Speed is the Future of Mobile Friendly

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Even though only half of business websites are mobile friendly, Google is already raising the bar on what mobile friendly means.

If you’ve surfed the web on your phone, you’ve no doubt run across mobile un-friendly websites that simply zoom out until the page fits on your screen. This of course makes the text so small as to be unreadable. A mobile friendly site on the other hand is designed to either present a separate page that was created for smaller screen sizes, or it is “responsive” and adjusts seamlessly for any display size. With over 50% of searches occurring on mobile phones, businesses that are stuck with zooming sites face stiff penalties, both in Google, and in user satisfaction.

Over half of users won’t recommend a website that isn’t mobile optimized.

 

Even among sites that are phone friendly, there is a growing speed divide. For example, the average load time for pages on smartphones has crept up to 4.5 seconds over the last few years, as websites get more complex and interactive. If that’s your website, here’s the bad news: for every second of load time, you lose visitors.Stop Watch

40% of users will abandon your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Google has noticed users’ taste for speed, and is quickly pushing fast sites higher up the rankings. Google has even spearheaded a new technology solution called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The goal is to have super fast mobile pages that load in 1 second or less. AMP pages are specially coded and submitted to Google, which keeps a copy on their servers to enable the fastest load times possible.

Once more sites AMP up their page speeds, users will never look back. Are you stuck in the slow lane? Contact us today and see how we can help.

See full study (opens a new window)

 

7 Key Takeaways from Google’s New Search Rating Guidelines

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Google just released a 160 page document that instructs their army of human search rankers as to how to rate a website. Here’s what you need to know in 5 minutes or less. A much longer and more comprehensive breakdown can be found on the Moz Blog.

  1. The humans don’t actually get any say in the final ranking, they are merely a control group to test various algorithm changes against. But the goal is to get the machines to rate close to the humans.
  2. All ranking is done on mobile devices! If your website isn’t mobile friendly, the window of grace is closing.
  3. Websites that can have a significant impact on a users life or money (Shopping, Financial Information, Medical Info, Legal pages, etc.) are held to a much higher standard.
  4. E-A-T (Expertise / Authority / Trustworthiness) is one of the main criteria for rankings. If raters feel you know what you’re talking about, and you’re linking / linked to and from other credible sources, you get a better score.
  5. Usefulness: Does your page satisfy the search query intent? Pages that fully satisfy intent quickly, get the best score.
  6. Page design: Confusing and cluttered pages rank lower. Ugly pages are ok, as long as the searcher can find what they need.
  7. Ads: Are ads clearly separate from the rest of the content, or are you trying to sneak them in?

Bottom line: If you’ve been putting off updating your site for mobile, this is a clear shot across the bow from Google to do it soon.