Mobile Friendly Test: Why It Is Important for SEO?

What is Mobile Friendly Test?

The mobile version of the website is a duplicate version of the main site, for which a special layout is used that allows you to conveniently view and navigate through the resource pages from mobile phones and tablets.

Mobile friendly test is a special tool which allows you to see what score your website has due to Google search calculation parameters. This is a set of factors provided by Google that helps determine how convenient the mobile version of your site is to users.

This is an implementation of comfortable access to the whole website from mobile devices. In smartphones displays, the site is shown in one column, so before you make a mobile version of the site, the developer needs to think carefully about the design – place everything in such a way as not to cut down the visitor in the functionality and make interaction with the resource as convenient as possible.

Steps to make your website mobile friendly:

Tip 1: Do not create one more separate mobile-friendly website

The web is changing so fast and Google tries to follow all these changes. Therefore you might hear about mobile-first indexing. It means that mobile friendliness becomes one of the main ranking factors for indexing websites. Some developers come up with the idea to make a separate site for the mobile version. However, it means having to cut out content with important information like photos, videos, etc. This makes your mobile-friendly website less rich and interesting for users. Moreover, by having two websites with the same content (one for desktops and another for mobile) you will have two separate links in search system like Google. Therefore, it will cause troubles with the purpose of trying to have the content show up. That is why you do not need it.

Note: But if you have decided to do separate versions of your website, don`t forget to place rel=”alternate” mobile attribute. It`s an important step to prevent your website from duplicate content penalty issues. So let’s sort out how “rel mobile” attribute works.  

Firstly, place on each page of your desktop version a special tag with the attribute link rel = “alternate”, which will lead to the corresponding page of the mobile version. This will help GoogleBot find the content which is optimized specially for mobile devices. We need to point to search bots that there is another version of the website`s page.

Your piece of code will be composed like:

Secondly, each web page of mobile version should contain the canonical tag, which leads to the version of the same page but with the usual formatting:

Tip 2: You should only use responsive design

Responsive design is the best solution for mobile friendly websites. Why? Because it allows developers to make the site viewable on different devices with different sizes of the site. With responsive design, you will be able to make your images and layouts more flexible, and keep stylesheet media queries cascading from the beginning. With the help of responsive website design, the web page will figure out the user’s screen size and accordingly change the layout. Therefore, it will greatly simplify the task for developers while creating a site.

Tip 3: Always use a viewport meta tag

The browser rendering engine determines the size and scale of the website size through the viewport. That is why it is a critical code while building a multi-device web resource. If you will not use the viewport meta tag, your website will not work properly on mobile devices. It literally tells the browser how the page should fit the screen.
This screenshot is an example of what you can use in the document headline:

Tip 4: Button sizes and font sizes importance

Button sizes as font sizes are very important for mobile devices. Why? With small website buttons, users may just miss them or hit the wrong one accidentally. It is always annoying when your fingers literally cannot hit the right button because of its size. Apple recommends going with 44px by 44px button sizes or above.
Your mobile friendly website should have a font size of at least 14px, it is not that big! By using a 14px size you make sure that users will not need to use zoom in order to read the content on your site. You can use a 12px font size only for labels and forms.

Tip 5: Images with high-resolution

If you consider your website with a high standard, high-resolution images are mandatory. The latest IOS, Android, and Windows mobile devices have high-definition screens. So, to avoid blurry or pixelated images, we recommend using very high-resolution images, which will resolve your issue automatically.

Tip 6: Do not use default zoom

We definitely do not recommend using auto-zoom for the mobile-friendly website. It can mess up layout elements like navigation content and images. Using meta tag will solve zoom problems automatically. However, by default, zoomed images can appear too big or too small, which will annoy users because of having to waste time adjusting.

Tip 7: YouTube videos on mobile site

It is not that easy to use videos on the mobile website version. YouTube video is the best answer to this problem. Videos on YouTube combat all difficulties in viewing videos on mobile – in fact, YouTube already made everything for you, all you need to do is to use it.

Tip 8: Wide user’s mobile experience

What does it mean? You can make a perfect website, but you should always provide a choice to your users. “View desktop version” or “go to the full site” is a necessary button because there are still users who prefer the full site interface, so give them this opportunity.

Tip 9: Always testing

Never stop testing! It is usually possible to make a better version. You should always think as a user and find out what can be further developed, changed or even deleted. You can try Google mobile-friendly test tool and check if your site is perfect for Google search.

• Make tests with different mobile devices of different operating systems (Android, Windows, and IOS);
• Make tests on different screen size devices (tablets, surfaces, and other);
• Test not only the front page but all of them, all buttons and user actions;
• Ask your friends or a specialist to test it for you, as they should have a fresh look.

These tips should help you make your website mobile friendly. Do not forget how important it is for you to have satisfied website users – you need to create maximum comfort for users, so that it turns them into a permanent audience.

Why do you need Mobile-Friendly Test?

As you know it`s really important to gain traffic to your website from different sources. It means that there are different types of users who prefer to search on the internet from different devices, so webmaster should always be in trend. If you have bad results of this test, your website would fail in Google SERP. So it`s a valuable factor of ranking. Nowadays, more and more websites are trying to stand by Google demands. When your website is mobile-friendly, you will not only make it convenient for your users, but you will also see a huge improvement in your search engine ranking.