Google's mobile-friendly search label

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Google's mobile-friendly search label

- Hi, and welcome to another episode of weekly marketing tips. I'm Brad Batesole and this week I'd like to talk about some changes Google made to its search results and how you can make sure that your website isn't lost to Google. Now, we've all had a bad experience with a website on our mobile devices. You tap a search result from Google only to find you can't scroll or navigate the content. And because mobile is becoming such a dominating force in the online world, it was really only a matter of time before Google decided to take action. So, in mid November Google rolled out a change for their search results.

They're not adding a label to websites that are mobile friendly and this change isn't going to happen for everyone overnight but it's important to get ahead of the curve and make the necessary changes now so Google doesn't push you further down in the search results. Let's go ahead and look at an example of what this tag looks like. I'm sharing my screen from my mobile device and I've pulled up the Google.com homepage. I'm just going to do a generic search for search engines and hit search. So, right away, just under the green URL the first words you see is mobile friendly.

And I'm betting that this mobile friendly label will improve the click through rate for users that are using a mobile device. Not having the mobile friendly label next to a result that has one will likely signal to the user that your page might not be worth visiting. Now, Google is known to try news things and then abandon the practice altogether. We saw this with the use of Google plus profiles in search results just last year. So, keep that in mind. But regardless if Google keeps this label around long-term, it's a absolute must that your site is mobile friendly in today's digital landscape.

If it isn't, hopefully this gives you the motivation to migrate to a responsive or mobile friendly design. And if you've been fighting for your company to make this change, hopefully this is the last piece of evidence you need to convince the stakeholders. So, according to Google, they'll determine if your site is mobile friendly according to the following criteria. Your site avoids software that is not common on mobile devices such as Flash. Your site uses text that is readible without having to zoom. It sizes content so users don't have to scroll horizontally or again continue to zoom.

And it places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped from such a small screen size. Fortunately, Google's made it pretty easy to see if you'll pass. They've created a mobile friendly test here at Google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly. Now, you can also find this just by searching Google for the mobile friendly test. Once you arrive at this page, you'll enter in the page that you want to test and then choose Analyze. Let's take a look at Google.com to start.

I'll enter Google.com into the input box and then choose Analyze. And in just a couple of seconds they're gonna let us know whether we passed and here it says, "Great, this page is mobile friendly." And that's all we need to know. But what happens if you fail? So, to find that out, let's type in another URL, explorecalifornia.org and I'll analyze that link. So, here we can see the result when we have problems. Along the left-hand side, Google's going to tell us all the reasons the page is not mobile friendly.

In this case, the text is too small, our mobile view port is not set, our links are too close together, and we're using incompatible plugins. It also shows us how Google sees the page which can be helpful in detecting errors. Along the right-hand side are some additional tips and documentation you can use to further understand how to fix your site. Google had also published a web masters mobile guide which'll show you the best ways to create and improve your website. Now, the easiest way to get to that is just do a Google search for web masters mobile guide.

If you're going to be hiring a developer to help fix your site, it's still worth a read so you can make sure the best practices are being implemented correctly. I also recommend taking a look at my movie on selecting a designer and developer in the Online Marketing Fundamentals course here on Lynda.com. Again, I think this is a really important step to take, especially if you want to get a leg up on your competition. This is a great opportunity and Google is definitely experimenting with using these signals in the raking algorithm as well. Thanks for checking in this week.

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