I always do what my Google overlords tell me to do. It’s important if you want people to be able to find your site. A few years ago we had “Mobilegeddon,” which is when Google starting giving a more favorable rank to sites that are mobile-friendly. And this is important, because more and more people are using their smart phones to look up information. (Site not mobile-friendly? Contact us, we can help.)
So we started making all our sites responsive, which is great for everyone. One thing to keep in mind, though is that a desktop site, when condensed into a smartphone, sometimes has way too much stuff. When we set up a website for anyone and work on the responsiveness, we make cuts. I wrote about this earlier this year. We make decisions about what needs to stay for mobile, and what can go so that the page presents the information the user needs with less bells and whistles. Truly, the most important thing is that your visitors can find the information they are looking for.
Fast forward to Google’s recent blog post, and we’re learning that mobile indexing is going to get even more important. They are changing the rules so that they are using your mobile content before the desktop content to help rank your site.
“Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results.” – Google Blog
What does this mean for you?
The main point I’m taking away from this is that it’s important that when you make cuts about what can be cut on the responsive website, the actual page content, the words you use to describe your business, yourself, your services, your products, etc, needs to stay put. Don’t hide that content on your mobile view.
This is something we already do on websites we create. Keep the content, because usually that’s what people are looking for, and drop extra buttons, sliders, photos, etc that can take up space and provide less important value for the person who lands on the mobile website.
As I always say, Content is King. Same goes for site when it comes to mobile.
Amy Masson
Amy is the co-owner, developer, and website strategist for Sumy Designs. She's been making websites with WordPress since 2006 and is passionate about making sure websites are as functional as they are beautiful.