5 Common Mobile Web Mistakes Google Wants You to Avoid

When Google talks to marketers, it pays to listen.

Organic search remains an important part of a complete SEO strategy. With the mobile web gaining relevance over the desktop, now is the time to protect your sites ranking.

Google recently updated it's guidelines for improving SEO for your sites mobile users. Below we list 5 common mobile site mistakes to avoid.

Blocked JavaScript & CSS

Simple: if your robots.txt file prevents Google's bots from crawling a pages javascript and CSS files, ranking will drop. Make sure your web master or SEO provider verifies the sites robots.txt file with Google Search Console.

Unplayable Content

We all know that Flash is all but rotting in the grave at this point, but there may be other reasons video or interactive content is not mobile compatible. Test your sites content, and replace any offending videos or elements with HTML 5 equivalents.

Mobile-Only 404s

If your site serves content to desktop users accessing a URL but shows an error page to mobile users, ranking will drop. Make sure that your sites desktop URLs resolve correctly on all pages for mobile users.

Interstitials

If your site has an overlay that covers the content a visitor was expecting to see, search ranking will be negatively affected. Sign-up forms, advertisements and other elements that must be dismissed by the user to access content should be kept to an absolute minimum.

Slow Mobile Pages

Google recommends that your sites pages render on mobile devices in less than one second to avoid lower ranking. For some sites based on popular CMS software such as Wordpress, large javascript libraries and complex CSS can dramatically impact load times on mobile devices. Optimize your site for mobile. Fancy animations and parallax effects won't matter if no one visits your site because you've fallen off the first page of search results.

Does your site pass the Mobile Web Test? Have suggestions of your own? Sound-off in the comments below!

Comtech offers a FREE website evaluation to determine if your website is mobile friendly - Call (855) 874-5522 for more details!