Responsive Design and the Mobile Search Tipping Point
One of the reasons why we pulled the trigger on getting our site up on a new mobile-optimized theme wasn’t just all the noise that Google and professionals were making in the SEO space. We were seeing it for ourselves in the observations of our clients’ sites. On our clients with responsive sites, we could see a substantial growth in mobile search impressions as well as an increase in mobile search visits.
If you’re not seeing increased visits in your analytics, you have to check webmaster data. Remember, analytics is only measuring the people already arriving on your site. Webmasters measures how your site is performing in search results – whether the visitors actually click through or not. As we converted all of our clients over to responsive sites in the last year, we continued to see nice increases in mobile search traffic.
And you’re not done just yet. Being responsive is one thing, but ensuring your page elements are optimized for folks tapping through with their thumbs is another. Google Search Console provides detailed information on your site and what you need to improve for an optimized mobile experience.
How to Verify your Mobile Search Performance
Verifying your mobile search performance isn’t difficult. Login to Google Search Console, navigate to Search Traffic > Search Analytics, modify your filter and date range, and you can see how you’re site is trending. You can view both your clicks and the impressions. As you can see with our site, we were fairly consistent until the new responsive design recently provided a nice boost.
Google simply prefers responsive design. This is evidenced on the various search engine algorithm iterations over time, and particularly in this most recent change. Responsive design makes it easier for Google to crawl, index, and organize your site. Download Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Mobile Marketing for additional information.