- In the year 2014, mobile search volume surpassed desktop search volume.
- Over the last 5 years, smartphones and mobile devices have dramatically influenced how we browse the internet. Statistically speaking, over 70% of online searches are done over mobile devices compared to a bleak 30% over desktop computers.
- Smartphone usage is also rapidly on the rise in developing countries such as Brazil, India, Indonesia and the African countries–in the year 2016, the developing countries contributed to about 108 million new smartphone users worldwide. These smartphone users define a huge, new market.
Google has always been aware of these new market opportunities and the large shifts in the consumer habits. So, it wasn’t much of a surprise when Google announced mobile-first approach testing in 2016. However, early this year, Google has started implementing its mobile-first algorithm and it’s now crunch time to optimise your websites to the latest SEO requirements if you wish to avoid a dip in your site’s performance.
Here are a few simple steps to get you started:
1. Ensure Responsiveness Of Your Website
Ensure adaptive designs for your websites–starting from the smallest screen, work your way to the larger screen sizes. This approach ensures that the small screen versions of your website have only the essential features and ensures the UX is optimised for all small-screen devices. Therefore, redesign your websites and transition to a responsive site ASAP.
2. Maintain Mobile Versions Of All Pages
Ensure the mobile version of your website contains all the pages with all the content and functionality of the desktop version because Google search will be ranking your site based on the mobile version database. This means that having a great desktop site is of no use if you do not maintain a similar mobile version.
3. Ensure Your Site Is Mobile-friendly
Test your website on different mobile devices and operating systems to ensure responsiveness of your site. A great way to approach this parameter is by keeping a close eye on the Google analytics user-engagement metrics and watch out for high bounce rates, lower session durations or fewer conversions on particular devices.
4. Take Inventory Of All Directives
The fundamental of the new algorithm is not just about catering to mobile users. It’s about enhancing the user experience and ensuring the user finds what he/she is looking for easily within the shortest time period possible. This means that irregularities of on-site directives and redirections are absolutely unacceptable. So, test your site using a website crawler and clean out ‘no-index’ directives, remove incorrect meta tags, update missing meta tags and any fix any irregular on-page redirects.
5. Review Your Website Server Responses
Similar to the directives, optimise your server responses by removing 404 pages, fixing broken links and ensuring redirect chains transition directly to the destination page.
6. Maintain A Good Page Speed
When a user opens your site on a mobile device you have less than 3-5 seconds to load your page. Any delay beyond this and you will lose about 53-75% of your visitors. And as Google is serious about improving the user experience for mobile users, sites that do not load quickly and incur high bounce rates are soon likely to be penalised. So, ramp up your page speed to avoid getting in a pickle.
Quick Takeaway
If your mobile site does not serve the purpose of popular search queries, your desktop website–however excellent–is almost obsolete in value. While the above-given list is not exhaustive, abiding by the points will help you cross off the bare minimum required to survive the mobile-first Google algorithm. For a competitive edge in organic searches, Carmatec Global– a Online marketing company in dubai–offers a focused approach to various SEO elements, while keeping up with the latest standards and trends. Get in touch with one of our SEO Experts today!
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