If you have a website and take even a marginal interest in its performance, you’ve probably heard about Google’s recent announcement that they will be taking websites’ mobile responsiveness into account when ranking.
Starting April 21, 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.
Mobile-Friendliness: What Does It Mean?
When you visit a website on your phone, does it scale to fit the device? Does the video work on your iPad or Android tablet? If it does, it’s mobile-friendly. I would be delighted to say this is the end of the story, but the fact is that there are degrees of mobile-friendliness, and Google is considering a great many factors in its ranking algorithms.
To find out if your website is mobile-friendly, you can simply type the URL in Google’s Mobile Friendly Test page: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
Here are some factors that will cause a website to fail the mobile-friendly test:
- It uses software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
- You have to zoom in to read the text
- It does not resize content to fit the screen, so users have to scroll horizontally or zoom
- Links are so close together that it is not easy to tap the correct one
What Next?
So if you passed the mobile-friendliness test in the link above, fantastic! You may still have a few things to work on, though. One of the most important things is to ensure that you don’t have any faulty redirects. This can happen when you use a separate URL for your mobile website than you do for your regular website… for example, m.yourwebsite.com versus just yourwebsite.com. You’ve probably experienced the frustration of a faulty redirect before. You might search for a restaurant’s website on your cellphone, and click the link to see their menu, and then get redirected to the mobile website’s homepage. Annoying!
Other common issues worth fixing:
Blocked JavaScript, CSS and image files: This means getting rid of any robots.txt files that block Google from crawling your images, CSS, or JavaScript files.
Unplayable content: This is generally Flash content that won’t play on a mobile device.
Mobile-only 404s: This means you should have a mobile version of every page that’s on your desktop site—more on that in a moment.
App download interstitials: This refers to those annoying popups that say “Would you like to download the Yelp app?” when you’re just trying to get some information on the website! Fortunately, these are now being penalized by Google.
Irrelevant cross-links: Again, this means you really ought to have a mobile version of every page on your desktop site. Have you ever tried to get to one page on a mobile site only to be redirected to a totally irrelevant page… even when you know for a fact that it’s available on the desktop version of the site? Yeah, that’s an irrelevant cross-link.
Slow mobile pages: People want mobile pages to load quickly. Welcome to Obviousville.
If You Didn’t Pass Google’s Mobile-Friendliness Test…
You CAN get a mobile version of your site. One option is to use a third-party service like DudaMobile or GoMobi. These are both perfectly fine solutions, and in fact we have used them for clients. But the more customization you want—and you can do quite a bit of customization!—the further you get from being able to easily maintain your web content. Unless you set up DudaMobile or GoMobi to mirror everything on your desktop website, then you have to manually update your mobile site whenever there’s a change to the equivalent content on your desktop site. And there’s the issue of the mobile redirects. All of these services use mobile redirects—like m.yourwebsite.com—instead of yourwebsite.com. And we think Google is moving in the direction of penalizing these mobile redirects in the future. In 2013, there started to be murmurings about this. If you can avoid a mobile redirect, we think you should.
And the best way to avoid a mobile redirect is to get your website set up to serve elegantly degraded versions of your website for each device. We’re currently doing quite a bit of work creating stylesheets for websites we designed a few years ago, before everyone started viewing websites on mobile devices. Whether the platform was Joomla or WordPress or even a static HTML website, we’re able to add code that allows your website to look great on any device. By having a custom stylesheet developed, you can pick where you want each element to display, or if you want it to display at all. By far, this option allows you the most flexibility.
If your site isn’t mobile-friendly and you’re worried about SEO… don’t panic. The ultimate trick to getting a good search engine ranking is to provide great, relevant content that people (not computers) actually want to read. If you’re doing this already—fantastic! If not, strongly consider adding a blog to your website, where you can continuously add new content that applies to your subject area and attracts both search engine bots and, most importantly, real humans. And, as always, if you need help making your website mobile-friendly, or improving your search engine recognition, we are here to help.
