Does your mobile site suck? It’s better not to have one at all!

Last week Google announced via the Webmaster Central Blog some new ranking changes it’s making to smartphone search results-that is, the search results you see whenever you perform a Google search on your phone. Here’s the most important part of the announcement:

“To improve the search experience for smartphone users and address their pain points, we plan to roll out several ranking changes in the near future that address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users.”

Translation: Google will begin penalizing mobile sites that provide a bad user experience-including yours, if it’s not configured properly! Mobile sites with faulty redirects, incorrect usage of Googlebot-Mobile, unplayable videos, and other common errors will be de-valued in search results. In other words, it’s better for SEO to only have a desktop version of your website rather than a poor, error-filled mobile site.

Just by the fact you’re reading a digital marketing blog, you probably already know how important mobile is. Just recently we saw a staggering statistic over at Copyblogger that really puts mobile’s growth in perspective:

“There are over 1 million more mobile devices activated every day across the world than there are babies born.”

The problem is, companies read statistics like the one above and rush into building a mobile site without implementing it properly, or giving consideration as to whether they really need a separate mobile site in the first place.

Responsive Web vs. Separate Mobile Site

In most cases, responsive web design (a website that serves the same content to all users but formats it optimally per different devices) is recommended to provide the best all-around user experience, as well as being beneficial for SEO. Building a separate mobile site/experience is ideal and even necessary in some situations, but requires significantly more work and planning.

Let’s face it-there’re a lot of crappy mobile sites out there! How many times have you tried to visit one of them on your smartphone only to be met with slow-loading content, ugly pages, errors, redirects, or worse-a site that doesn’t load at all? If any of this describes the mobile version of your company’s website, it’s probably a safe bet nobody’s using it, and now we know (officially) that Google doesn’t like it either!

With mobile search set to overtake that of desktop in the near future, Mobile SEO is now a critical part of search engine optimization. If your mobile site isn’t up to Google’s standards, it’s doing you more harm than good. Our Mobile SEO service and Mobile Readiness Audits have helped many clients uncover performance issues with their mobile sites, and put them on the right track. We can help you too!

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