Mobile SEO and AMPs

Also, consider your users that interact first with your Mobile site - perhaps they find your site on the go, or are shown it by a friend. Say they revisit your site when they get home from a Tablet or Desktop device, to find out more or to complete a transaction. How frustrating would it be if they were unable to find some information they’d seen already, or if they otherwise struggled to traverse your website the same way. Consistency is an important part in satisfying users’ expectations:

83% of mobile users say that a seamless experience across all devices is very important.

Reflecting the growing dominance of Mobile over traditional Desktop experiences, Google had been including an increasing number of mobile-related ranking factors in their algorithm, and awarding them growing importance.

These include positive factors like Mobile page speed and usability, as well as punitive factors (like punishing sites that including intrusive interstitials on mobile).

In 2018, Google finally made the switch to ‘Mobile-First Indexing’.

Mobile-First Indexing means that Google will predominantly crawl and index the mobile version of your pages. In cases where there is no mobile version of a page (or site!), they will defer to the desktop version.

Consequently, the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. Therefore if content is only on your desktop site, there’s a high probability that Google won’t see it, and therefore will be unable to use it for ranking.

This is another reason that content on your mobile and desktop site should be the same, and Google have come out and confirmed as much:

“If your mobile site has less content than your desktop site, you should consider updating your mobile site so that its primary content is equivalent with your desktop site. This includes text, images (with alt-attributes), and videos – in the usual crawlable and indexable formats.”

Your mobile site is your most important site, and mobile-first should be your philosophy to your site/service, not just Google’s.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source web component framework that delivers amazing, lightning-fast mobile experiences.

The project was initially developed by Google, with contributions from over 30 publishers and technology companies, including Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and WordPress.

These AMP pages use a restricted ‘diet version’ of HTML called AMPHTML, along with other rules that guarantee a fast, smooth-loading page prioritizing the user-experience above all else.

The primary way in which AMP manages to be so fast is that so many of the elements that might slow down a page have been prohibited.

There are certain tags of HTML that have been banned, or replaced with AMP equivalents (such as forms to amp-forms).

Similarly, all CSS must be streamlined, and JavaScript is heavily restricted and standardised. You have to use an off-the-shelf AMP-friendly JavaScript library, with features such as lazy loading).

On top of all this, heavy caching essential to AMP. In fact, Google themselves generally ends up serving the AMP version of these pages, meaning they no longer need to fetch it from you any more.

Reflecting the growing dominance of Mobile over traditional Desktop experiences, Google had been including an increasing number of mobile-related ranking factors in their algorithm, and awarding them growing importance.

These include positive factors like Mobile page speed and usability, as well as punitive factors (like punishing sites that including intrusive interstitials on mobile).

In 2018, Google finally made the switch to ‘Mobile-First Indexing’.

Optiminder can help you modernise your mobile experience, whether that means an overhaul of the content on your mobile site, or helping you get your website AMP-ready.

We offer a range of Mobile services, from conducting a Mobile Site Audit to delivering an End-to-End Mobile Optimisation Service. Reach out today with your website URL to find out how we can help.