Content Attributes
I’m on an iPhone, and I’m looking for a good hotel in Chicago, so I search on Google for “hotels in Chicago” and start exploring the one that catches my attention on the search results first page. I exclude the booking sites for the moment and point directly to those highlighted by the star-rich snippets, where, after reading some positive reviews, I decide to visit the website.
The situation that presents itself to me when exploring the top 8 sites with rich snippets is that only 3 out of 8 have a mobile presence. The rest of the sites make you see the desktop version often unreadable.
Let me be clear. I took as a reference a sector, tourism, which, although competitive, is perhaps among the most “optimized” from a mobile point of view. In many other sectors, even competitive ones, the situation is worse. For example, I could tell you about some big international blogs that preach mobile SEO a lot but don’t have a responsive or mobile version of their blog.
The importance of mobile SEO
Why does it become necessary to have a mobile presence? Well first of all, because we have been talking about the furniture boom, its importance, etc. for almost ten years. etc., they probably talked about the boom a little in advance, but, already since last year, it has become a reality represented by ever-growing numbers that can be verified from Google Analytics accounts. For example, let’s take Facebook access to websites from Facebook this year will probably exceed those from the desktop.
But on the marketing side, referring to traffic aside, what should push all companies to invest in a mobile presence are the points listed in the research released last year by using Google itself and, to summarize, I report in the following slides.
- Consumers search for mobile sites throughout the buying process.
- Consumers tend to search for the location of a store on their mobile.
- 93% of users use mobile to search.
Also not to be underestimated is the fact that more and more users are buying (and will buy) directly from their mobile devices. The rest can be read in Google’s Think Insights.
All this collides with the Italian reality; how many restaurants in Italy have a mobile version of their site? Very few!
Optimize your site for mobile devices
To make sure your site is quickly responsive in the first place, and therefore that you choose the right WordPress theme, there are other things you can do.
AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages
More and more people prefer to access websites from their mobile. Google is rightly adapting its algorithms so that sites optimized for mobile devices are better positioned.
Indeed, Google has even decided to restructure its indexing rules based on “mobile-first”, i.e., taking into account first of all the mobile version of websites.
One tool that can help you with this is AMP. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and it is a project that aims to deliver content to users who surf the web from mobile even faster. AMP is an open-source project, but there is a Google AMP cache that contains AMP pages.
If you’re interested in adding it to your site as well, try the AMP WordPress plugin.
Limit pop-ups
One of the elements that most disturb mobile browsing is full-screen pop-ups. For this reason, Google will penalize sites that display full-screen, intrusive pop-ups, or that must be closed by the user before he or she can continue browsing.
However, it is important to note that sites that show pop-ups required by law, such as the banner for the information on cookies, are not penalized.
However, all other pop-ups, such as promotional ones or those that invite the user to subscribe to the newsletter, should be reduced to occupy about 20% of the screen of a mobile device. Pop-ups shouldn’t disturb your browsing and should be easy to close.
You can try SuperMonitoring to check your website availability and make sure its pop-up is running properly.
Conclusion
Let’s say it really depends on what the goals of the mobile presence are. Is the site a showcase, informative, and the aim is to allow the reading of contents? Then the responsive site is for you. In the case of more complex projects where the objectives are to convert, think of e-commerce, perhaps it would be better to design a separate site.
In any case, however, everything should include a detailed analysis of the user’s search experience, going through Google Analytics well, and comparing use devices and on-site behavior.