• Stop being a LURKER - join our dealer community and get involved. Sign up and start a conversation.

Mobile SEO

VVAuto1

Hat Trick
May 18, 2012
92
22
First Name
Victor
typically I know we talk about SEO for mobile/desktop and tablet as one. However were noticing a big difference in terms of our rankings, we've recently redone out desktop and mobile sites (roughly 3 months ago) - for example spitzertoyota.com

For what its worth I notice it specifically on long tail keyword searches...
 
Google is making substantial changes to the way they index mobile sites:
Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. -- Google
SearchEnglineLand.com had a great write-up this week about how to prepare for these changes, much of this advice may be immediately applicable to your situation Victor -

Excerpt from "Take These 3 Actions To Ready For Google’s Mobile Search Update"
1. Identify & Improve Your Mobile Web Optimization Status
Even if you have a mobile-ready site, it’s important to dig deeper by doing a mobile SEO audit so Google can correctly identify and serve your mobile content.

Start by validating your site with Google’s mobile friendly test tool, making sure the site resources such as images, CSS, JS are also crawlable.

mobile-friendly-test.png


For similar insights, you can also view the Google Webmaster Tools mobile usability report, which will alert you to various mobile usability issues such as the use of Flash, improperly sized content, and touch elements that are too close together.

Check Google Webmaster Tools’ Crawl Errors report and select the “Smartphone” tab to identify if Google’s smartphone crawler has found any problems when crawling your site. For example:
    • Are you blocking important areas of your sites that should be crawled and indexed instead?
    • Are your pages not being found, returning soft-404s or 404s?
    • How has the smartphone Googlebot found these errors?
    • From which pages and XML sitemaps are they being linked or referred?
Identify the sources of these crawling issues, making sure to unblock or block as needed and avoid linking or referring to non-existing pages.

webmaster-tools-crawl-errors.png


Use the fetch as Google feature in Webmaster Tools and select the “Mobile Smartphone” option to see how Google’s smartphone crawler sees your most important pages. Ask yourself:
    • Is it accessing to the right version, or is it being redirected to a non-relevant page?
    • Is the content accessible?
    • Are the relevant SEO elements, such as the title and meta description of each page, being discovered?
    • Are the site pages set up correctly (including the relevant annotations, http status, user agent detection, etc.) based on your chosen mobile site configuration?
Perform this analysis on a site-wide basis by using crawling tools like Screaming Frog orDeepCrawl, which allow you to select the smartphone Googlebot as your user agent.

mobile-crawler.png


Site speed is another important optimization consideration, as this is a ranking factor for both mobile and desktop sites. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check for page speed issues on your mobile site:

pagespeed-suggestions-mobile.png


You can also use the Speed Suggestions report in Google Analytics (under Behavior> Site Speed) with a mobile advanced segment to identify any speed issues on the pages with the highest mobiles pageviews and prioritize page speed optimization for these pages.

If you find that you need to completely redesign your website to ensure mobile-friendliness, make sure to check out the following resources:
 
  • Like
Reactions: joe.pistell
I also began to notice this quite a bit last year.
We started to build specific pages on the mobile sites just to see how they would perform and, since 45% of our traffic is mobile, the results were surprising. We started to rebuild our entire mobile strategy to take it much more seriously, rather than just as an extension of our existing desktop sites. Lead forms, photo integration, maps, etc - everything was redone in an adaptive manner to ensure that it looked and functioned great on mobile and we've been testing theories and implementations ever since.
 
Did anyone see a drop off in specifically Iphone sessions on 9/13/2014???? We noticed it hit across multiple of our sites, any thoughts? We went from 70 mobile apple iphone sessions each day down to 3 each day......... And its remained that way since.