What are mobile search results, and how is it different from PC search results? Surely, many have encountered a problem when going to a website from a mobile device was almost impossible. The screen displayed just a reduced copy of the PC pages. You constantly had to enlarge fragments of text and buttons to read or click without risking a miss.
To prevent visitors from encountering such problems, website owners use various methods of mobile delivery. That is, they configure the resource for correct display on phone or tablet screens. Why is this so important?
According to StatCounter statistics, back in 2016, the percentage of mobile connections in the world exceeded PC connections. And since then, the gap has only increased. Today, about 5 billion people own phones. More than 77% of smartphone owners, when searching for information, prefer portable devices, even when they are at home with access to a PC. Therefore, simply ignoring such a number of potential clients on the Internet is very unprofitable.
Search Engine Requirements
There is a trend of “telephonization” of sites, not without the help of search engines. After all, it is also important for them that users do not experience difficulties when searching for information using smartphones. And therefore, they introduced another criterion that affects the position of the resource on the search results page – correct display on phone screens.
The requirements of search engines for mobile optimization are not very different. The main thing is that it is there – otherwise, the site will not see a place in the TOP mobile search results. Let’s consider the example of the most popular search engine in the world – Google.
Key Criteria for Evaluating Mobile Optimization
Google’s requirements for a site are as follows:
- You should tell the bot that the site is also intended for mobile devices.
- No indexing errors.
- With a lack of Flash and Silverlight elements, it is better to use HTML5 code instead.
- The text must be readable without scaling.
- Lack of horizontal scrolling.
- There should be sufficient space between hyperlinks.
The purpose of these requirements is convenience for mobile users. Having optimization for a phone gives an undeniable advantage in search engine ranking.
How to check a website for mobile optimization
Very simple. Just go to it from your phone. If the page structure does not differ from what is displayed on your PC, the site is not optimized. Of course, this will simply help you find out whether the resource is configured for the phone or not. To get more useful information, it is better to check using auxiliary services like Google Search Console.
To use Google Search Console, simply go to the service page, enter the site URL, and run the check.
Thus, you can find out in a few minutes whether your site fully complies with the search engine criteria. And also see the main errors. But it is worth remembering that the information you receive concerns only the page whose address you specified, usually the main one. Therefore, it is better to conduct several checks of different types of pages.
What is better, the adaptive design of the current template or the mobile version
As a rule, to adjust a site for phone screens, either adaptive design or a mobile version is used. In the first case, pages with one URL are displayed on all devices, in the second case, different ones.
When using adaptive, the image adjusts to the device’s screen resolution. Blocks are arranged sequentially one after another and are accessible with vertical scrolling. In order not to clutter the already small screen space, some elements are collapsed in sidebars.
In the mobile version, everything is different. In fact, it is an additional site hosted on a subdomain of the main one. Most often, the letter m or the prefix mobile is simply added to the address of the main one, so as not to cause confusion. The structure of the mobile version is much simpler than the desktop one and often resembles it only in visual design; only the most important information and functions can be found on it.
To understand which method is better, it is worth taking a closer look at their main features.
Main differences
Price: It takes much less time and money to create an adaptive version. After all, a mobile version implies the creation of a whole separate site.
Search engine optimization: When there is a mobile version, difficulties often arise during promotion, for example, duplication of the content of the main site. In adaptive, such problems do not exist. Google recommends adaptive design.
Performance: The loading speed of mobile version pages is higher, as they weigh much less. And with adaptive design, the page is loaded in full.
Updating content and resource support: Regularly updating content, making edits to the structure and updating information on two sites at once is much more difficult than on one. Therefore, the advantage is for the adaptive one.
Usability: As a rule, adaptive is more informative; almost all information is available on it, pages for PC, just the least valuable is hidden so as not to clutter the space. And mobile versions are often more convenient to navigate due to their simplicity. But to a greater extent, everything depends on the skills of the developer; an experienced specialist will be able to competently combine informativeness and simplicity on any of the types of optimization.
Universality: The mobile version on tablets is displayed the same way as on smartphones, only stretched across the width of the screen. But in the adaptive version, a separate design template is provided for this. This looks much better and allows you to more effectively manage the free space on the screen with a large extension. After all, you can fit more functional elements to save the user time searching for them.
Adaptive has almost replaced phone versions. They are used only for sites where the traffic density is too high and it is necessary to maintain a high loading speed. Therefore, we will talk further exclusively about adaptive layout.
How to adapt a website for phones
There are two ways to do this. The first is using plugins – a quick and easy method, but it does not always work well, and is often not applicable at all. The second is more difficult, it requires either the skills of a layout designer, or time and persistence to figure it out. But the result will be much better. We will consider them in more detail below.
To evaluate your own work, it is better to use the same Google Search Console. After all, there is always a chance that elements will not be displayed correctly in some browsers or smartphone models. This means that simply taking your own device and going to the page from it is not enough.
Adaptive layout using special plugins
This method requires virtually no layout or programming skills since you won’t have to work with code.
Plugins are add-ons to the CMS, with the help of which you can add new functions to the site by simply downloading, installing, and configuring them for adaptive design on WordPress, JetPack, WP Mobile Detector, WP Mobile Edition, WPtouch, and some other plugins are used. They either completely replace the adaptive layout or ensure the correct display of certain elements of the resource on mobile phones. It is worth remembering that not all of them are compatible, and in an attempt to please users in every little thing, installing as many add-ons as possible can only make things worse.
Of course, to correctly configure the plugin or plugins you will have to spend some time, but it will take much less time than for independent layout.
But there are also some downsides. When creating a unique design, you draw it yourself instead of using ready-made templates, and because of this, plugins may not work correctly. Some free add-ons can place their ads on your site, cluttering up the content and scaring away visitors. Also, not all CMSs have such a variety of plugins as WordPress, so you may simply not find the add-on you need. If the resource is created from scratch (without using a content management system), then the option with plugins is completely excluded.
Adaptive layout by working with code
This requires a bit more technical knowledge. One of the least labor-intensive ways is to create an adaptive one using the @media directive in CSS (cascading style sheet). You will only have to work with one style.css file, specifying which properties should be applied to the specified elements at a certain screen resolution.
One of the most common mistakes in mobile optimization is the absence of the Viewport meta tag. It is responsible for displaying the page by the width of the screen. And if you forget about it, Google will have two complaints about you at once. Firstly, the presence of the meta tag is specified among the requirements for mobile search results. Secondly, the text will most likely not adjust to the width of the screen, and horizontal scrolling will appear, which search engines also do not like.
Conclusion
Nowadays, mobile users’ interests are more important than ever in website development. Adopting a mobile-first design approach, where the mobile screen is used as the primary basis for the design and then adapted for other resolutions, is becoming increasingly effective and essential.
This method ensures that your site performs optimally on mobile devices, which is crucial for capturing and retaining a larger mobile audience. For the best results and significant improvements, it’s wise to collaborate with the best digital marketing agency. Remember, the sooner you start optimizing for mobile, the more effectively you’ll reach and engage with your mobile users.
