IS YOUR WEBSITE TAKING ADVANTAGE OF GOOGLE’S LATEST MOBILE-FRIENDLY ALGORITHMIC UPDATES?WHAT IS LOREM IPSUM?
Google is infamous for its algorithmic updates and search index changes. You may be familiar with Google’s mobile-friendly algorithmic update that was unveiled in two rollout phases – the first in 2015 and the second in May of 2016.
In this update for website design, Long Island New York area business owners concerned about elevating website rankings hopefully paid attention, as the update was formulated to boost the search results of mobile-friendly pages and gauge how mobile-fast your website is (desktop speed is gauged too, but the focus in on mobile).
WHAT MAKES A PAGE MOBILE-FRIENDLY?
There are hundreds of factors that determine the rankings of your website and we pages, but major criteria include the following:
• Does it have small font sizes?
• Are the tap targets or links to your buttons too close together?
• Is the content readable?
• What is your (the site’s or page’s) viewpoint?
• Does your site or page provide a great user experience?
HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU’RE MOBILE-FRIENDLY?
The easiest way to know is checking to see if your pages have Google’s mobile-friendly label when you bring up live mobile searches. If you’re not sure what this label is, it’s simply a snippet of text under the URL on Google’s search page that says “mobile-friendly”, or you can check out Googles mobile ready test.
THE LATEST
Currently, many of the signals Google uses to rank your page are based on your desktop pages instead of on your mobile ones. So you could have a page that runs fast on desktop but slow on mobile, yet your mobile rankings aren’t affected.
In the coming months, Google hopes to update this so that mobile-specific page speed will become a factor, and desktop qualities will no longer be relied on.
Google’s Small Business blog recently announced a new tool for test mobile-friendliness: a new landing page that tests your business website’s page speed and mobile-friendliness for desktop AND mobile.
This should make testing much easier – you have one tool, not two: one for mobile-friendly testing and/or one for testing page speed.
The new tool will evaluate three aspects of your website.
• Mobile-friendliness
o The quality of a user’s experience while browsing your site from their mobile device
o Tappable buttons that work
o Easily navigable on a small screen
o The most important information should be front and center
• Desktop page speed
o How long it takes your page to load
o Depends not just on user’s web connection but also on the elements within your website pages
• Mobile page speed
o How long it takes your page to load
o Mobile customers will move on to another page if yours doesn’t load within 3 seconds
Google will email you a comprehensive report with all the relevant scores and details. You’ll get a score of between 0 and 100 for each of the 3 elements (mobile speed, mobile-friendliness, desktop speed), suggestions for improvement, and more to help maximize your site’s speed and effectiveness on both mobile and desktop.
Websites are fluid and Google likes to keep us on guard with new releases, so if you’re in need of website design, and you want to create an SEO-friendly site, Web Rocket Media are the experts, so call today!