TRAFFIC
3. Dynamic mobile site
If you want to present your visitors with
different information on the same URLs,
this is where a dynamic site comes in.
You may have specific offers that you only
want tablet viewers to see. There have
been concerns that this could be seen as
cloaking; however, as there is a specific
Googlebot for this, this is not the case.
Ensure that you present to Googlebotmobile exactly what you display to your
visitors (you can check this in Google
Webmaster Tools, opting for
Googlebot-mobile).
Check list
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Set
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Not
up mobile traffic segments.
considered cloaking.
Mobile users want results and they
want them fast: speed is key. The speed
that a website loads is a very important
consideration, even more so for mobile and
tablet websites. These devices are portable,
they are used out and about, so not only
do we need to consider that users will not,
in most cases, be connected to Wi-Fi, but
that they actually want to find what they are
looking for, faster.
Mobile users have far different
expectations with how fast a website
loads. They are not doing heavy research
– something that may be expected at a
desktop – rather, they want the answer to
their query and they want it fast. 85 percent
of mobile searchers expect their mobile
experience to be just as fast, if not faster,
than that performed on a desktop.
Be very aware of the load times of your
mobile and tablet offering. Don’t frustrate
visitors who are after fast content by
making them wait, as they will invariably
give up, impacting your bounce rate. A
very slow loading site will be negatively
impacted with ranking performance.
Make sure that you make full use of the
‘site speed’ section in Google Analytics,
which is found in the behaviour section.
Here, you will be able to take a look at the
average load time for mobile visits. Look
at the most popular pages and look out for
inconsistencies, as popular pages
that take a long time to load will certainly
need investigation.
Google Analytics now also now provides
page speed suggestions which, if you are
accustomed to implementing page speed
recommendations on your desktop site,
will be very useful. In most cases, they will
follow the standard recommendations you
will be used to, such as optimising images
to reduce their file size.
Search queries
Pay attention to your search queries. While
there are keyboards on phones and tablets
and styluses are available, it is still more
difficult to effectively type across these
devices. Users are more conversational with
their queries across mobiles and tablets,
as these devices are often used for quick
queries, such as ‘where can I find…’
Google released its latest algorithm
update in October 2013. While the search
giant described Hummingbird as “a
new engine”, the algorithm is in fact a
mishmash of elements from Panda
(related to content quality) and Penguin
(related to spam and linking attributes).
The key new Hummingbird feature
revolves around search query types;
Google is now viewing certain search
keywords and search phrases differently.
Rather than analysing search phrases
in a more traditional boolean (word-byword) manner, Google is now evaluating
all keywords together within a search
query phrase to understand the context
of the search phrase, therefore
enabling better quality search results
to be returned.
mobile and tablet user behaviour
mobile
Often, those on mobiles are looking
for contact details, opening hours and
directions – they want answers fast
whilst on the go; purchases on mobile
are still at a lower volume as many are
wary to make purchases, especially large
ones on a mobile handset although
this is changing.
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Fingers, thumbs and screen size
The average size of a click on a
Smartphone is 44pixels. Make sure that
you factor this in – if you have small
buttons, then look to utilise padding with
CSS to increase the clickable area.
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Search queries
Searchers on a handset are frequently in
a rush, they use sh