Rankings Getting Harder Without A Mobile-responsive Website
We’ve written a heck of a lot about the need for a mobile-responsive website recently, but it’s starting to get serious. Before you read any further, take a quick look at the statistics on the website example used here. This is one of our clients and illustrates the traffic for a desktop-only site. They get more traffic from mobile devices than desktop. This is a case that we are seeing in client’s traffic time and
We’ve written a heck of a lot about the need for a mobile-responsive website recently, but it’s starting to get serious.
Before you read any further, take a quick look at the statistics on the website example used here. This is one of our clients and illustrates the traffic for a desktop-only site. They get more traffic from mobile devices than desktop. This is a case that we are seeing in client’s traffic time and time again. You must act. Anyway, back to the main topic.
In a recent blog post Yoshikiyo Kato, a Google mobile search team programmer, and Pierre Far, a Webmaster trends analyst, said “To improve the search experience for smartphone users and address their pain points, we plan to roll out several ranking changes in the near future that address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users.”
They go on to say that they will be weighing sites down in rank if they have errors like:
Unplayable Videos Or Missing Content
This error is very common where Flash has been used on a site, because it’s not viewable on Apple products like iPad or iPhone, nor many Android operating systems either.
Faulty Redirects
If you are running a separate mobile site, having search results direct all mobile users to the home page of the mobile site, rather than the specific page of content that search relates to.
Irrelevant Content or Crosslinking
This is when a page on a separate mobile site is supposed to have content on a particular subject, let’s say a bus timetable for a specific suburb, but instead redirects the user to a General page.
Load Times
Mobile pages must be optimised to show lower-bandwidth content than a desktop site mainly due to slower connection speeds of mobile devices, especially above-the fold content i.e the first screen or two of content seen by the user. It is important to note here though that it’s not only the bandwidth, but due to higher variable latency of mobile networks that you should reduce the number of round trips to the server which will make the world of difference to your mobile site loading.
For more in-depth analysis of how your website performs on mobile devices talk to us today.
Next we will take a look at what your website stats are telling you about your mobile audience.
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