Mobile Speed Test

While SEO ranking for e-commerce and business sites are important, ranking is also dependent on other factors measured by Google. If your site fails to load quickly on a cell phone it doesn’t matter how great your SEO work is on your site. Of course it is important to rank highly on as many search terms as possible, but you won’t achieve great position or depth in the index if your site is slow to load.

The biggest change to Google algorithm updates came in April of 2015 with the Mobile Update and again in May of 2016 when additional changes were added to the way Google decides on rankings for sites.

Mobile Optimized Site

Since that time websites that were not optimized for mobile platforms experienced a drop in the ranking position of their website pages. Mobile First being the credo of the new Google ranking system, e-commerce sites were hit hard by this update. By 2022 most businesses have embraced this change and have implemented sites that are mobile friendly.

You can test your site to see if it’s mobile friendly here: Mobile-Friendly Test – Google

Of course Google does not stop work on its ranking tools and in 2022 indeed the latest addition to its ranking algorithms evaluating several factors not previously considered.

Core Web Vitals

Web Core Vitals are a set of metrics that gauge how quickly a website loads and how the user interacts with it.

These metrics consist of:

 

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric gauges loading speed by timing how long it takes for the largest text or image element to load.

First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity by keeping track of how long it takes the browser to react after a user clicks a link or button on a page for the first time.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): which tracks the movement of on-screen visual components while a page loads, gauges visual stability.

Google is vague as usual about the impact of these measurements on your sites ability to rank highly in search, but it is clear that if your competition is performing better on these factors than you are, and your products and information are similar, then your pages are going to list further down in the index, and on mobile possibly not at all!

Mobile vs. Desktop Search

Google’s desktop and mobile searches are distinct in a few significant ways:

Screen size: Because mobile devices have smaller screens than desktop computers, search results are presented and laid out in a way that is most effective on these smaller screens.

Search Intent: Mobile users frequently have different search intentions than desktop users do. For instance, mobile users are more likely to be looking up information while on the go, whereas desktop users might be more likely to be looking up information on a particular subject. Google may therefore give different categories of search results more weight for desktop users than for mobile users.

Local Search: Google gives more weight to local search results for mobile users because they are more likely to be looking for information about nearby businesses and services.

Mobile First: Google has implemented a mobile-first indexing policy, which means that it now primarily uses the content from a website’s mobile version to rank pages from that site. This is done to reflect the fact that an increasing number of users are conducting searches on mobile devices.

Voice search: Since voice searches on mobile devices are more prevalent than text searches, spoken queries may produce different results from typed ones.

Google’s mobile search results are generally geared toward the needs and intentions of mobile users, whereas desktop search results are geared toward desktop users.

Mobile Performance Testing

Anyone can test their site to see how it performs by using the Google Page Speed test platform available here: Google Page Speed Test

This tool provides immediate Web Core Vitals results and then ranking factors for Speed, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. It also provides extremely detailed information about how to fix issues on your site.

However, many of the items reportd will require assistance from a front end developer to correct the problems reported.

If you’re in need of an expert that can address Mobile performance issues contact us!

We can help!