Google made significant changes to their search algorithm last week to make mobile key to SEO. From now on, your search ranking looks at how optimised your website is for mobile devices and penalises sites that are not up to scratch.
Since this change came into place we’ve seen a few issues creeping up. Websites that rely on organic search traffic, or use Adwords for PPC & Display Advertising, have seen sharp drops in traffic because their sites are not good enough on mobile.
This includes sites that are already responsive. There are a whole load of invisible things that will drag your site down, so even if it already looks great on a smaller screen it doesn’t mean it’s optimised.
This leaves anyone that cares about traffic to their site asking two things:
- Is my site optimised for mobile?
- If not, what can I do about it?
Is my site optimised for mobile?
If you’re concerned about your mobile optimisation, you don’t have to give your card details over to some rogue consultant to perform a ‘mobile website health check’ or any other dark magic.
Google have gone and made a tool that does it for you, in a way that’s easy to understand, right in front of you, for nothing. Good old Google.
You can find it here. Just type in your domain name, hit enter and then laugh or cry depending how close to 100 you get.
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What can I do to optimise my site for mobile?
There are a number of things you can do to optimise your site for mobile devices – and Google will let you know all the ones that apply to you – but these are the most common issues that we actually find make the biggest difference with our clients:
Have a single URL, responsive website.
Make sure you combine your mobile and desktop sites into a single responsive website. This is Google’s prefered set-up for ranking your site, and it also stops you diluting your ranks across two (or more) sites.
Make the UI mobile friendly.
Make sure everything is readable – if you need to zoom you’re doing it wrong – and if something is clickable make sure it’s big enough to tap with your thumb and not overlapping other clickable stuff. Also, avoid any technology that isn’t mobile friendly. Yes, Flash, we’re talking to you.
Serve optimised images and compressed resources.
The site should only send image files as big as the screen requesting them is going to show. A lot of sites use way more bandwidth than they actually need by downloading full sized images – even on a tiny mobile screen – and leaving the device to then shrink them down.
Prioritise content loading.
Make sure the actual content of the page isn’t blocked and stuck loading behind a queue of mammoth scripts or other resources. Make things load together or, if you can, defer the scripts to load after the content.
Use compact and efficient code.
Old or template based sites often have heaps of useless ‘fat’ in the code slowing things down. Things like unused plug-ins, duplicate or redundant code – they often sit just before the content, eating bandwidth and decreasing the page-load time for no purpose or benefit whatsoever.
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