Mobile first optimisation for non-responsive websites.
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With Google beginning to test mobile first indexing, being just desktop friendly isn’t good enough anymore. This session will cover what we know of the update and how the different areas of Auto Trader are combating this change.
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Mobile first optimisation for non-responsive websites.
- 2. Mobile first optimisation for non-responsive websites.
- 3. Mobile first, what do we know? Overview 3
- 4. What does Google want? Overview 4
- 5. An Auto Trader story Mobile first optimisation. Overview 5
- 6. My role at Auto Trader
- 7. SEO Consultant for Auto Trader My role at Auto Trader
- 8. Mobile first, what do we know?
- 9. There are now more mobile searches than ever before. Mobile first, what do we know? 9
- 10. Mobile first, what do we know? 10 What if you don’t have a mobile site?
- 11. Mobile first, what do we know? 11 Google have said they will look at the mobile version of your site…
- 12. Google have said content that’s not mobile-friendly will not rank as well. Mobile first, what do we know? 12
- 13. Mobile first, what do we know? 13
- 14. 14 Mobile first, what do we know?
- 15. 7 months later… Still no closer to roll out. Mobile first, what do we know? 15
- 16. Still think mobile first. Mobile first, what do we know? 16
- 18. Have a responsive site? You shouldn’t have to do anything. What Google wants 18
- 19. Serve structured mark-up on both desktop and mobile sites. What Google wants 19
- 20. Use the robots.txt testing tool. What Google wants 20
- 21. Only have a desktop site? What Google wants 21
- 22. A good desktop-oriented site is better than a bad mobile version. What Google wants 22
- 23. Build up your mobile site, launch it when ready. What Google wants 23
- 24. An Auto Trader story
- 25. Cue responsive website… An Auto Trader story 25
- 26. Traffic split. An Auto Trader story 26 50% Mobile Visits
- 27. Everyone has internal challenges. An Auto Trader story 27
- 28. Content & mark-up different across mobile and desktop? Make changes to your site An Auto Trader story 28
- 29. No need to change canonical links. An Auto Trader story 29
- 30. We have 2 versions… 30 An Auto Trader story
- 31. We confused Google 31 An Auto Trader story
- 32. Google struggled 32 An Auto Trader story
- 33. Desktop example: (http://farm.autotrader.co.uk/used-farm- machinery/john-deere) 33 An Auto Trader story
- 34. Mobile example: (farm.autotrader.co.uk/mobile/search?ma ke=john-deere &seoidentifier=true) 34 An Auto Trader story
- 35. Google didn’t understand. Our users didn’t understand. 35 An Auto Trader story
- 36. Changes Made
- 37. We mapped all the relevant pages to their mobile equivalent. Changes Made 37
- 38. 38 Changes Made
- 39. Used two versions of a canonical tag. https://goo.gl/T6R29E 39 Changes Made
- 40. Used rel alternate tags on desktop. 40 Changes Made
- 41. 41 Changes Made
- 42. Used Canonical tag on mobile site. 42 Changes Made
- 43. 43 Changes Made
- 45. Text, H1’s, Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions. 45 Changes Made
- 46. 46 Page Type URL Desktop Mobile Desktop Mobile Desktop Mobile Desktop Mobile Desktop Mobile Desktop Mobile Desktop Mobile Home www.example.co.uk Used Home www.example.co.uk Used Make www.example.co.uk Used Make Model www.example.co.uk Location www.example.co.uk Body Type www.example.co.uk Textual ContentTitle Meta Description H1 Schema Present Canonical Present Rel next/prev Changes Made
- 47. Results
- 48. /mobile version one week later… Results 48
- 49. 49 Before: 0.08% CTR After: 18.59% CTR Results
- 50. 50 Before: 8,400 impressions After: 20,256 impressions Results
- 51. 51 Before: 7 visits After: 3,766 Results
- 52. 52 Before: 1.4 avg position After: 2.4 avg position Results
- 54. 54 Bounce rate improved: 50% to 12% Results
- 55. 55 New users increased: 143 to 4,855 Results
- 56. 56 Users increased: 1,713 to 15,135 Results
- 57. 57 Sessions increased: 286 to 18,991 Results
- 58. 58 Av session increased: 21s to 6m 52s Results
- 59. Mobile users, now landing on the correct pages. 59 Results
- 60. The Future
- 61. Still need a fix fit for the future. The Future 61
- 62. Have a responsive site? You shouldn’t have to do anything. The Future 62
- 63. Summary
- 64. 60% of Google searches are now from mobile.
- 65. Don’t have a mobile site? Google will crawl your desktop version instead.
- 66. A good desktop-oriented site is better than a bad mobile version.
- 67. Responsive site? You shouldn’t have to change anything.
Editor's Notes
- Today I am going to speak about Mobile first optimisation for non-responsive websites. Within this talk I am going to cover.
- The Mobile first update, what do we know?
- What does Google want?
- And im going to show you our first steps on the journey to mobile first.
- But let me start by telling you abit about myself and my role at Auto Trader
- My names Mat I am an SEO Consultant at Auto Trader. I have been at Auto Trader for over 5 years and I have worked on some of the largest automotive customer SEO accounts in the country. I Moved to Auto Traders specialist commercial team around a year ago. – The commercial side of Auto Trader includes Vans, Bikes, Leisure such as caravans, Trucks/HGV’s, Plant Machinery and Farming equipment this side of the business needed a lot of care and attention especially with updates such as mobile first on the horizon. So with that in mind.
- what do we know about the Mobile first update ?
- Nearly 60% of searches on google are now from mobile devices. And Google wants its index and results to represent their users. Who are now mobile. This is why a mobile first index is in Googles best interest.
- What if you don’t have a mobile site? Although Google wants you to have a mobile site, it will crawl your desktop version instead. But is that what you want in this day and age? Stephen Kenwright spoke last year about how “best practice is not enough and if everyone followed standard practise then everyone is standard.” – in 2017 you shouldn’t only have a desktop site. If you have a non responsive site due to current platform/developer limitations then this presentation should definitely help you.
- Google have said that they will look at the mobile version of your site. If the mobile version has less content than the desktop site, Google will probably just see the mobile version with less content. Which isn’t great. What does that mean for your Meta titles and descriptions? Or the content your serving to try and drive conversions ? Is that how you want yourselves to appear in the search results for up too 60% of Google searches?
- Google has previously said that content that’s not deemed mobile-friendly will not rank as well. This remains the case with the new index. As well as having content on your mobile site, this content needs to be mobile friendly and accessible on a mobile device. So an example of this all the clickable elements cant be too close together, text cant be too small to read, content shouldn’t be wider than the screen and so on. But when will update launch ?
- This is the Initial announcement made on the webmaster blog back in November 2016.
- We have since had Further updates on twitter. But still no go live date.
- So 7 months after official announcement on the webmaster blog, back in November 16. It looks like Google are now pushing this update back as far as next year. And still have not confirmed an official release date.
- Even though this update has been delayed we still need to be thinking mobile first. Google will still continue to use the current index for the mean time, but we still need to be creating content and building pages with the mobile first index in mind. Because Google will rank both your mobile and desktop sites based on signals they get from crawling just your mobile site upon release of this update.
- So what does Google Want from us?
- Google have said If you have a responsive site or a dynamic serving site where the primary content and mark-up is equivalent across mobile and desktop, you shouldn’t have to change anything. This is where having a responsive site is fantastic, hopefully with this in place you shouldn’t have to change anything on site. For this particular update anyway.
- Make sure to serve structured mark-up for both the desktop and mobile version of your site. If you have structured mark-up in place, you can verify they match across desktop and mobile, by typing the URLs of both versions into the Structured Data Testing Tool, and then compare the output.
- Ofcourse Use the robots.txt testing tool to verify that your mobile version is accessible to Googlebot.
- What If you only have a desktop site? Google will continue to index your desktop site just fine, even if they are using a mobile user agent to view your site. But is this best practise in 2017? Probably not.
- But with that being said its good to keep in mind that, a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site.
- It's better for you to build up your mobile site and launch it when ready.
- So with taking all this into consideration our Truck, Plant and Farm section had a problem with the mobile versions of there sites.
- Even before the update was announced we where planning to migrate over to a responsive site.
- We where planning this as our current split of traffic is around 46-52% month on month and is continuing to grow. But on average around 50% of our traffic come from mobile.
- But Of course everyone has internal challenges and we are no different. For example we currently have a different code base for desktop & mobile. This used to cause to confusion. As when I would ask for a change I was usually be faced with the question “would you like this change on desktop or mobile” We have since completed a massive learning piece for all of our business around SEO and the mobile first update and questions like this have since become a thing of the past. But aside from these challenges Google has also advised on some technical changes to sites.
- So Google advised if your primary content is different across each version of your site you should consider making some changes. This was definitely the case for us.
- Google also advised that it will continue to use canonical links as a guide to understand your content across different versions of the site. Google will use these links to serve the correct results on desktop or mobile. Again this was not something that was utilised by ourselves.
- So our Truck, Plant and Farm channels currently operate on two different site versions. A desktop version and a separate mobile version defined by /mobile.
- Our deeper level URL’s also caused confusion for Google as it was difficult to see which pages are the same.
- In turn Google struggled to rank the mobile friendly page over the desktop version (Which when served to a consumer was a terrible journey.)
- So For example John Deere (which is a tractor brand for anyone unsure) its desktop URL looked like this (http://farm.autotrader.co.uk/used-farm-machinery/john-deere)
- and our mobile version (farm.autotrader.co.uk/mobile/search?make=john-deere&seoidentifier=true) As you can see just by the URL these pages where created as an after thought and not built with SEO best practise in mind.
- As you can imagine this would be very difficult for Google to understand which version to serve a user, so we would typically see a mobile user shown the desktop version, which is a really bad experience as these pages are not mobile friendly.
- So what changes did we make ?
- We have since mapped all the relevant pages to their mobile equivalent.
- Here's an example of just a few of the pages with the mobile URL’s on the left and the desktop on the right. Just to give you an idea of the scale of this it was over 2,000 desktop to mobile page mappings.
- So then we told Google which pages had a mobile equivalent. We did this by using two versions of a canonical tag. As I mentioned earlier this is something that was not utilised, and something that Google recommended implementing. For those unsure about Canonical tags the above link should take you to a great presentation I seen at Brighton SEO this year titled “So you think you know canonical tags” – by Sean Butcher
- The first we used on the desktop site was a rel alternative tag. This tag tells Google we have an alternative version of the page, it is currently viewing in this case the URL containing /mobile.
- Here is an example of that tag in place.
- The second tag we used was on the mobile site and this is a regular Canonical tag. This tells Google the desktop version is the original source of the content and is not a duplication on the mobile site.
- Again here is an example of that tag in place on our site.
- So we have now told Google that these pages are the same. But that isn’t enough so we also matched Content
- This included, page content, H1’s, Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions. We made a basic checklist to make sure we where consistent with this across our site.
- Here is the guide we followed so that we where consistent across all our pages.
- So after these changes where made what results did we see ?
- So, one week after the changes being live we did a week on week comparison of just visitors who hit the /mobile version. (the example I am using is on our trucks site)
- So Week before live we had a 0.08% CTR. And the Week after live we had a 18.59% CTR. (more than an 18% growth)
- Again Week before live we had 8,400 Impressions. And Week after live we had 20,256 Impressions. (a 11,856 or 141% Increase)
- Week before live we had 7 visits in a week. Week after live we have 3,766 (A 53,700% increase)
- And lastly the Week before Live our average position was 1.4 Week after go live average position was now 2.4 a drop of 1 on average, but we did have an increase in ranking keywords. The increase was around 54 in the first week alone.
- What about our Google Analytics? Now these stats are a Year on Year comparison.
- So Our Bounce rate improved from 50% to 12%
- Our New users increased from 143 to 4,855 (3,295% growth)
- Our Users increased from 1,713 to 15,135 (783% growth)
- Our Sessions increased from 286 to 18,991 (6,540% growth)
- And this is my favourite, Our Average Session Duration increased from 21 seconds to 6 minutes 52 (A 6 minute 31 second growth)
- Of course we have seen a similar dip in traffic to our desktop site. But this means users who are using a mobile device are now landing on the correct page.
- So Although these results where great, what do we have planned for the future?
- The work shown was by no means a fix fit for the future. It was more of a stop gap to make sure we started on the mobile first journey before a responsive platform is released by our development team. And that is our next step a responsive site.
- The main reason for this goes back to the first thing Google mentioned in their Blog release of the mobile first update. Stating that “If you have a responsive site or a dynamic serving site where the primary content and mark-up is equivalent across mobile and desktop, you shouldn’t have to change anything”. And in turn we believe this will serve the best experience for our users and will also be the best futureproofing for our site moving forward.
- So just to summarise and to provide some takeaways.
- Nearly 60% of searches on google are now from mobile devices.
- If you don’t have a mobile site Google will still crawl your desktop version instead.
- A functional desktop site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site.
- And finally If you have a responsive site you shouldn’t have to change anything.
- So that’s my story of how we at Auto Trader ensured SEO for mobile first on a none responsive platform. I thought I would share my experience with this and hope its been useful for those in the same position. Has anybody got any questions ?