Searchlite: Is Your Site Mobile-Friendly? How to Tell and Why it Matters

Summer is well and truly here! Warm weather, blooming flowers, and no Core Web Vitals until the fall. Summer's got Uproer in the mood for new beginnings - we'll be moving into our new office in just a few days.

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Speaking of new, are you new to the SEO industry? It can be a big transition, especially since it's an incredibly interdisciplinary field. Uproer SEO Analyst Cristiana took a little time to reflect on her first 9 months or so as an SEO and broke down what to expect and some tips to help those just starting out.

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This month's newsletter is covering what it means to be mobile-friendly, how Google tackles UGC spam, writing effective product descriptions, and more.

Let's get into it:

How To Tell If Your Site Is Mobile Friendly Or Not?

by Aleks Shklyar for iPullRank

Key Takeaways:

• The mobile version of your website, i.e. what Googlebot mobile sees when it crawls your site, will soon be the only version of your site that gets indexed
• It’s the responsibility of website owners to make sure their sites are optimized for mobile in order to succeed
• The good news is that it’s fairly easy to know which pages of your site are mobile-friendly and which ones aren’t using built-in tools in Google Search Console

Why it Matters: 
“Mobilegeddon” refers to the panic that swept the search landscape when it was announced that Google would start using mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor in 2015. Today, “Mobilgeddon” is often referenced as an example of how updates to Google’s algorithm can often be overblown and anticlimactic.

Well, as Aleks Shklyar of iPullRank points out, the true Mobilegeddon is here. Mobile-friendliness isn’t just a ranking signal anymore - it’s a prerequisite. While the best time to start making sure your site is entirely mobile-friendly was five years ago, the next best time is right now.

Take advantage of Google’s free tools within Google Search Console and prioritize projects that address mobile-friendliness.

Taking A Consumer Approach To PPC Campaign Strategy

by Brian Frank for PPC Hero

Key Takeaways:

• When building your PPC campaigns, pay extra attention to the audience. Consider their goals, motivations, and needs to identify ways to improve your keyword mix and creative.

• With a focus on core audiences and consumers, the important thing is to identify the long-tail searches relevant to your customer’s intent and in their lexicon.

• To round it all out, align your intent-focused keywords with imagery and copy that addresses pain points and meets your customer where they are, based on their goals and motivations.

Why it Matters: 
This article walks through some important questions to ask when thinking about keyword research. I know everyone has opinions here, but the key takeaway is that, no surprise, knowing your audience is critical for building good campaigns.

It’s easy in paid search to get bogged into a systematic approach. We can identify keywords approximately in our target market, look at cost per click and volume, and say “good enough.” But, as this article encourages, we should dig deeper. If we focus on our audience first, our keyword sets, create, and calls to action let us speak their language.

Our campaigns become a means of understanding customer pain points and motivations. And that offers spillover benefits in trustworthiness and raw performance.

13 Tips for Writing Product Descriptions That Convert

by Himani Kankaria for Search Engine Journal

Key Takeaways:

• This article shares 13 tips to write more compelling, persuasive e-commerce product descriptions that actually convert.
• Some of our favorite tips include adding a "how to use" section to your product description, using social proof to build trust, and incorporating your brand story into your description.

Why it Matters: 

With consumerism moving online in droves, many businesses have had to quickly transition from brick + mortar to online. However, in-store and online shopping are often completely different experiences—online often requires more information up front since customers can't see or feel the product.

A standout product description has a simple role: answer its customers' most pressing questions to show how this product will help their life. If your descriptions succeed, they take the load off your customer service team and result in more sales. Win-win, eh?

The Content Commodity Trap

by Kevin Indig

Key Takeaways: 

• If content is easy to replicate, it’s a commodity, meaning you have to compete with others that have the same content, meaning you ultimately need to differentiate your content in some way.
• Not all content is a commodity, but it all lives on the commodity spectrum - from replicable content (like recipes and how tos) to truly unique and individual content. You should always be aiming to create truly unique content that serves a purpose.
• When you can’t differentiate the content you have from others, you need to be able to create an experience that creates a community - that means great UX and CX.

Why it Matters:
It’s easy to create content, especially top of funnel content, that relies heavily on high volume, commoditized content. However, it’s important to know that true traffic growth is not possible if you simply summarize what’s out there.

If you’re writing content that’s pretty boiler plate - say a hummus recipe for your recipe website - how are you going to supplement this piece with a piece of content that’s unique to you, fresh to the internet, and creates authority? Great organic content starts with a unique take, and scalable content hubs.

Google Warns Of Manual Actions For UGC Spam

by Roger Montti for Search Engine Journal

Key Takeaways: 

• Google recently published a blog post with recommendations for publishers to prevent their sites from being overrun by UGC spam.
• Google warns that sites with spammy, low-quality content might be hit with manual actions to remove or demote pages.
• If your site faces significant spam, consider taking steps like blocking auto account creation, moderating the content, or nofollowing / noindexing spam content.

Why It Matters:

Spam is the cosmic background radiation of the internet. It’s everywhere, and it’s annoying. This article signals that Google is taking action to address the issue, and we should be taking similar steps on our end.

If your site deals with UGC content like forums, guestbooks, hosting, or internal search services, we recommend you conduct an audit to hunt down spam and get ahead of any potential demotion from Google.

While they haven’t said when these actions will start happening regularly, there’s no time like the present to follow the tips outlined here and come up with a spam removal plan.

Other Interesting Stories:

• Language models like GPT-3 could herald a new type of search engine

• Google I/O 2021: horizontal integration and machine learning

• MUM: A new AI milestone for understanding information

Free Tool of the Month:

SEO Toolbelt

This month's free SEO tool is very meta: it's a directory to help you find free SEO tools! The SEO Toolbelt is an online platform organized in a way that makes it easy to find the right SEO tool for the job. We've linked to the free SEO tools section of the site but you can also find plenty of paid tools there as well. We hope you find it useful.