Will Your Google Rankings Tank if You Change your Company Name?

Transcript from Video:

Hi, I’m Geoff from Leapfrog Internet Marketing. This Vlog answers the question “Will your Google rankings tank if you change your company name?” So, let’s take your website. Let’s take a website called Elle Courbee. Let’s say you have this website and you want to change your name for whatever reason, you wanna have a rebrand or you don’t like the name. And so you’re thinking about changing the name and then more importantly, for search engine optimization changing the domain. So, you’re thinking about moving this website from ellecourbee.co.uk and putting it on let’s say elledoorbay.co.uk. How does this impact your Google rankings?

Well, first of all, if you don’t have any Google rankings and many websites don’t, then you don’t need to worry about the SEO implications. You can just change your domain and it won’t be a problem. But for this particular website, for example, Elle Courbee, tummy control corset it’s on page one of Google. So, it’s getting traffic and it’s getting sales from Google. If that was then switched and that website moved from ellecourbee.co.uk to elledoorbay.co.uk, what would happen? Well, 60% of the reason why that website is on Google page one is to do with backlinks coming to the website. And if you look at the data, the current domain enjoys about 400 links coming to it whereas if you buy a brand new domain for the new name Elledoorbay, it has zero.

And so in effect of that power from the links which accounts for 60% of that ranking, it would have dropped down to zero. And therefore, it will just disappear on Google page one. And you can see some of the other websites are also on page one and how many links they have. So, the problem with switching to a brand new domain is it has no links, is in effect your starting back from zero. You can add links over time and build back to a page one position. That could take months if not years to do. So, I’d just take care if you’re enjoying page one Google rankings for the moment from your website. Think very carefully before moving your website to a brand new domain. If you’ve got any questions, let me know.

Why Google Has Changed the Meta Description Again

Transcript from Video:

Hi. I’m Geoff from Leapfrog Internet Marketing. Why Google has changed the meta description again. So just as a reminder, the meta description is normally a two-line description that is below the meta title in the search results and the URL. It’s not actually a ranking factor anymore, but it’s worth writing it because it’s a mini sales pitch to someone who’ll potentially click on your website. So for donkeys it was around 160 characters, around two lines of text, and then back in December 2017 Google quickly was showing sometimes three lines of text or it is sometimes even four lines, up to 320 characters including spaces.

So the SEO industry started writing longer, four-line, 320-character meta descriptions, and then in the last month basically, that line has now dropped back down. And it really depends, Google will serve up a meta description on mobile that is on average around 130 characters, and for desktop, around 160 characters. And so what do you do? What length meta description do you write? We feel the best thing to do now would be to write a four-line meta description, a 320-character one, and treat it as a mini sales pitch, just right for the human being. And as Google now confirmed, the vast majority of meta descriptions that show in a search result are not taken from the meta description. Google is using machine learning more and more to actually take bits from the page content.

So they may use your meta description, but more than likely they’ll use content from your website. So I think the take-home is, write a long meaty meta description but at the end of the day Google may not use it. If you’ve got any questions, please let me know. Thanks.

How Writing a Longer Meta Description Can Boost your Google Rankings

Transcript from Video:

I’m Geoff Roy from Leapfrog Internet Marketing. This is about how writing a longer meta description can actually boost your Google rankings. So back in December 2017 Google announced that the meta description is going up from 160 word characters to 320 characters. Google’s original advice was actually “do not change your meta descriptions”. They would create those longer meta tags themselves.

But we feel there’s…we really recommend that people should extend their meta descriptions to the full 320 characters. The reason’s quite simple. This is a meta description here with 320 characters and this is the one with 160 characters. And you’re just occupying more space on Google page one and you’re gonna get more click-throughs. You’re just occupying much more space on page one.

And at the end of the day if you’re getting more clicks you’ll get a higher click-through rate and we believe that if you’re getting more clicks than the competition above and below you, Google will sense that people prefer your website and will actually improve your rankings. So we’d recommend definitely extend your meta descriptions. We’ve changed some and within a couple of days they’ve gone live on Google page one. If you’ve got any questions let me know. Thank you.

Does Google Prefer Long or Short Blog Posts?

Transcript from Video:

Hi, I’m Geoff from Leapfrog Internet Marketing. This is a quick video on “Does Google Prefer Long or Short Blog Posts?” So, if you’re thinking about writing your blog content, putting all that lovely content on there, how many words should you be writing? Should it be 300 words? Should it be 900 words? Should it be 2,000 words? Read more

Why is the Mobile First Google Update Important

Words from Video:

Hi. I’m Geoff from Leapfrog Internet Marketing. This is to answer “Why is the Google mobile-first update important?” So, if we go back in time back to, I think, the 21st of April 2015, Google launched what was #mobilegeddon, and this was their mobile-friendly update. And what this did really was…it penalized your website if it wasn’t mobile-friendly or responsive. Read more

Why Top 3 on Google Page 1 is So SO Important

Video Transcript:

I’m Geoff from Leapfrog Internet Marketing. This is looking at why getting in the top three on Google page one is so, so important. Let’s take a search term for “vets in Fleet,” and at the moment, we’re ranked seventh on page one. Okay, so if you do a search for “vets in Fleet,” you have the rankings coming down here, and let’s say we’re in seventh position. So, if we take that 7th position here for every 100 searches, we will get 2.6, so let’s say 3 clickthroughs to our website. Read more