Mobile Usability & Search

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good afternoon everyone - [Introduce yourself, mention the PushON stand] Today I’m going to be talking about how usability issues with your website can affect your visibility in search. The main focus is going to be Google’s new mobile-friendly algorithm update, so basically what it entails and how you can prevent it from negatively affecting you and your site.
• #3: Mobile isn’t the future, it’s the present. And it’s been that way for a long time now. I don’t need to make an argument for mobile as important anymore, we all know how fundamentally key it is to have it at the forefront of our thinking. I’m sure you’ve seen a million slides like this with device stats on…well these ones are completely made up, entirely fabricated because there’s no need for me to make a case for them.
• #4: Before we go through anything, I’d just like to clarify that Google defines mobile as smartphones. Generally Android, iPhone and Windows phones.
• #5: This definition does not include tablets, multimedia phones or feature phones. Multimedia phones: 3G phones that aren’t smartphones. Feature phones: phones with browsers that cannot render standard HTML. Multimedia and feature phones aren’t too much of a consideration in the UK but if you’re looking at other territories, Africa perhaps, then you may need to be considerate of these. It’s also important to note that you won’t see some of these devices in your Analytics because JavaScript doesn’t work with them. You’ll need to check your server logs for a true representation of access numbers. A multimedia phone usually has something like a camera as a feature.
• #6: Announced in February and dubbed mobilegeddon by the SEO community, Google has just introduced an update targeted at mobile usability issues. This is a big thing for a number of reasons but primarily because it will give precedence to sites deemed mobile-friendly in SERPs. Now any mobile usability issues won’t just annoy users, they will actually affect the way your site ranks. So what we do we know about this update?
• #7: Webmaster Trends Analyst, Gary Illyes
• #8: Discuss Panda & Penguin.
• #9: It’s even made mainstream news.
• #10: Announced in February ----- Meeting Notes (22/04/15 00:14) ----- Rather than having to wait for a data refresh or update, early tests suggest that you may have to wait up to around 72 hours for Google to deem a page mobile-friendly after changes have been made. Some tests have cited as little as 12-18 hours for the mobile-friendly label to appear after changes have been made.
• #12: This is just speculation. Results are slightly different on Android and iOs. For example, the way that app packs are displayed.
• #13: ----- Meeting Notes (22/04/15 00:14) ----- The local search team does have the option of employing the new update as part of their algorithm but that will be a decision they may make at a later date.
• #14: A page is either mobile-friendly or it isn’t. There’s no sliding scale and there’s no varying degrees.
• #15: ----- Meeting Notes (23/04/15 02:28) ----- This is a really positive thing because there won't be the scenario where a small group of pages that are deemed not mobile-friendly will not take down your whole site.
• #17: Multimdia and feature phones aren’t too much of a consideration in the UK but if you’re looking at other territories, Africa perhaps, then you may need to be considerate of these. It’s also important to note that you won’t see some of these devices in your Analytics because JavaScript doesn’t work with them. You’ll need to check your server logs for a true representation of access numbers.
• #18: Next have bombed. The prospect of the update has had a big effect on the web as a whole. Google announced yesterday that there are 4.7% more mobile-friendly sites today than there were 2 months ago. ----- Meeting Notes (23/04/15 02:28) ----- Also this could signify an initial test roll out where they're only affecting a portion of results and refining it before making bigger changes.
• #19: Optimising your site for the update is easy. What can you do to align your site with Google’s usability criteria?
• #20: If you’re using a popular CMS, Google has some really useful platform-specific guidelines on making your site mobile-friendly. So if you’re using WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Prestashop etc. there’s a lot of documentation on-hand to help you make your site mobile-friendly as quickly and easily as possible.
• #22: An absolute must is to access and use the mobile usability report in Webmaster Tools. If you've not got an account, set one up. This will give you a page-by-page or issue itemised run down of the issues with your site. This is the picture that Google's seeing. And there's just an example of one of our clients who we have fixed a couple of hundred errors for prior to the update just to really protect them.
• #23: So how can you tell if you’ve been hit? Where can you look?
• #24: Using this segment with these conditions you can see if any drops or increases have occurred during the update so far. If you really wanted to get scientific with it, you could export the list of pages that are listed as having mobile usability errors in Webmaster Tools and then add the URLs affected to a table filter using regex so you just look at those in isolation OR if the list is quite large, you can export all the data into Excel.
• #25: Search Metrics recently launched a new mobile visibility score. Their score is based on your site’s rank for popular keywords and the volume of those keywords, so if there is any shift in your rankings SM will pick it up and your visibility score will be adjusted accordingly.
• #26: Check your search queries report in WMT. This shows you the number of times your site has appeared in SERPs, how may clicks its received and the keywords for which you appear. Look for any increases or decreases here and the beauty of this is that you can ascertain for which individual keywords you may be seeing change for. Of course, WMT data is soft and not as good as the data we had prior to (not provided) but it’s still useful. Just remember that WMT data is also delayed by a couple of days, so look at Analytics for a more up-to-date look at how your site is performing.
• #27: Optimising your site for the update is easy. What can you do to align your site with Google’s usability criteria?
• #28: Google isn’t being massively strict. Cite URL Profiler study. ----- Meeting Notes (22/04/15 00:14) ----- An absolute must is to access and use the mobile usability report in Webmaster Tools. If you've not got an account, set one up. This will give you a page-by-page or issue itemised run down of the issues with your site. This is the picture that Google's seeing. And there's just an example of one of our clients who we have fixed a couple of hundred errors for prior to the update just to really protect them.
• #29: Plugins are the main reason for hanging and browser crashes on mobile, so try to avoid them. There’s often no need for plugins now anyway, stick to native web technologies. Now it’s not quite as black and white as you may think when it comes to this issue. If a site is using old YouTube Flash embeds, it won’t necessarily fail. It will just come up as “consider fixing”.
• #30: Size content to the viewport and ensure that it works across a range of different devices. Noone likes to horizontally scroll.
• #31: Make sure that tap targets are large enough so that they’re easy to tap and if they’re small add enough spacing so that there’s less chance for confusion.
• #32: Also, just generally use a font size that is legible.
• #33: A viewport controls how a page is displayed on a mobile device. Without a viewport, most pages will display at desktop screen width. That’s obviously not preferable for responsive sites. This is a really basic consideration.
• #34: Previously these will have annoyed users. Not only will they continue to do that but they will also have an effect on your visibility in search.
• #35: ----- Meeting Notes (23/04/15 02:28) ----- Don't create an extra step between the user and the content they want to see.
• #36: On mobile this is so that Google can correctly render the page how the user will see it. It’s also related to their page layout algorithm which penalises sites that have too many ads above-the-fold and Google needs the CSS to be able to ascertain the correct positioning and visibility of ads on a page.
• #37: Do not use smartphone-specific directives. So don’t block your mobile site and, also while we’re on the subject, don’t display anything different to Googlebot’s mobile crawler than users would see. An interesting fact actually is that Google’s smartphone crawler identifies as an iPhone which I think is rather peculiar.
• #39: Some sites serve pages on desktop that 404 on mobile. It could be the result of incorrect user agent redirects. If there’s no mobile equivalent page, redirect them to the closest equivalent or keep them on the desktop page. Both of those are better than 404. Check your crawl errors tab in Webmaster Tools and the smartphone tab will show you mobile-only 404 errors. Consider switching to a responsive design.
• #40: If you’re redirecting based on user agent, make sure that the redirects are taking the mobile user to the right page. If they access the Nike page from search results, make sure it redirects them to the mobile version of the Nike page and not to the homepage. This quite a common issue. ----- Meeting Notes (23/04/15 02:28) ----- These are obviously user-agent based redirects that are redirecting you from the desktop page listed in the search results to the mobile equivalent page.
• #41: Despite not being a factor in the recent update, it’s still very important. Don’t just focus on the easy stuff, gzip compression, browser caching etc. Look at things that really make a difference on mobile. Fully responsive images, for example, rather than simply scaling images down use the <picture>, <srcset> elements for fully responsive imagery. You can use the <picture> element, even though it’s not fully supported. You can use CSS media queries or a responsive image framework. There’s loads of options out there. Images generally account for around 60% of a page’s total size. Pagespeed Insights, Pingdom, GT Metrix etc.
• #43: Bing just hit 20% market share in the US and they’re at 8% in the UK. ----- Meeting Notes (22/04/15 00:14) ----- And, of course, I've only mentioned Google but let's not forget Bing. They've been doing the same.
• #45: First of all, it goes without saying that you should have a detailed look at Google’s mobile guidelines. Check your WMT for usability issues and your Analytics accounts for any signs of impact. Act accordingly. Think beyond the update, Google is really pushing the mobile agenda at the moment and they will continue to do so. Usability affecting ranking gives another business reason to tackle any issues. Not only will it affect conversion rate on-site, it's also going to now affect actual visitor numbers coming to the site.