If you operate a website you will almost certainly know by now that on Tuesday, 21st April, 2015, Google is going to make a massive change to the way it ranks websites. This change outranks both Panda and Penguin in
terms of its scale of impact on search results and comes down to one very important criterion: whether your website, landing pages, and blog are fully optimized for mobile.
Google announced the change in February and has done a thorough job ever since preparing marketers and website owners to predict how the change may affect their sites and search traffic. They said: ‘Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect
mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.’
If your site isn't fully optimised for mobile devices, you will likely see a reduction to your ranking on mobile searches. In this email, I'll walk through
the changes using some of Google's tools to help you prepare for it.
To determine your readiness, you'll want to start with Google's free assessment tool.
When you run your site on the tool, you'll get a quick assessment of whether your mobile rank will suffer as a result of the 21st April change. If your website is fully optimised for mobile, you'll get a success
message and a visual of how the Googlebot "sees" your website. Don’t worry if there are pages or resources which Googlebot can't "see"; this will be because you (or your web developer) have blocked them with a robots.txt file. That's deliberate, but it's good to know nevertheless.
If your website,
landing pages or blog are not ready for the mobile update, you'll get a failure message and a few pointed bullets on the reasons your content failed the test.
While it may seem as though you'll need to do a whole detailed redesign to fix each error, moving to a mobile
optimised content management system, blog, or landing page tool will fix most of them.
Ready to move on?
If any of your content isn't optimised for mobile, it's really important that you make some changes in light of the new algorithm. Even the best landing page in the world will see drastically diminishing returns after 21st April if it's not optimised for mobile.
To remedy the situation you have options. Google recognizes three different configurations as "mobile friendly." You can move your content to any of the following set-ups and be protected from the change.
1) Responsive Design
This is Google's recommended solution. The reason responsive design is so desirable is that it doesn't create two copies of the same site. Viewers only have one URL to go to and the website will adapt as they move from phone to tablet to desktop and beyond.
2) Dynamic Serving
Like responsive design, a dynamic serving approach keeps the same URL -- but this time, the HTML actually changes. Dynamic serving uses user-agents to "sniff" out what kind of device the viewer is using and then dynamically serves up the appropriate view. Google notes that this user-agent detection can be an error-prone technique, but it is an option that passes the Google mobile-optimization test.
3) Mobile Website
Creating a separate mobile website was one of the earliest versions of mobile optimization, and it
still works for Google's requirements. Upon a new user arriving, this configuration tries to detect the users’ device, then redirects to the appropriate website using redirects.
The reason this method isn't as recommended as responsive design is it requires you to maintain -- and Google to crawl -- two versions of your content. In addition, it can be a disruptive experience for
someone who accidentally clicks on the mobile link, possibly shared through social or email, while on a desktop computer.
Why is Responsive Design the Best Choice?
There are lots of reasons responsive makes sense as the best way to optimise your
site.
Website visitors like it: From a visitor's standpoint, responsive is pretty seamless. It's the same URL (address) and the same HTML (content) -- it just adapts and gets re-proportioned based on the viewer. That means if you email yourself a link from your phone and then reopen it on your desktop,
it's going to be a consistent experience either way.
Google likes it: From Google's standpoint, there are a few things responsive does really well. For starters, it saves resources when Googlebot crawls your site. Rather than crawling multiple sites, the Googlebot can go to one place which increases efficiency and helps Google index more content. It also helps
Google's algorithms more accurately assign indexing properties to a piece of content without needing to check two places.
Marketers and website owners like it: A responsive site requires less time to maintain because you don't have multiple pages for the same content. It also requires no redirection of users based to other URLs based on their device, which speeds up the load
time of your website -- and faster sites lead to more conversions.
So if you've used Google's free tool and found that your website isn't responsive (and we've come across some client sites that thought they were only to be disappointed) make the change to a responsive design as soon as you can.
We use Thrive Themes on all our sites (there are about six to choose from) and they have all passed Google's mobile friendly test, so they may be a good place to start. They have also got some brilliant lead generation tools which I will be writing to you about next
week.
Noel Guilford