There is no better place to be than at the top of Google’s search rankings; for marketers, it’s the Holy Grail. The key component in reaching that milestone is SEO (Search Engine Optimization), a process by which your site and content is ranked based on relevance. Now, with so much search traffic coming to Google from mobile devices, they are taking a firm stance on mobile SEO, and there is no question that they are standing on the side of the people.
Google first announced their Googlebot-Mobile for smartphones back in 2011; their engine that crawls and indexes sites as if it were a smartphone user. Since then, there have been a couple blog posts, but no firm lines had ever really been drawn in the sand on what will impact mobile SEO. That all changed recently when Google released a blog post announcing that it would begin demoting sites in mobile search results if they are not mobile friendly or misconfigured. The move highlights the importance Google is placing on mobile users as the future of search and sends a clear signal to marketers that either they implement a mobile solution, or alter a current solution that does not meet their guidelines.
The recent guidelines extend beyond just having a mobile optimized site and, for the first time, go into detail about implementation. The goal of the guidelines is pretty straightforward: Get mobile users to the piece of information they are looking for as quickly as possible.
Google highlighted one of the more common changes/recommendations they suggest in their recent post. The first is with regard to faulty redirects. This happens when a user is redirected from a desktop page to an irrelevant mobile page—we’ve all dealt with that frustration. The key here is to implement what we have referred to in the past as “deep linking,” which ensures all desktop pages redirect mobile users to the corresponding mobile page, thus getting the user to the exact piece of information they are looking for. In addition, they urge marketers to ensure that there are no page errors for mobile users and to test across multiple devices to ensure the highest level of usability.
If you’ve spent time, energy and a vast amount of resources on climbing to the top of the mountain with a good SEO strategy, it would be a shame to see your work come falling down by not preparing for mobile SEO. Now that Google has drawn their lines in the sand—and clearly sided with ensuring a quality user experience—there isn’t much time left to get this right. Contact your mobile specialist today and ensure that your mobile assets are following Google’s guidelines for usability.
To see how your site looks on a mobile device today, visit www.TestMySiteNow.com
Source: Seth Kaplan is president of Mobile Real Estate. For more information, please visit www.mobilerealestateid.com
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