Mobile Google Updates and What to Do About It

Intro

Google recently collected a ton of marketers together for their Google Marketing Live event. For anyone connected to a digital marketing professional on Linkedin, you probably heard about the event as well.

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Changes In-Effect for Google (but really, YOU).

Mobile search results have changed. In early May, Google announced that they would be doing a redesign by making it easier for a user to read more information and for the brand to be more recognizable. The real change is that there's more real estate on your phone to show more results. It's definitely an improvement. See for yourself here. The previous version is on the left, the new changes are on the right.

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You'll notice that the change here is showing a brand logo / icon with the paid and un-paid (organic) results. It does make the advertisement harder to distinguish.

So how do you stay on top of a change like this? What do you need to do to update your website to capture these changes?

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Define a Favicon to Show in Search Results

It's not as complicated as it sounds. But if you're not setup with a Google Webmaster account, you're at the mercy of Google's bot to crawl and index your site. Make sure your site is setup, it's relatively easy, but there are many agencies and freelancers that can help you get through the setup process.

According to Google, you'll need to have a favicon listed in the opening head of your site:

1. Follow Google's guidelines to create a favicon
2. Create and place a <link> tag in the header of your homepage. Using this syntax:
   
   <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/path/to/favicon.ico">
   rel can be any of the following strings:
   
   "shortcut icon"
   "icon"
   "apple-touch-icon"
   "apple-touch-icon-precomposed"
   
   href is the URL for the favicon. You can use a relative path like (/imagename.svg) or the absolute path like (https://domain.com/imagename.svg). It's important to note that Google stresses the image must be in the same domain as the homepage.
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3. Google will then update your favicon when it crawls your website. Making changes to your favicon? You'll need to resubmit the site to be indexed.

An important note: Google will not post anything inappropriate for an image used as a favicon.

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Conclusion

Ensure that you're monitoring your mobile results (even if you're not making this tiny adjustment). Google's changes will impact how your brand and content show up in search results.

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Additional Reading / Resources

Follow these links to get in-depth information on the topic discussed in this blog:

1) Google Marketing Live - Google's Blog Post

2) How to Define a Favicon for Google Search Results

3) Watch Google Marketing Live on Demand

4) Buying Linear TV Through Google 360

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