Google has announced that as of April 21, 2015, it will take mobile optimization into account in the positioning of search results from mobile devices. This update in its algorithm will affect both websites and applications.
With this measure, Google remains true to its philosophy of ensuring that users find relevant and high quality pages in the first search results.
At the end of 2014, the label “For mobile”(mobile-friendly) was included in the mobile search results. This tells users which websites are optimized for mobile.
What until now have been recommendations to improve positioning, from next April 21 may be reflected negatively on the mobile traffic of our website if we do not have it properly optimized for mobile.
How do I know if my site is optimized for mobile?
Google provides us with this page where we can enter our domain and get a quick assessment where we can check if our website meets the basic criteria of mobile optimization.
How to optimize my website for mobile
If your website did not pass the above test, you still have time to fix it.
On the results page of the optimization test we get the first clues about the problems encountered by the user when accessing our website from the mobile version.
It also tells us how Googlebot sees the page. And if our website uses a CMS such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, Google provides us with a guide to optimize our website for mobile devices.
Another option is to check in Google Webmaster Tools the mobile usability of our website. In this section we indicate the mobile usability errors detected in our website and how to solve them.
Application content in search results
Like websites, applications can be displayed as results relevant to searches entered by users.
Application indexing allows us to connect pages of a website with application-specific content. In this way, smartphone users who have installed the application will be able to open it directly from the relevant Google mobile search results.
Let’s take as an example an apartment rental website and its application, which can also display the apartments. You can establish the relationship between your web pages and deep links to the application so that users see one of the apartments on the results pages when they do a Google search with their mobile device and can open that result directly in the application if they have it installed.
Google offers a guide where it explains in detail how to implement application indexing for our website and our application.
Don’t get left behind, and optimize your website for mobile devices!
