mobile seo - smx london 2015 - adam whittles

MAY 21,2015

What SEO’s Need To Know About Mobile

Adam Whittles

SEO Director, Maxus UK

@AdamWhittles

searchmarketingexpo.com@AdamWhittles#SMX #24B

Adam Whittles

SEO Director @ Maxus UK

@AdamWhittles

linkedin.com/in/adamwhittles


Source: IMRG and Capgemini’s Quarterly Benchmark 2015


“36% of mobile web search results vary from desktop, with 23% showing pages from completely different sites”

Data provided by SearchMetrics from their 2014 US Google Ranking Factors Study


The Fold

789

789


GooglebotMobile

Crawling Errors

Changes in Mobile Rankings

201420132012

Mobile Results & Test Tool

PageSpeed Insights

Indexing Android

Apps

Mobile Usability

2015

Usability Warnings

Mobile Search Queries Stats

Warnings for Flash

Sites

Faulty Redirects

2011

Mobile-friendly Update

Timeline of Google Mobile Events


2015

Mobile-friendly Update

April 21st 2015


#MOBILEGEDDON


#MOBILEPOCALYPSE


Choosing a mobile setupResponsive Separate URLs Dynamic Serving

• ALL devices• 1 URL• Same Content/HTML• Use CSS to render pages

• Separate Mobile & Desktop URLs example.com/m/ m.example.com• Different HTML

• All devices • 1 URL• different HTML (and CSS) depending

on user agent (desktop or mobile device)

Pros

• 1 URL• Easier to maintain• Link Consolidation• No Redirects > Reduce Loading Time• Recommended By Google (saves

resources, pages crawled once)

• Better Mobile Experience• Faster• Dedicated Mobile Content• Easier Implementation

• 1 URL• Link Consolidation• Capacity for different mobile content

Cons

• Slower• All content is downloaded whether it is

used or not. This can be problematic for image intensive websites

• Same Mobile/Desktop Content

• Link Equity Dilution• Higher Cost to maintain• Crawled Multiple Times with

different user agents

• Slower • Higher Cost to maintain• Old Redirect Lists• Complex technical implementation• Crawled Multiple Times

SEO

• Check Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors for Redirect & 404 Errors

• Check Page Load Time for Mobile and Desktop

• Allow Search Engines to crawl all assets (CSS, Images, JS)

• Redirect Mobile Users and Bots to the mobile site

• Test Desktop Site for Redirects & 404 Errors

• Add Rel=Alternate to desktop and rel=Canonical to mobile site

• XML Mobile Sitemaps

• Use user-agent vary header to help search bots to find your mobile content

• Test for Vary: User-Agent HTTP Header

Source (modified): John Shehata, Executive Director of Search at ABC News


Just because Google strongly recommends using responsive

design doesn’t mean you should automatically choose responsive

design for your site


Bad Use of Responsive Web Design: Disney.co.uk


Questions to consider when deciding which mobile setup to use

1. How much budget do you have?2. How much engineering/technical resource do you have available?3. Do users interact differently between your mobile and desktop sites?4. Do you need a fast website based on your target audience search

behaviour?5. Is your content designed for sharing?6. Do you use a CDN to speed up content delivery?7. Does your content rely heavily on images or picture galleries?


Source: BrightEdge


Non-mobile friendly URL in mobile search. Desktop homepage is missing the rel=“alternate” tag


Crawl your site using Googlebot’s mobile User Agent


Or…Mobile-friendly Checker (Chrome Extension) Bulk Mobile-friendly checker (urlitor.com/mobile)

mobile seo - smx london 2015 - adam whittles

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