“Mobile is exploding,” said every headline for the last decade. Google is all about traffic and mobile is both largest segment of traffic, as well as the fastest growing!
Google’s search results will be based on the mobile versions of web pages, including the results that are shown to desktop users. This is even if your prospects are primarily using desktop (if you are in manufacturing and a few other industries), desktop drives most of your actual conversions, or maybe you just like the look of your desktop site better.
Up to now, Google has been indexing web pages as desktop browsers see them. With the new ‘mobile first’ approach, Google will start indexing web pages as mobile phones see them. The rankings will be calculated based on the mobile results.
Google says there will be minimal rankings changes, but this is a pretty major announcement. It is likely that mobile-friendly sites will see minimal ranking changes, but mobile unfriendly sites are likely to see an increasing loss of visibility. Looking at your website’s rankings in Google’s mobile search results gives an indicator of whether your site is vulnerable to losing traffic and here are some important tips to make sure:
1. Check your mobile rankings, check your risk
Looking at your website’s rankings in Google’s mobile search results gives an indicator of whether your site is vulnerable to losing traffic. It’s only an indicator, however: Google is basing mobile rankings to some extent on crawls of the Desktop version of your site. So better keep reading…
2. Be accessible
Some sites hide content behind popups / interstitials. Google is specifically planning on penalizing intrusive popups on January 10, 2017. If you have an email subscription popup or survey layer, you may be penalized. And we all experience frustration with those ads that come up when we are trying to read a news article. Some vendors, such as Ometrics have been on top of this since the day of Google’s announcement! Make sure all of your vendors are.
If you have a separate mobile site, make sure it is crawlable and be sure to register it in Google Search Console! Old best practices – blocking the duplicate content on a mobile version of your site – could potentially kill your traffic.
3. Be responsive
Responsive mobile design allows for the best (compromise of) user experience across the many mobile, tablet and desktop displays. It adapts the page, and allows a single URL for mobile and desktop versions of the site. If you haven’t changed to responsive mobile design, ask us for a list of great web designers.
4. Be fast
Speed on mobile is quite important. Research has shown that 40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Wireless internet connections are usually not nearly as fast as wired connections that desktop users experience. Optimizing image file sizes and resolutions hasn’t been this important since the days of the modem.
5. Don’t mess up AMP
Staying ahead of the curve takes advantage of the greatest opportunities: Being the first among your competitors to implement mobile-friendly, mobile responsive, schema and AMP creates traffic. The period in which your site is in Google’s favor – and competitors are playing catch-up – can mean serious revenue.
With these 5 tips, you will be ahead of the pack (for a short while). As Google implements more changes, search is likely to keep changing at a breakneck pace. Watch your indexing, ranking, traffic and conversion to keep ahead of the curve.
Oh and PS: Bing will still use Desktop crawling to determine mobile rankings.