Mobile Friendliness and Search
Posted on Friday, June 30, 2017 at 12:23 AM
Tailoring your website to meet the evolving needs of mobile searchers
and get priority ranking on search engines.
By William
Dunkerley
If you benefit from online searches that bring
prospective subscribers to your publication, it's time to rethink
mobile. Increasingly, search activity is being dominated by mobile. An
absence of mobile friendliness can put you at great disadvantage.
Last
November, Search Engine Land reported: "Google begins
mobile-first indexing, using mobile content for all search rankings." SEL
is an online news site that covers search engine optimization issues. It
explains that "if you're not mobile-friendly, that will have an impact
even on how you appear for desktop searchers."
Are You
Mobile Friendly?
Google has a tool for analyzing how mobile
friendly your site is. You can check your publication by clicking here.
We
tried the tool on a several publications, with these results:
New
York Times -- "Page is not mobile friendly"
Interior
Design -- "Page is mobile friendly"
American Banker
-- "Page is mobile friendly"
Woodshop News -- "Page
is not mobile friendly"
(We must confess that STRAT
did not pass this test either!)
Another dimension of mobile
friendliness is download time. Readers may approach a site with a
variety of connection speeds and device capabilities. There is an online
tool to tell you how your site performs. It estimates how many visitors
are lost due to loading time. Click here.
We
retested the above publications with this tool. Here are the results:
New
York Times -- 19 percent
Interior Design -- 24 percent
American
Banker -- 32 percent
Woodshop News -- 26 percent
(On
this test, STRAT's visitor loss was reported simply as "low."
Mobile-First
Google Index
Google is developing a new search index that
places mobile first. Reports vary about the exact characteristics of the
index and on when it will be completely implemented. But there seems to
be little doubt that it is coming.
How to get ready for it?
Writing in Forbes magazine, AudienceBloom CEO Jayson DeMers
offers these recommendations:
--"Ensure full mobile compliance.
First, if you haven't yet, make sure you have a fully functioning mobile
version of your site -- preferably by using a responsive design on your
site that automatically flexes based on the device used to access it.
--"Ensure
equivalence between desktop and mobile. If you do end up using a
separate mobile version of your site, you'll want to ensure complete
equivalence between your two versions. Make your mobile version your
'primary' version, and ensure it's always updated first in future
revisions.
--"Consider app development. Though mobile-first is
focused on mobile sites, not apps, it's worth it to consider developing
an app for your business, as I predict Google's mobile focus will likely
lead the company to broader app favoritism (along the lines of app
streaming) in the near future."
More Tips
There's
even more to facing the challenges of mobile search. TREKK's Sarah
Mannone, writing in Target Marketing, offers:
--"Those
with responsive sites, where content and markup is the same across
mobile and desktop, will have the advantage. But even then, you may need
to adjust to accommodate mobile searchers. Today, voice search makes up
almost 20 percent of searches. And the words they use are typically
different than what they might type into a browser. That may make you
want to research your SEO approach.
--"We've all seen these giant
pop-ups that display an offer, ask you to download an app or sign up for
an e-newsletter. They're easily dismissed on the desktop, but when
translated to the smaller mobile screen they can be downright annoying.
For 2017, Google made it clear that mobile sites that continue to show
intrusive interstitials could see their search rankings drop. What
Google doesn't want to see is pop-ups that cover the main content,
making it inaccessible to the user. Exceptions are legal notices, like
cookie usage or age verification, and login screens for paid services
--"It
used to be that Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) was only
necessary for e-commerce or sites that store highly sensitive
information. To increase the security and privacy of all its searchers,
Google has recommended that every site use this more secure protocol.
Today, it uses it as a ranking factor signal, which means your ranking
could get a bump if you have it. This year Chrome began putting 'not
secure' warnings in the URL browser bar."
What Else?
It's
important to keep in mind that as the search industry proceeds in
catering more to the increasing demands of mobile searchers, it is still
feeling its way along. What's unknown is exactly how search users will
react to these changes.
For instance, we've seen pushback to the
Chrome "not secure" warnings. Apparently they have caused confusion
among a number of searchers who mistakenly interpret them as a "don't go
there" signal.
This all means that planned initiatives and
directions may change course based on how the market reacts. For
publishers it means that we need to be poised to act with agility in
order to succeed no matter what lies ahead.
William Dunkerley
is principal of William Dunkerley Publishing Consultants, www.publishinghelp.com.
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