seo and mobile friendliness

SEO and Mobile Friendliness

Together at last…

Let’s Start with the Basics...• What is SEO?• the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search

engine's unpaid results.

• What is Responsive?• an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal

viewing and interaction experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

(Thanks to Wikipedia for these incredibly precise definitions.)

Two Worlds Apart• SEO is used to help people find your website through search engine

searches; responsive design helps your website be viewed on a smaller screen, such as on your smartphone (or iPhone for...you people)• There were not many occurrences where the design/development of

your website and its ability to show up on search rankings (mobile or otherwise) would intersect• And then came….

MOBILE-GEDDON!!!

What is Mobile-Geddon?• Google announced an update to its algorithm that would affect

mobile search rankings• It would use “Mobile Friendliness” as a ranking factor• Simply put, if your website isn’t mobile friendly, it would drop on

search rankings if being searched for on a mobile device• Starting on April 21st of this year, the algorithm went into effect

Why The Change?• Mary Meeker, an analyst at

Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, predicted in 2008 that "Mobile to overtake fixed Internet access by 2014"• comScore co-founder Gian

Fulgoni said in January that 52% of time spent on Internet is done on a mobile device

Shut Up and Take My Money!• Online shopping done a lot on mobile; in 2014, 150 million people

used a mobile device to research, browse, or compare products• More than half of those who did some form of shopping on mobile

made a purchase• Big for local business as well; 2013 Google study showed that 50% of

consumers who conducted a smartphone search for a local store visited that store within 24 hours

How Does WordPress Help?• WordPress has many themes that have mobile-first code already

created by awesome people that you can simply apply to your blog or website• (If you look hard enough, you can find quite a few of them for free!!)• For the SEO side, there are great plugins that can help, but the

absolute standard is WordPress SEO by Yoast

Questions?