We’ve reached the half way point in our senior living SEO series. If you are joining us for the first time, don’t forget to skip back to week one so you don’t miss a thing!
This week we are moving on to talk about the need for speed, especially with regard to mobile.
We’ve all been there… you head over to Google in search of a new mailbox to replace the one the snow plow dude took out. Your list of results pops up, and you click one of the choices at the top of the search engine results.
Then you wait for the site to appear. And wait… and wait.
While it’s only been a few seconds, that’s like two hours in the digital world. So you jam on the back arrow and head down the list to find another choice.
That whole scenario makes the fine folks at Google a little crazy. They want search results that make people happy, and not those that send them back to look again.
You can check your speed by entering your site URL in to Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It will rate and analyze your site for both mobile and desktop platforms.
One other tool you can use (and it’s one our tech crew recommended because they think the Google tool is flawed) is pingdom. Tech folks say it is a more accurate indicator of website performance.
While our site was performing okay on a desktop, we were dragging a bit on mobile. It’s something we were worried about because Google is signaling mobile speeds are increasingly important to them. Pokey mobile sites like ours, are at risk of being penalized.
So we optimized the photo on our home page that was dragging things down. Now things are zipping along just fine.
Improving Senior Living SEO
In our case, we know part of the problem is that we have a large image that takes up all the space above the fold (the part of the site that you can see before starting to scroll down) on our home page. As much as we love the beautiful design, we need to resolve the mobile speed issue.
The good news is the Google tool makes it easy to analyze your speed. The bad news is the fix might not be easy or one you are too excited about making.
And that’s it for this tip on building senior living SEO. Next week is the final week of our series. If you don’t already do so, add your name and email address to the Subscribe box on the right side of this page so you receive our updates delivered directly to your Inbox a few times a month.