Google has developed a lot of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) algorithms, hummingbirds, pandas, and penguins. Most Google algorithm updates come without any notice. The latest big change from Google is the mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal for SEO (there are almost 200 signals). Here is an exact quote from the announcement. “Starting April 21, 2015, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.””. Google also mentioned “users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.” Moreover Google said, “Starting today, we will begin to use information from indexed apps as a factor in ranking for signed-in users who have the app installed. As a result, we may now surface content from indexed apps more prominently in search”. How does one prepare for this major Google SEO update ? First, ensure your website is mobile friendly.
What is a mobile-friendly website ? It is a website that is easily rendered in a manner that is easily readable on mobile devices, such as smartphones, iPhones, iPads and tablets. Your website must be designed in such a way that it must be easy to navigate and all the features must be easy to access and readable. Mobile internet users are growing much faster compared to desktop/laptop users. In the United States, 94% of people with smartphones search for local information on their phones. Interestingly, 77% of mobile searches occur at home or at work, places where desktop computers are likely to be present. Google developers recommend that websites must be responsive as it will increase the duration that users spend on the site and improve SEO.
Google indicates that mobile friendliness will:
- Be used as a ranking signal,
- Have significant impact on search results,
- Will impact all sites worldwide in all languages.
- If the desktop and mobile version of a site are treated as separate entities (www. and m.), both desktop and mobile URLs can be shown in desktop search results, and their ranking may be lower than if Google understood their relationship to each other.
Making sure your site is in compliance with Google’s preference, or that the annotation is correct, is crucial in maintaining ranking. Contact us to get help now at 619-567-9322 or contact us here.
Preparing for the Google Mobile Friendliness Update : Mobile Version or Responsive Design
To get started with, you can use Google’s
mobile friendly testing tool and mobile usability reports. You can also go through Google’s mobile friendly guidelines and SEO tips which are mentioned below:
Google may have declared the update early; however it hasn’t precisely been approaching with points of interest. Webmaster trends analyst Gary Illyes did offer a couple of subtle elements in his latest Q&A.
Most Importantly:
- Googlebot must be permitted to crawl CSS & JavaScript to pass the “mobile friendly” test.
- Responsive Design does not have a ranking advantage.
- Tablets won’t be influenced by this update
- Mobile friendliness is determined at the page level – not sitewide
- Google is presently working on a committed mobile indexing
Using a Mobile Version :
Pros
- Cost – Lower cost upfront based on a module/template that can be customized easily
- Time – Faster to develop/design
- Page Speed – Mobile sites load fast since they have less features and are light on graphics
Cons
- Maintaining multiple websites – mobile version and desktop version
- SEO for multiple websites can be more cost/time consuming
- Branding and Marketing for multiple sites will require more cost/time
- User experience – May not deliver the best user experience for all mobile devices – a tablet/Ipad user vs a smartphone/Iphone user
Responsive Web Design : (Recommended)
Pros
- One User experience – Deliver the best user experience for all types of devices Tablet, desktop, Smartphones
- One website leads to easier branding, marketing, maintenance
- One SEO Campaign – one website SEO campaign will save you a lot of cost/time
Cons
- Higher cost upfront to design, develop all the features of your website with responsive web design
- Speed optimization will require extra effort to ensure graphics load fast
- Requires technical staff and is more complex
Preparing for Future Google Mobile Friendly SEO Updates:
Once your website passes the Google Mobile-Friendly test, what’s next ? Regardless of the fact that your site measures up today, there’s no guarantee that it will be in compliance with future Google SEO algorithm updates. Staying on top of mobile search trends is important. Mobile web designs may not be completely perfect with future devices or browsers. Responsive sites will undoubtedly have the capacity to work with more mobile/tablet devices and desktop/laptop browsers after the initial one time investment.
Solution: Other Considerations to Get Ready for Google’s Mobile Friendly Search Update:
Here are the 3 suggestions to start reviewing and optimizing your mobile web search presence. While following these steps, you will give the best user experience to your mobile users:
1. Recognize & Improve Your Mobile Web Optimization Status:
Regardless of the fact that you have a Mobile friendly site, its vital to go deeper by doing a Mobile search engine optimization review so Google can accurately recognize and serve your mobile content. Begin by approving your site with Google’s Mobile Friendly test tool, verifying the site assets, for example, pictures, CSS, JS are additionally crawlable.
For comparative experiences, you can likewise see the Google Webmaster Tools mobile usability report, which will alarm you to different Mobile usability issues, for example, the utilization of Flash, despicably measured content, and touch components that are excessively near one another.
Check Google Webmaster Tools’ Crawl Errors report and select the “smartphone” tab to distinguish if Google’s smartphone crawler has found any issues while crawling your website. For instance:
- How did the Googlebot smartphone crawler find these errors?
- Are you blocking important areas of your sites that should be crawled and indexed instead?
- Are your pages not being found, returning soft-404s or 404s?
- From which pages and XML sitemaps are they being linked or referred?
Identify the sources of these crawling issues, making a point to unblock or block as required and abstain from linking or referring to non-existing pages. Use the fetch as Google feature in Webmaster Tools and select the “Mobile Smartphone” option to see how Google’s smartphone crawler observes most important web pages. Ask yourself:
- Is it getting to one side form, or would it say it is being diverted to a non-relevant page?
- Is the content on website accessible?
- Are the important & relevant SEO elements, for example, the title and Meta tags of every webpage, being found?
- Are the site pages set up accurately (http status, counting the applicable annotations, user agent recognition and so on.) in view of your selected mobile website configuration?
Carry out this web analysis on a site-wide by using crawling tools like DeepCrawl or Screaming Frog, which lets you to choose the smartphone Googlebot as your user agent.
Site Speed is an alternate vital optimization consideration, as this is a ranking factor for both mobile and desktop websites. Utilize Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check for page speed issues on your mobile website.
You can likewise utilize the Speed Suggestions report in Google Analytics (under Behavior > Site Speed) with a mobile propelled portion to distinguish any speed issues on the pages with the great number of mobiles online visits and organize page speed optimization for these pages.
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2. Review Your Mobile Traffic Behavior and Web Search Visibility:
Distinguish the top queries and pages in Mobile search with the “Mobile” filter of the Search Queries report with Google Webmaster Tools.
At the point when seeing this report, attempt to focus on the following points:
- Are your mobile users looking for the same data in the same path as your desktop clients?
- Which queries have a high click-through rate(CTR) in-spite of not being in the first positions?
- Which ones have a low CTR in-spite of ranking admirably?
- Which search queries and pages are trending on the top in rankings and traffic? Which are moving downwards?
- Are the top queries and pages in Mobile same as those in desktop, or they they are diverse?
Further your comprehension of Mobile search visibility and user behavior by checking your Mobile traffic in Google Analytics with a mobile organic advanced segment.
Analyze this report to find:
- What are the top pages from the conversions perspective or Mobile organic traffic?
- What are those with lower conversion rate and a higher than normal bounce rate?
Utilize Google Analytics Mobile report (under Audience) to recognize the top Mobile phones used by your users. At that point, check how the pages with the highest Mobile site visits — and those that you had beforehand related to the most Mobile indexed visibility – are seen from your users most well known Mobile phones by copying them with Chrome’s Developers Tools Device Mode.
Do likewise by searching for the top queries providing you mobile search results visibility to see how your pages are shown in mobile search results, as well as to discover which are your top mobile search competitors?
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3. Establish Your Mobile Web Search Competitiveness & Monitor Your Performance
Utilize tools like SearchMetrics, SimilarWeb SEMrush, or Sistrix to find the keywords for which your mobile search competitors are ranking, and utilize this data to distinguish more potential keywords to target.
(SimilarWeb furthermore provides a “Mobile Web Traffic” report that you can utilize to confirm the level and trend of mobile visits to your competitors’ site vs. your own.)
When you’ve compile a list of keywords your competitors are ranking for then you can consolidate them with the keywords from your top mobile search queries report in Google Webmaster Tools to create a master list of keywords.
Later on, divide these keywords into categories and perform keyword research with the Google Keyword Planner. Besides proposing potential new mobile keywords, the Keyword Planner permits you to view “Mobile Trends” and see a “Breakdown by Device,” which will provide for you a thought of Mobile search volume and trends over time. This information will permit you to organize the keywords with the most astounding potential. Once you are aware of what keywords to focus on, it’s time to start monitoring and tracking your progress.
Using a ranking tool that supports mobile rank tracking (such as SEMrush position tracking feature or Advanced Web Ranking), keep track of where you and your competitors stand with the valuable keywords you’ve identified — those that are already bringing the highest mobile search visibility along those with the highest potential with a rank tracking tool that supports mobile rankings.
Image Credits: searchengineland.com
Another recommendation is to setup custom alerts in Google Analytics to automatically notify you of ranking changes of your organic traffic via mobiles phones.
Another recent important update from Google is the ability to index Mobile app content through an application programming interface (API) called the Google Mobile App Indexing API. Google’s Mobile App Indexing API lives up to expectations distinctively in that designers tell Google of where content lives inside their application and what URL that content associates to on their site. Google then has the alternative of sending visitors to view the content on a Web page or inside the application.
Google’s Mobile App Indexing API is all the more about helping users explore to content it thinks about profound inside an application, rather than Google utilizing the API to find and dissect new content it didn’t know existed. As such, Google is going to have a truly hard time making sense of whether your application’s content ought to outrank a competitor’s Web page, however if Google realizes that the content on your website outranks a competitor’s, its glad to direct a user to peruse the content on your app rather than your own website, in light of the fact that it’s a superior experience.
Google’s App Indexing API may change the discussion of what genuine app SEO is and how it will develop. Rather than simply optimizing the title and description of an application’s listing in the Mobile app store, now we can really discuss enhancing the content inside the application itself. It will be as though a big SEO reset button has been pushed, as Google starts breaking down application main ranking factors. There will be new strategies, metrics, tools and reports. From multiple points of view, its the start of another era of SEO.
The Bottom Line:
Make your website user-friendly/Mobile friendly, updated with fresh content, relevant and useful to your target audience to achieve your best ranking in Google organic search results.
Making sure your site is in compliance with Google’s preference, or that the annotation is correct, is crucial in maintaining ranking. Contact us to get help now at 619-567-9322 or contact us here.
