I get a lot of questions about ranking in Google’s mobile search results, i.e. What is the mobile SEO best practices for Google mobile ranking. I also see it discussed on many blogs. I want to try to address some of your options and some of the complications and issues. It is not as simple as one package for mobile friendly design being the same for everybody. It really depends on a lot of things (Are you tired of hearing that yet?).
A month after Google said they were going to make some big changes to their mobile search results that would cause a big drops for non-mobile friendly, some businesses saw no changes and a small amount of businesses saw some big rankings drop due non-mobile friendly sites.
Mobile Friendly Test
First, how do you check to see if your mobile site is friendly? Actually, if you just Google “Google mobile friendly test” it should take you to Google’s official automated mobile friendly checker. If a site is not mobile friendly, the tool will give you some suggestions. Keep in mind that this is an imperfect tool that misses some things. Frankly, I think they put it together quickly and sometimes it says things that do not make sense. Anyway, I have tested this site www.SEOembedder.com and can confirm this site is mobile friendly.
Is Your Traffic Mostly from Mobile Devices?
If you are missing a bunch of stuff that could be bad for you. Especially if a lot of your market uses mobile devices. For example, a locksmith definitely needs to have a mobile friendly site. I imagine a very large percentage of their traffic are people who are locked out of their house or car and are not going to use a desktop computer. All you have got is your smart phone in your pocket and your keys in your car. What are you going to do? You are going to search on your phone. I imagine that is a very high percentage, as opposed to maybe business to business consulting. I think that is more likely to be on a desktop.
Hopefully, you are tracking your current traffic and you can look at your analytics or whatever traffic tracking software you are using. The software will tell you what percentage of your visitors are using mobile devices.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Furthermore, there’s a new standard of mobile friendliness (as of mid 2016) that can give your site great benefits in mobile search results if you follow it: Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP. I’ve pasted a screenshot of the new carousel that your site can show up in if you have AMP pages setup. You get the little lightning bolt and can jump ahead in the search results. Pretty sweet stuff.
If your site is on WordPress, setting up AMP pages is much easier than on other types of content management systems (CMS).
Unfortunately, there is a broad definition for mobile SEO. Somebody who has a ten inch tablet with a mobile operating system is considered mobile. I do not think that is completely accurate despite being categorized that way in analytics software. There is such a wide variety of devices and screen sizes that it is hard to get your site to show perfectly on every device.
Have you seen a big decrease in traffic from mobile devices recently? Especially towards the beginning of May or the end of April in 2015. It does not necessarily hit everybody at once. If you have and your site is marked as not mobile friendly this is something you want to look into.
How do you make your site mobile friendly?
I would say there are three main options to make your site mobile friendly. These choices can very dramatically in cost depending on exactly where you are at right now and where you need to go.
1. Tweak your desktop site
If you already have WordPress and you do not want to spend too much money, you just want to check off some of those mobile friendly things that Google suggests. You can tweak your desktop site, increasing the space between links and make text bigger and more actions like that to make it easier to use on a mobile phone. You can check to see how it looks on your own phone and check it within the Google tool to see what you can do. This is going to be your least expensive option, unless you are wanting to get a full redesign, in which case it can still be relatively expensive.
2. Separate mobile site
If you have someone else do it it can cost a thousand dollars or more. Having a separate mobile site that redirects, this is actually very inexpensive. There is an inexpensive service like dudamobile.com (duda.co). They have plans starting at $14/month, which is very inexpensive considering getting a mobile website designer is going to probably cost you $1,000 or more.
Now, there are some serious downsides to having a separate mobile site. You have probably seen other sites where it redirects you to m.domain.com. It looks different than if you were on a desktop. Personally, I do not like this and it is bad for SEO. Google prefers mobile responsive over a separate mobile site because that way it is just one website and they do not have to index multiple websites and decide between the two which one to rank. If you have WordPress, setting up dudamobile will be very easy for you. You sign up, you install a plugin on your WordPress site, and it could take you five to fifteen minutes to do the whole process and now you have a separate mobile site.
There are likely going to be addition steps you might want to do to make it look better and to improve it, but that is an option if you are in a hurry and do not want to spend too much money.
3. Mobile responsive design
You can also do a mobile responsive design for mobile SEO. This can be very expensive. Hiring a mobile designer is extremely expensive. There are not a lot of people who specialize in this. It is extremely difficult because of all the different sizes of screens out there.
Mobile responsive is supposed to change the layout of the site depending on the screen size. There are hundreds if not thousands of different screen sizes, so it is impossible to get it right on everything. I usually try to pick the top ones, maybe the most popular couple of Android and iPhones to try to make it match best. You can maybe live with it if it does not look great on the tablet but does look great on the desktop and phone. Getting it perfect on everything is a bit of a balancing act. If you make it better on the tablet it can hurt how it looks on the phone or the desktop, so you are playing a bit of whack-a-mole.
There are some WordPress themes that are automatically set up to be responsive. The one I use I just have to check a box and it sets it up as responsive. In those cases it can be less expensive, but a the same time it is not as good as getting a custom mobile responsive theme. If you are going to try to build a custom mobile responsive theme on your site that is going to be very expensive, even if you have a simple site. And the bigger your site is, the more different types of layouts you need, the more expensive it is going to be.
Focus on Web Design for Mobile SEO?
However, I do not like people to spend too much money on web design because, generally speaking, web design does not really provide you with quite the return as SEO because making a pretty and awesome website does not do you a hill of beans good if no one is seeing it. If you got the best billboard and it is out in the desert, not even near a road, what good does it do? At the same time you want to make sure that Google has checked you off as mobile friendly and you want your site to look modern, especially if you market is heavily mobile. If your market uses mobile a lot and your site looks really bad on a mobile device, then it is going to cause ranking and conversion issues. That does not mean I do not want people spending any money on it. I just try to keep it as minimum as possible so you can move forward with the things that really provide the return, i.e., search engine optimization.
Leave a comment below to share your experience about mobile SEO!
