Becoming Compliant With The New Mobile Search Standards

increase in mobile devicesWhat the major search engines recently did was update their algorithm to become more mobile friendly. So if you’ve recently lost organic traffic and your website isn’t mobile compliant, you most likely don’t meet the new standards that they’ve set.

What’s known is that a certain percentage of sites did immediately update to be compliant, this post their announcement. Once you consider the massive number of sites listed in their search catalog, there were a significant number who did so.

What this also signifies is that the majority of sites are yet to make the transition to becoming mobile friendly. If your site happens to fall into this category, you need to make adjustments to what’s referred to as “mobilegeddon.”

For those who think that they’ve made the transition to become mobile friendly, doing so doesn’t necessarily mean it’s user-friendly to the user.

Know If Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly
Begin by testing your site on Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool… Click Here. Know that it will just test the specified page you address, and not the entire site, which is the same for their mobile algorithm.

So test your homepage URL first to see if it’s mobile friendly. If it’s not, then your entire site won’t be either. If it’s not mobile-friendly, then you need to find a mobile friendly solution. If it is, then there are always ways to improve it.

Choosing A Mobile-Friendly Solution
For mobile searches, the best solution for having a mobile site is a “responsive” Web design, which is also what Google recommends you use.

What responsive sites will do is detect the device that’s being used to access your website, whether it be a smartphone, tablet, or desktop, and will automatically align your site to fit the screen of the particular device being used.

It’s advised that you not use a separate dedicated mobile site along with a separate desktop site, this because you’ll end up managing multiple sites.

There may also be detection errors, such as faulty redirects going from mobiles to a desktop configured site, and desktops being redirected to a mobile site.

There’s nothing worse than searching on a mobile device and then landing on a desktop site. What a responsive site is able to do is serve the exact same content regardless of the device being used, so faulty redirects won’t be an issue.

Create Precise User-Centric Content
What Google detects are over 200 signals in their algorithm, this to determine what the best search results are that’s based on the keywords being searched. Your site being mobile friendly is just one signal.

Content is still king and a crucial component when attempting to rank well, especially in mobile search, where you need to provide your visitors with a superior user experience. Without relevant user centric content, Google won’t care if your site is mobile or not.

So a mobile site that’s well designed with easy navigation, this combined with high-quality usable content that’s relevant, is what will gain you high placement on the mobile search hierarchy.

Know Your Mobile Search Engagement And Conversion Rates
What you need to know are your exact search engagement and conversion metrics on your mobile site. Because it passes Google’s Mobile-Friendly test, doesn’t mean it’s user friendly.

Also know that their current mobile algorithm is specific just for smartphones, and not for tablets. So when analyzing your traffic data, just key in specifically on your smartphone users.

If your engagement along with the conversion metrics are favorable, then your site is user friendly as well.

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If the metrics aren’t as good as your desktop traffic, then your site may need a bit of tweaking to become more mobile user friendly.

Analyze Diagnose And The Correct Mobile User Experience
If your mobile friendly site currently has poor engagement, then it’s most likely because of the content. Mobile users are more strict and prompt when searching on mobile, so your content needs to be concise.

Your content most commonly isn’t what they’re searching for, or your responsive site might be loading too slow on certain mobile devices.

Regardless of the reasons why, it becomes a poor user-experience issue, resulting in you losing visitors and conversions.

In addition to analyzing your traffic data, what you can also use is Google’s Page Speed Insights tool… Click Here, which will instantly diagnose where your issues are.

Doing so helps you in determining if your site has speed issues when loading pages on mobile devices, along with the reasons why.

It will also tell you if your site has mobile usability issues, and will then offer solutions on how you can fix them.

Resubmitting Your Site In Google’s Index
Once your site is mobile and user friendly with relevant content, then resubmit your site to Google’s index again, requesting that their search engine spiders re-crawl your mobile sites URL.

You can do so… Click Here using the “Fetch – Submit – Index” feature that’s found in their Webmaster Tools.

Although Google will crawl all your new pages automatically, what this does is just expedites the process.

Always Be Tweaking To Improve
So what you should have is a fully responsive mobile site which passes their Mobile-Friendly Test, as well as passing their Page Speed Insights.

The site also has high quality content which your visitors are searching for, and wanting to engage with or read.

Then maintain and measure your mobile traffic’s engagement along with the conversion data, this to ensure that the site meets both the user and Google’s expectations, and then make improvements when needed.

Since the Internet landscape is constantly changing, realize that mobile is now a huge part of it. So what you always need to be doing is altering and complying, so you won’t be left behind.

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