Did you know that only six percent of top 100 Fortune 500 companies have sites that comply with Google’s new smartphone requirements?
With the growing number of mobile users, Google announced changes to search engine rankings for websites and how they handle their mobile traffic. The search engine giant wants companies to make it easier for someone to always find the content they are searching for on their websites. In the future, companies who fail to serve mobile content to their visitors risk a lower search engine ranking.
Google points out two common mistakes: having faulty redirects and smartphone-only errors. Websites that have separate desktop and mobile websites may have faulty redirects. This occurs when a mobile user intends on visiting a deeper URL in a website but is redirected to the mobile homepage. For example, someone visits mypage.com/my-blog-post and is redirected to m.mypage.com.
Faulty redirects occur when visitors intend on visiting a deeper URL in a website but is redirected to the mobile homepage. Server Attention Span comic via xkcd
Smartphone-only errors occur when someone visits a desktop page on their mobile device but is served an error page or a 404 page. To avoid this, Google suggests that the desktop URL is served when users are visiting a desktop page from a mobile device.
By making sure the user experience is seamless on your website, visitors can become fully engaged with your brand. Most importantly, mobile users will be able to find the content they are looking for faster. Often times, these errors can be costly and you can lose potential traffic. Imagine clicking on a link from a search result or a tweet and being directed to mobile homepage instead.
Mobile Redirects on GolfBC’s Mobile Website
GolfBC offers world-class facilities and one-of-a-kind signature holes. Their championship golf courses rank among the highest in Canada and North America. Earlier this year, we helped GolfBC launch their mobile website to meet their growing number of mobile visitors – the golfer on-the-go.
GolfBC’s mobile site was developed with a more app-like feel to accommodate for the interactive-rich features. The nearby courses feature uses geolocation capabilities of mobile devices to automatically provide mobile users with a listing of nearby courses. The mobile site aims to be highly interactive giving the mobile user course information including holes, par, yardage and weather. Most importantly, we wanted to make it easy for the golfer on-the-go to book a tee time on their mobile devices.
GolfBC’s Mobile website
We recently implemented redirects for GolfBC to help improve their SEO. More specifically, we created server side redirects. Server side redirects enable mobile users to avoid any delays before they are redirected to the appropriate page unlike javascript redirects. The use of javascript redirects didn’t make sense since it would force the user to download extra bytes (and using up the user’s phone data) and take a longer time to download.
With the redirects, the mobile website automatically recognizes when someone visits the desktop page from a mobile device and serves an equivalent smartphone-friendly page.
Try it out – search for GolfBC using your smartphone and click on any of the search engine results. If the mobile content exists, you will be directed to the mobile page. However, if the page doesn’t, you will be directed to content you wanted on the desktop page.
Search results for GolfBC on a mobile device. Users are redirected to the right content either mobile or desktop instead of being served the mobile homepage.
Closing Thoughts
To create a better mobile web, companies need to consider how the mobile user is consuming your content. While we are all making the mobile web a better place for customers, we also need to embrace the ongoing learning of how mobile content is consumed. It’s no doubt that the number of mobile users are continuing to grow globally. The changes to search engine rankings that Google has rolled out puts the mobile user experience first – allowing for everyone to enjoy their search experience and your brand.
