People who predominantly browse the internet from their mobile phones were given some help by Google earlier this year when it introduced mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal and started labelling sites based on whether or not they adhered to its guidelines in this area. Gloucester web design companies, like others in the UK, have had to adapt their practices to deal with the changes that are afoot. This is mainly to make sure that they are complying to Google’s ever- changing algorithms.
This has led to a reshuffling of rankings on mobile SERPs, although there are some sites which have managed to circumvent the wrath of the algorithms without actually being that much easier to use on portable devices.
Google’s algorithms can be difficult to appease, with even the biggest names in the business struggling to stay afloat in its ever-shifting SERPs.
So what are the best ways to make sure that a site is mobile-friendly and able to retain or even improve its rank while also ensuring that the user experience is not affected for desktop customers?
Eradicate Interstitials
Making sure that a website is mobile-friendly requires some dramatic design changes. For companies that want to make their sites more responsive, seeking the assistance of agencies is sensible to make this transformation swift and cost-effective.
But even with a responsive site in place, there are still ways to get penalised and damage your SEO credentials. Interstitials which advertise the availability of a downloadable app are the most recent design decision to avoid, as the presence of one will cause Google to take action against your site.
Interstitials may seem like a good idea at first, but their promotional benefits are outweighed both by the ranking penalties they entail and the annoyance that they can cause in users.
Fix Redirects
If you redirect mobile users to particular pages when they arrive on your site – usually to point them towards mobile-optimised content – then this is all well and good. But if redirects are faulty, then Google will detect this and penalise your site.
Fixing faulty redirects is the first step, but having a site which is designed responsively to adapt to whatever device is being used is a better solution, as this avoids the need for redirects altogether. Checking out the available analytical data will let you work out where errors are present and take action.
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