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How to improve Google search rankings through mobile

Jack Brett
  • Jack Brett
  • March 26, 2015
How to improve Google search rankings through mobile

Your web site is everything a web site should be. It’s beautifully designed with Web 2.0 features. With three layers of caching it loads like lightning. Through years of hard work you’ve made it the most visited, most trusted site in its class, and its dignified placement at the top of any pertinent search results list is a testament to that.

But is it “mobile-friendly”? That might seem like a matter of opinion, and to some degree that’s true. Unfortunately, the only opinion that matters is that of the Google “spider” bot creeping toward your site to index it right now. All web-based businesses know the fight for those few top rankings is a tiring one. With everyone fighting to stay relevant in a world where Google is ostensibly the sole judge of what is and isn’t relevant, it can be costly when it decides to change up the rules.

In roughly one month, Google will roll out the next version of its industry-leading search algorithm, one that will place a much greater weight on the mobile-friendliness of web pages worldwide. Google’s own team expects a “significant impact” on mobile search results, possibly impacting even more queries than their Panda update back in 2011. Even the fact that their rollout strategy includes an announcement months in advance suggests the potential size of that impact, and should be taken as a serious warning by anyone who values their mobile traffic.

What does this mean? Like any other Google algorithm update, this one will have its share of winners and losers. April 21 will be a great day for those who have done right by the ever-increasing population of mobile users, but those who have ignored the trend or written it off as a temporary caprice might be in for a rude awakening. And historically speaking, if your site falls on the wrong side of the list it can take a long time to recover.


This update shouldn’t spell doom for any website, as long as proper precautions are taken. Here are some quick tips on how to prepare for that first visit from the new, mobile-first Googlebot:

1. Be the Googlebot

Google doesn’t want your amazing site to suffer a demotion any more than you do. Their focus is simply to improve the experience for mobile users, so they’ve made a Mobile-Friendly Test available for site owners to drop in their site’s URL and see if the mobile Googlebot considers it mobile-friendly. There are a few things that tend to count against sites:

  • The text size is too small to read on a mobile screen.
  • Links are presented so close together that users with larger fingertips might tap accidentally.
  • Content is arranged wider than the screen, forcing users to scroll horizontally.
  • The site includes video content that’s not playable on most mobile devices—this includes Flash.

If your site comes up non–mobile-friendly, don’t panic! This test is simply a preview for your benefit, and does not have any impact on your site’s current ranking. However, it’s best to heed the test’s advice. If you have a very large site with a multitude of pages, all accessible through deep-linking (making them fair game for Googlebots), you’ll want to set up your site through Google Webmaster Tools to evaluate the entire site at once, rather than going page-by-page. Another advantage of this toolkit is that it exposes other factors impacting the overall mobile-friendliness of your site, which won’t be found by evaluating pages individually—like unreliable cross-linking, which burns sites with multiple unique paths on desktop that all redirect to a single path on mobile.

2. Focus on the pages with the highest traffic

This might seem obvious, but there is a lingering paranoia around this update that if even one page on a site is not mobile-friendly, the merciless Googlebot will apply that scarlet letter to the entire site. Fear not! Mobile-friendliness is determined on a page-by-page basis, so don’t presume that you need to find it in your budget to make every page on your site mobile-friendly within the month. Let the analytics drive your mobile preparation efforts. For example, if /pets/puppies.html is getting 5,000 hits a day and /pets/salamanders.html is getting 12, the salamanders can wait. If your seldom-searched pages suffer a demotion from the new algorithm but your more popular ones get a nice boost, your site still wins overall.

3. Don’t cheat

Like so many tech-savvy site owners before you, you’ll be tempted to try your hand at outsmarting Google. It’s easy enough to check if the visitor is a Googlebot and dynamically serve up some generic content which happens to be mobile-friendly but is nothing like what actual mobile users would see. Several notable sites have employed similar tactics in the past, and some were successful—for a while.

As one example, one of the many factors that Google uses for ranking pages is the “authoritative value” of the other sites that link to it. Because sites ending in .edu were given considerable weight in that calculation, certain e-commerce platforms would encourage college and university sites to post links to their product pages, giving them a very “scholarly” boost in rank. In February 2011, Google released their Panda update, which was intended to demote those sites that were boosting their rankings artificially. It was effective: the only thing worse than having your site drop from page one to page six overnight is the professional discredit of having your SEO practices exposed in that way (it came to be known as the “Panda-slap”).

Some sites eventually recovered, some never did. Take a lesson from the SEO prodigies of the past. As clever as you are, the chances you’ll discover a loophole that the Google team doesn’t know about are very slim. Mostly because this is what they do. Your cleverness would be better spent making your site legitimately mobile-friendly.

4. Know what to look for on day one

Once you’ve armed yourself with the knowledge of what pages on your site are and aren’t mobile-friendly and have taken whatever vigilant actions time and budget would allow, the best thing to do before game day is arm yourself with the data you’ll need to measure the impact of the new algorithm on your site’s mobile traffic. Google Webmaster Tools not only provides a full list of the search queries that returned links to your site for any time period, but also shows you how many came from mobile search and what your site’s average position was on the list. These are the numbers you want to watch. Specifically, you want a list of the search queries which are not specific to your brand.

For example, if your business is called Max & Murdock’s Llama Insurance, you shouldn’t be as concerned about the query “max and murdocks” as you are about the query “llama insurance.” Mobile-friendliness is just one item being introduced into the sea of individually weighted ranking factors in the search algorithm, so a brand-specific query should still place your site on top—even if it’s not a mobile-friendly page. The unbranded queries for generic services are where we’re bound to see some upsets.

If your site has been at the number-one slot for “llama insurance” over the past month and its mobile-friendliness is in question, maybe a quick Google search is in order to see who occupies results number two, three, four, and five (as if you don’t already know who your competitors are). This will enable you to identify their mobile-friendliness and compare their sites to yours. Once you can make predictions as to who will rise and who will fall, you can re-evaluate your own mobile strategy based on those the results. The April 21 update will be rolled out in real time globally, so it shouldn’t take long to see the effect.

Some might argue that users search with Google because it delivers the most pertinent content, and that this titan of search engines might be overstepping its bounds by penalizing perfectly legitimate sites for reasons unrelated to content or relevance. But Google didn’t become synonymous with “search” by making ill-considered updates. Its search algorithm is the most advanced of its kind, and is the result of hundreds of major revisions over the years. Google’s goal is not only to organize the world’s information, but also to make it accessible in the best user experience possible. And who better to inform Google about user preferences than its billion-plus searchers every day from around the world?

The update goes live April 21, with or without our blessing. Google has done its part in warning us not to ignore mobile on the web, and even told us how to leverage mobile-friendly design into a major opportunity. It remains to be seen how significant this update is for Google search results, but it certainly highlights a growing trend. With the continuing rise in mobile searches—in numbers even surpassing desktop in some countries—this update has been a long time coming. Google is always listening to its users. Good things can happen if we take the time to listen to Google.

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