What Does Google Consider “Mobile”?
by Admin
Posted on 21-06-2023 09:12 AM
Mobile friendliness does matter for seo. In fact, it’s a ranking signal in both google and bing’s algorithms when it detects a user is searching on a mobile device. Websites that are mobile friendly, in general, will outrank non-mobile friendly sites in mobile search results.
So, if your
website
relies on or targets traffic from mobile users at all, mobile friendliness is vital for seo. Even if your business doesn’t rely on or care about traffic from mobile users for some reason, thanks to google starting its mobile-first index , mobile friendliness will soon matter for you as well.
According to statista , mobile devices generated 59% of worldwide mobile traffic in the final quarter of 2022. It’s not just users that predominantly view your site from a mobile device, but googlebot too. In 2016, google announced mobile-first indexing. As a result, google predominantly crawls the web via the googlebot smartphone user agent. This means that google will primarily use the mobile version of content for indexing and ranking. Mobile-first indexing began rolling out in 2018. By 2021, a majority of sites moved over to the new format of crawling. For many years, this was a hot topic among seo professionals.
When people talk about rel="alternate" mobile, rel="alternate" media tag or rel="alternate" media attribute, they refer to this link relation: for the sake of ease, we'll call it the mobile attribute here on out. This link relation is used to indicate a relation between a desktop and a mobile website to search engines. If you have a separate desktop and mobile website, and you care about mobile seo you need to be using the mobile attribute. Currently only google and yandex support the use of the mobile attribute.
Mobile seo makes sure your mobile site offers the best possible presentation of your content to a mobile device user. Since our world is increasingly mobile-oriented, it has become imperative that your site is mobile-friendly. If your site is not, or not properly, available for mobile users, you will miss out on a decent ranking in the search engines and thus miss the income. Therefore, you should do everything in your power to optimize the mobile view of your site and make it as good as possible. In fact, it should be excellent! for a while , google uses the mobile version of the site to determine its rankings.
Most mobile devices today use touchscreens for almost all functions. You will only find a few buttons on the sides, bottom and top of most devices and these are usually the power button, the volume buttons, the home button and a few others. In fact, the major search engines, google and bing changed their search ranking algorithms, where mobile-friendly sites are now ranking higher. Bing actually indicates whether the site is mobile-friendly in its results :.
When It Comes to Mobile, You’ve Got 3 Options
The pagespeed insight tool can test speed from both a desktop and mobile perspective. Very useful to see where the easiest performance improvements can be gained in terms of download speed. As site speed is considered part of google’s algorithm, fixing issues could result in a real impact on mobile search positions. The google keyword tool gives a guideline on the monthly volume in searches. As well as looking at desktop searches, the tool can also show data for searches on mobile devices.
Simply select ‘advanced options’ ‘show ideas and statistics for’ and select ‘mobile’. Local search trends can be added to see seasonal fluctuations or if keyword searches are increasing in volume.