see a sitemap, maybe somebody's done some SEO on a site, but when we don't see a sitemap, either it's been an incredibly inept person who's been doing SEO on the site, or no SEO has been done on the site. We can usually pull up a site and we've got a 15 to 30 minute call that's free and kind of give you some feedback on, hey, your SEO, whoever you're using for your SEO, here's where they're going wrong already, or here's where they're going right. I'll be honest, it doesn't happen very often, but we've had clients or prospects call us, hey, I want you to look at the SEO, and I'm like, your SEO is good. You're probably okay. We've got other marketing strategies that could probably help enhance the number of leads you had, but the reason you came in our door was SEO, and that may be good. Well, we can really help take you to the next level. There's a lot of new things that are happening that you've got to stay on top of what's going on. There's Shift Google My Business, there's Hyperlocal SEO. There's a lot of stuff that keeps changing, and a lot of people are doing SEO the way it used to work three years ago. Same thing with social. Something that I'm seeing with social, I think you laughed or something when I was talking to somebody about social, and I was like, if you don't understand how your social's making money ... Making you money. It's probably not. Yeah. I heard Chris start laughing after I said that. A lot of people are selling you social services, and you're like, I know I need to do this, but I don't see it hitting the bottom line bringing revenue. If you don't know how it's doing it, it's probably not. One of the changes that happened in March, and a lot of companies

haven't changed this, is it's the three ... Adjusted to it. Yeah, a lot of companies haven't made changes. adjusted to it is the three posts a week on multiple platforms I think is really good for Google social signals. It's really good for ... To speak to Google. To speak to Google for SEO, but to drive business or referral business, Facebook said, no, you got to pay money. If you're a business, you got to pay money. What you want to do is ... Pay to play. You want to start taking maybe one of those three posts, maybe limit it to one or keep all three of them, but pick the best one and maybe put five, 10, 15, 20 bucks behind it every time. Just boost it, and that's where you're going to continue to get your visibility. Same things are working, just costing a little more money, having to do it a little bit different, but if you didn't know that, you're going to hit. If your SEO service that you're paying for or you're doing yourself is not including a paid strategy behind it, then it's probably more of a waste of time. It's really not that much money. To put 20 bucks a month behind Facebook ... Can get you some traction, for sure. It can get you some traction. For Facebook, think about 20 times X number of businesses. It's crazy, but for the individual business, it is a little more pay to play, but the internet's free, and people are learning how to wall up the gardens. And then finally, we're covering best practices for mobile-first indexing, and these are the best practices. Miguel, hello. Make sure you have the correct relative canonical and relative alternate link elements between your mobile and desktop versions. Keonicle's really important when you're doing location pages. I don't know if you want to speak to Keonicle tag and what that means, Chris. Canonical is a taxonomy phrase which says, we're using this term to point to the originator of the content. Because we're switching to

mobile-first, we really probably want our mobile version of the site. Assuming you have two different versions, you want that mobile version to be the first originator of the content. Your workstation version or your desktop version, you want a real canonical tag that points to your mobile version so that that's the originator. And that's the pro tip of today. Pro tip of today. And so you want to use that in a couple of places. You probably should have 301 redirects, but if you don't, make sure you have canonical for things like the non-www version of your website, the www version of the website, the www.com slash index.php version because with and without the index.php, Google sees that as different content. Really should have a 301 redirect, but if you don't, have a canonical tag. And so make sure they're pointing to the right place and the right place is now your mobile version. Yes. Yeah. Especially if your website has been turned on for mobile version indexing or whatever the phrase is. I don't know what the phrase that they send you is. So punch in the face to you, Google, for changing everything again. Or kicking the shins? No. Kicking the shins. I don't know. It's the right move. Yeah. The search volume on mobile devices is just outstripping. I saw it. Climb, climb, climb. Yeah. And we are still seeing actually that most conversions are happening on desktop. So even though- Depending on business. Yeah, it does depend. Depending on business. Yeah. Most are. So we'll still see lots of traffic. In some cases, it's pretty extreme. We'll see 75% of traffic on the mobile device. So this is overall traffic, 70% on the mobile device. And we'll see 65% of conversions on the workstation. So this is where some Google training actually is really helpful. They're wanting you to optimize for micro moments. Okay? Yeah. Yeah. So people are making a decision. They're taking some kind of action. What are they doing if they're on the go? They're sitting at the doctor's office.

What can they do quickly? Can they book something? Can they download something? What it is? Are they going to buy something? And so Google's put out some really, really good training on micro moments. And if you optimize for micro moments and answering those questions and selling products into those spaces, you're really going to ... Google's going to help you. Just like when Facebook Live came out and they just blasted everywhere and it's kind of died down since then, but there's certain things that are happening that if you do it, it's going to carry it more. Like Instagram, right? Yeah. The 10-minute, what is it called? Instagram Stories. Stories, yeah. Right? The 10-minute version. They are trying to push that hard. So you need to get on that if you're not. Again, influencers out there, call us. Call us. We have a story for you. All right. So that was a really good piece of information. We wanted to get that out to everyone and see if it's really coming to fruition. If you like this podcast, we'll ask you to tell three people about the podcast. You can do that right now. We will not be offended if you get slightly distracted. We'll just wait. Let's just wait. You can do it right now. We'll wait. We'll just wait. Go ahead. All right. Have you done it? Twitter? Yeah. Do it. All right. All right. Cool. Okay. Thanks. Appreciate it. If you are looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool in the world, call EOF Results for increased revenue in your business, 713-592-6724. If you have a referral, so that's somebody ... And it's important that we say this every now and then, because every now and then we get these phone calls that are like, do you guys do websites? Yes. Do you guys do PPC? Yes. Which PPC? Are you talking Facebook PPC? Are you talking Instagram PPC? Are you talking about Google PPC? We are starting an education company. We're moving to the new building. So don't worry.

We're going to be doing that too, but we have an agency. We're running the agency. We're killing it for our clients. We do full service from geofencing to HTML coding. Yeah. Boom. That's good. Yeah. What he said. Yeah. I'm going with that. So send that referral to us. When they pay their bill, we'll pay you. Yeah. And on the little ... It's like the ... I don't know. I don't like our hamburgers, but we got two hamburgers. Hamburger menu. Yeah. The hamburger menu on the right side. Right side. Yeah. You go to the referral option. You go to the referral option. Fill out the form. Fill out the form. And it's basically you put in your information. You put in the referrals information. If we close the deal, we pay you 5% for life if they're with us that long. But we do have some clients that are eight years, some four years, a lot of two and three year clients. So let you know. You can make good stream income. It's a great stream income. We have some people that are doing really well. So if you're a web designer out there and you're not doing the SEO, send it our way. It's free. Social media, et cetera. All right. And that's it. That's all I got. You can connect with us. Where do you want to ... Oh. A lot of ways. I feel like I've just sold too much. Too much. Remember to please leave a review for Matt's book. Yes. Okay. Yes. Yes. I'll take that. So that's buildyourbrandmania.com? Amazon. Yeah. Buildyourbrandmania.com. When you click on the button, it'll now take you to Amazon because you can't ... Be part of Amazon Select. You cannot sell your book anywhere else to be part of Amazon Select. Oh. Okay. So I had to direct everything to them. To Amazon. Yeah. And then leave a review there. Please. Please. That would be really nice. We'll leave it with that. Yeah. We do have a Pinterest account, pinterest.com slash ... Pinterest. Just kidding. All

right. And we'll leave it at ... We need to get those, pinterest.com slash Pinterest. Pinterest. Yeah. We'll leave those as they are. We are live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. You can get a transcript, video, and audio of this podcast by going to ewebresults.com and clicking the little podcast link, and then you can find it, and it's all there. Yay. We are the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. That is because of all of you all. Thank you. All of y'all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for being loyal listeners. And we're going to have a new thumbnail. So if you're looking for it, it's going to change next week. Oh, yeah. The thumbnail for the podcast is changing. Yeah. So you're not going to see our ... Did you hire somebody to make that change? You're not going to see our pretty faces anymore. That's so sad. Yeah. We've got to get a little more professional up in here. All right. I couldn't have shared it. I know. So we have two. Right? One is the caricatures. Yeah. Right? The Bobbleheads. Yeah. Let's hold the Bobbleheads up. Maybe look for these guys or look for SEO Podcast Real Big. Right. Yeah. But these guys, we might do this one. We have two options. We're A-B testing it. Woo. Yeah. Very cool. All right. Thank you, guys. Until the next podcast, my name's Chris Burrus. Matt Bertram. Bye-bye. Transcribed by https://otter.ai Edited by https://otter.ai