I’ve Heard That: You’re Telling Me This Index Is Mobile?

Speaker 1 (00:03):

Welcome to “I’ve Heard That,” the podcast from Hurrdat marketing that discusses digital marketing trends, tips, and more.

Meghan (00:10):

Welcome back. We have a lot to cover today. I’m so excited to talk about this. I have Ross back and Aaron back, so welcome.

Aaron (00:19):

Nice to be back.

Ross (00:21):

It’s good to be back. Yep.

Meghan (00:21):

Awesome, so the mobile index… mobile-first index rolled out March, 2021. Take me back. What does that mean? How do we get there?

Ross (00:32):

Well, just to give you a little history lesson, it was way back in 2015 maybe 2016, that Google first introduced the idea that they were going to bring in a mobile index. At that point, it was way off in the future and you didn’t have to care about it, but in hindsight, people should have really taken a lot more notice of it because, I think as soon after as like 2017, sites started to be being moved from the desktop focused index to the mobile index. So what that means is basically Google has two different crawlers, it has a desktop crawler and a mobile crawler. And the mobile crawler looks at your website through a mobile viewer. So it’ll assess your website in… just as if you were looking at a mobile phone. So if your website wasn’t mobile friendly, then it would not get a very good score from the mobile crawler.

Ross (01:33):

So Google was really pushing people way back when to actually make sure that you had a dedicated mobile presence, whether that be a responsive site or like an m.website, something that was representative of a mobile experience. And then as I say, in 2017, 2018, that’s when Google really started to move websites across and people were getting notifications in Google search console that they had been moved over to the mobile indexing. And it’s been quite a long process. As I say, 2016, 2017. We were told about it, it’s 2017, 2018 as people started to be moved over. And then late 2019, early 2020 Google said, “okay, here’s your hard and fast date, March, 2021. We’re moving the entire web to mobile presence and the mobile index.” So even then, they gave people plenty of time, plenty of notice to actually do something about this, but a lot of people haven’t. so-

Meghan (02:32):

We’ve gotten mobile search surpass desktop, like ages ago.

Ross (02:37):

Five, six, seven years ago. Yeah.

Meghan (02:39):

So if you weren’t optimized, like you’ve already been missing the 8-ball.

Ross (02:42):

Exactly. Yes.

Meghan (02:43):

Yeah. So what do you consider… I know there’s a good way and a bad way, kind of best practice to… how do you adjust to be prepared for the mobile first index?

Aaron (02:55):

Yeah, I can definitely speak to the experience part of it a little bit. And maybe Ross, you can expand on the exact components that Google is looking for, for mobile friendliness, but definitely on the experience side. A mobile friendly site or mobile ready site, you really got to be thinking about that experience. And we all know people are looking at things and like need digestible content, like a lot of structure, but mobile has made that even more important. Especially as you scroll down a page, you really have to think about the order that things are showing up to people, how easy you’re making it for them to access that information. Even just the way the page loads.

Aaron (03:34):

It’s so much different, there’s so much less on the screen. So you have to think about, “okay, what’s that hero area? What’s the image that shows up there? What content am I bringing into that area? Do I have something actionable for that person to do within that? Or am I going to make them work down the page to do that?” So there’s a lot that goes into it. And definitely now we’re thinking mobile-first designs that we adjust to desktop instead of the other way around, because as you said the search volume and just mobile use in general has surpassed desktop quite a while ago. And even thinking about obviously social traffic is even more skewed towards mobile. So if the site’s not providing that experience, it’s just a real missed opportunity.

Meghan (04:19):

Yeah. I mean, I know we’ve talked about customer journey before and customer experience on site, and I feel like a lot of mobile experiences were just like a really stripped down, watered down version of a desktop to the point where you couldn’t even convert, or do half of what you wanted to do on a mobile experience. So-

Aaron (04:38):

Absolutely.

Meghan (04:39):

Times have definitely shifted. And I guess that goes back to our conversation of, if that’s where your customer wants to do business, and that’s what they’re there to do, then like help guide them along that way. Don’t make them go home and go to the desktop to finish.

Ross (04:52):

Yeah. And that’s the valid point you make there, people did adopt mobile versions of their website kind of early on, but they tended to be a stripped down version of the desktop site. So they may have been kind of mobile ready, but they weren’t mobile friendly. The experience that they were providing satisfied the need of five, six, seven, eight years ago, where people had mobile phones and they had a slower connection. So you had to strip things down so that you didn’t like it didn’t take forever for the page to load. Now we live in the broadband era and we have 5g, things are instant.

Ross (05:31):

So that’s one of the main reasons that Google has moved to the mobile index because we have, I say we, most people have access now to a fast internet connection. So having a full experience website on your mobile phone is not the exception anymore. It’s kind of the norm. So having that stripped down version of years ago, doesn’t satisfy the need now. So when Google is looking at these stripped down versions, they’re only getting a bite-sized chunk of what you’re actually offering. Even though you think you may have a mobile presence, you might have that stripped down version, which now would become your entire ranking set that Google will look at. So you’d be missing out on tens of pages, hundreds of pages, potentially.

Meghan (06:17):

Yeah. It’s like okay grade 10% of my site here Google.

Ross (06:20):

Quite literally that yes. So that’s something that people have to be aware of is that yes, you may have a mobile version of your website, but is it reflective of the full experience that people were getting on your desktop site?

Meghan (06:31):

That’s not what you want to be judged on if that’s the case.

Ross (06:33):

No, no, no, because people-

Meghan (06:33):

Going to lose your ranking.

Ross (06:33):

Exactly.

Meghan (06:36):

Exactly.

Aaron (06:37):

Yes.

Meghan (06:38):

So what happens for those that have a separate desktop site versus their mobile site? What’s Google think about that?

Ross (06:48):

That’s still perfectly fine. You can have two completely separate experiences, but you make sure that you’ve got them linked with the appropriate alternate tags. So the Google can see that relationship between this page is the mobile version of the desktop page. So you can still have that and still rank as you did before. You got to make sure you have that correct linking with the alternate tags underneath, and then making sure that you have everything represented on both sides. So you don’t have a different experience or different set of content or a different set of products on the mobile that you’d have on desktop. So you’d have to make sure that both sites offer exactly the same experience, exactly the same product, exactly the same services, just in a mobile friendly, and ready way on the mobile site. But it’s linked using the alternate tanks.

Aaron (07:34):

And that’s becoming far less common, right? Because-

Ross (07:37):

Very much so, very much so.

Aaron (07:39):

Because it’s so much more maintenance, you’re essentially operating two entirely different sites, and-

Ross (07:44):

Yeah.

Aaron (07:44):

If you do have a good mobile friendly design, it’s going to work on both desktop and mobile. So-

Ross (07:50):

Yeah.

Aaron (07:51):

I think people definitely prefer to manage one site over two.

Ross (07:55):

Google prefers to have a responsive website, so it’s just the set one website that responds differently to the viewport that’s seeing the site. So it will resize images, it will resize the text, it will move things around, depending on the view size. There’s several different technologies that are out there. You can, you can have adaptive sites, which you have several different sized templates that would then be used, but that’s kind of heavy and slow because you’re loading a different experience, different sizes, different pages. So the responsive version is the preferred method, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t still succeed with one of the alternatives.

Meghan (08:29):

Yeah. I guess it goes back to what we’ve said, like all along is evaluating like what our, what our client’s goals are. And then how does that translate into this experience? Or how does it translate into the customer journey? Like what are the pieces and where do they fall into place when we’re designing and thinking about what we want on their site.

Ross (08:45):

Exactly. And as Aaron mentioned, we take it from a mobile first perspective, design everything as a mobile device first, and then resize it for a desktop afterwards, we make sure that the mobile friendly, the mobile ready aspect of it fits the bill exactly. And then we can move on from there once we’ve okayed that the mobile site and the desktop site will come afterwards.

Meghan (09:07):

Yeah. So you clients’ checking site and the design process on your desktop. Remember your clients are looking at it on their mobile. So I think that’s just like part of the process when we’re showing and going through the design development process, we’re like, “get out your phone and take a look”, of course, because yeah, we can reverse engineer it into desktop. And if we’re designing with mobile first then.

Ross (09:30):

But thankfully we have tools now that we can actually develop on a desktop device that will actually-

Meghan (09:36):

We.

Ross (09:37):

Yes, we, that we can actually develop on a desktop site, but we can actually display it and we can run it through with the client on a desktop screen, but in the mobile format. So they don’t have to-

Meghan (09:48):

We don’t have like a shoebox full of old iPhones or something.

Aaron (09:50):

But it’s a good point because when you do see, you see examples of like sites that get built desktop first and that whole review process happens, and then you go to like a responsive or down to a smaller size and you’re like, “Oh, this doesn’t really make sense”. Yeah. Just the way the sequence and things are happening and just the way it’s laid out. And it’s like, “Oh, that doesn’t make any sense”. So it’s definitely important to be reviewing and just like viewing your site from a mobile perspective as you evaluate it and think about those things. Because you can just forget about mobile. If you worked on your computer, that’s probably where you’re going to view the site and how you’re going to evaluate it. And then all of a sudden you see it mobile and you’re like, “Whoa. Yeah, this isn’t a great experience.”

Ross (10:39):

That’s not what I signed up for. Yeah. You make a very valid point is you can have that design in the desktop and it looks wonderful, it’s great. It has all of the user experience that you want, but then when you shrink it down to a mobile website, it doesn’t pass the mobile friendly test because the images are too small or the buttons or the clicks, the links on are just too small and too close together. So you’re actually trying to click it and you can’t actually click on that target because they’re too close together because you’re-

Meghan (11:11):

You like fat finger it, except for it’s not your fingers.

Ross (11:13):

Trying to squeeze too much into it because you didn’t design it from a mobile first aspect. You’re trying to squeeze everything you could see on the desktop site, into this small mobile format and then end up falling foul of the mobile friendly algorithm because the touch targets are too close together, or the images are too close together or they’re too small or the things are that because you’re just trying to squeeze everything in, rather than designing it from a mobile first perspective. So you can lay out everything as you would want to see it on the mobile device. And then you can go to the desktop and make it look pretty for a desktop.

Aaron (11:46):

So Ross, I think most people know what it’s… when they see a good mobile site, what that looks like and what that experience feels like. What are the technical components that go into it that Google is looking for to say, “Yes, this is a mobile friendly or mobile ready website”.

Ross (12:04):

Yes. So some of the things I just talked about in terms of having those touch points, so the buttons, links, images appropriately sized, when it comes to the actual coding, it’s exactly the same as a desktop. It wants a quick loading, a fast loading website that the can be shown like quickly because it’s a mobile device. You don’t want to be waiting 10 minutes for it to load up. So making sure that the coding behind the scenes, the scripts that are loaded asynchronous they’re loaded when they’re needed, you can use the lazy loading for the images. So only the things that are on the screen are loaded at the time. And then as you’re scrolling up, things are loading kind of like a page ahead. So that there are kind of things that we’re looking at. We’re still trying to develop a fast loading website, just making sure that the components of it actually fit the mobile friendly algorithms and they fit the screen that they’re designed for, that kind of viewpoint. Not designed for desktop and then try to be squeezed into a different format.

Meghan (13:03):

Well, it’s all kind of common sense. I mean, we’ve talked before about designing for your user and then that’s what pleases the algorithm well, all of those things make sense. Hey, if you can’t, if you have to keep clicking something and then going back, cause you accidentally click the wrong thing. Well, yeah, the touch points being too close. Well, that’s part of the algorithm, but it just makes sense to do it that way because of the user.

Ross (13:22):

Yeah. And that’s why it’s part of the algorithm, is because Google knows from years of experience that if people can’t interact with the site as they want to, it’s a bad experience, it was a bad user experience. So that would end up with the user going back to the SERPs and picking your competitor. So making sure that you have that design in place that allows them to interact with your site and get what they were searching for and getting it without having to press the button 10 times and then click the wrong one because they’re too close together or they’re too small.

Meghan (13:54):

I got the opposite problem, that’s why I don’t have the iPhone max, because my thumb can not reach down to that top left corner. So, I mean, there’s just like all those things that should be thought through when we’re designing, like how is it going to be used? Is this easy to use? Like, is it too squished, too spaced?

Ross (14:10):

Yeah. It comes down to things like some people are left-handed. So if you’ve got all your buttons on the wrong side of the phone, it’s going to be a bad experience. Are you going to try to incorporate something that actually works for everybody? Yeah. So try to have your touch points and your buttons and your links in a central position rather than all listed down the left hand side or the right hand side ,so just try to keep those things in mind when it’s a desktop and you’ve got a mouse, that’s not a consideration. The fact that we’re actually using a thumb or a finger makes that a very valid consideration.

Meghan (14:43):

Yeah, exactly.

Aaron (14:44):

One thing I’ve noticed that’s a pretty common mistake is, people will have a menu structure where the top level item that’s visible is not actually a link. It’s just a dropdown and they don’t correct that over on mobile. So people are clicking that and nothing’s happening because the functionality across isn’t the same. So it’s just all those little things like, you really have to consider those things when you’re creating a positive mobile experience.

Ross (15:16):

Yeah, definitely. Especially here, have a big site then you, you’ve got all this navigation that people can’t see because you obviously can’t have a huge navigation on the mobile device. It just doesn’t exist. So that’s why we have the hamburger menus and you see those three little lines and oftentimes you click on those and you get the expandable menus then. Rather than seeing the whole menu listed across the top. And then you hit that and then it drops down. It’s actually hidden away. So that it’s there when you need it, but it’s not trying to be squeezed onto the mobile.

Meghan (15:45):

Yeah, onto the, yeah the words viewed. You can’t squeeze it in that doesn’t work. So what other pitfalls do you guys see? What are some of the other major no-nos and mistakes that happen on mobile?

Ross (15:57):

Yeah. The ones that we see still are websites that were design desktop first, and then they didn’t have a mobile website. So they tried to squeeze that desktop experience with a similar design. Obviously they can’t fit the same design there, but it’s just a replication of what is on the desktop in a small mobile form, and it just does not work. Because we know that they had that designed for a desktop device. And then somebody came along and said, “okay, we’ll keep this design, but we’ll just turn it a little bit and tweak it here and then just try and squeeze it onto the screen. And you can see just by the user experience that, that wasn’t a mobile first design.

Meghan (16:39):

Check, your analytics, it’s not working.

Ross (16:41):

Exactly, exactly.

Aaron (16:42):

I’d say it’s just overlooking the way, like a page loads on mobile. And that first impression it’s so different between desktop and mobile. There’s, you’ll see as an example, would be a site that has just one word up in big hero area and on desktop, that looks really cool. And you can see what’s right below it. So you can kind of see the supporting text when the page loads, but if just one word loads on mobile, you’re almost like, “okay, what was this page? Like, what am I doing here?” So, and you have to scroll down and then where’s the first button down the page. It might be multiple sections down the page where on a desktop device, you could see it from when the page loads.

Aaron (17:28):

So I just think it’s really evaluating that experience and thinking about, okay, if I knew nothing about this site, which is always hard to do when you’re familiar with the site, but if I knew nothing about the site and I was sitting this page for the first time, what would I think when this page loaded and what would be that action I’m supposed to take? And those are the things I think I still see. And it’s similar to what Ross said. It’s a desktop. The Zion coming over to mobile instead of the other way around

Ross (17:57):

The visual experience of a desktop site is remarkably different to a mobile site because you have all of that real estate. You can have those huge hero images. You can have multiple images, you can have multiple blog cards. You have so much real estate to play with, but when you’ve got the mobile device, you have a single track. So you can’t squeeze all of that on there and make it work. So you have to design it mobile first, understand how it’s going to be laid out, understand how people are going to interact with it, understand how that’s going to feed into the rest of the site. It’s a process, it’s something that you can’t just try and squeeze into it from a desktop site. You have to think of it completely differently. It’s an entirely different kind of thought process and design process because it’s still the same website, but the way people interact with it is like night and day different.

Aaron (18:48):

One thing I really like that people are doing now with mobile designs as some of the sideways scrolling. So I think people are getting smarter, designs are getting smarter about, “okay, if I want to feature five different things,” five different blog posts, for example, or something like that within this page, you can just scroll sideways through them. And it doesn’t create this super bulky long page. And I know people are used to scrolling, so that’s not like a huge deal, but just…

Meghan (19:16):

It’s like an organized way, like a little carousel, for these blog articles or if I’m not wanting to look at blog articles, I can scroll up.

Aaron (19:26):

Right past it really quickly instead of having to go through all of them and…

Meghan (19:29):

Check all the blog articles.

Aaron (19:30):

Yeah, so I think there’s some good things happening right now. Designs are getting more savvy and we keep evolving to make things more mobile friendly while still providing that same benefit of all the things we want to on desktop.

Ross (19:42):

Yeah, and another thing that I could say is there were a lot of things on the desktop site that we can’t incorporate on a mobile version, but with the sideways swiping that can kind of incorporate some of those elements that we see on the desktop site, but include that in a smaller viewport. So like the swiping for the things left to right is definitely a way that you can replicate the feel of the desktop experience on a much smaller platform.

Meghan (20:10):

Yeah. That’s super smart. I think for me, like with COVID happening and now we’re starting to entertain eating out on patio of course, but QR codes and menus. Oh my gosh. They’re like such a pain point. If you have a PDF menu, please save us. Like update it because yeah, like for me, like when you scan the QR code and you have to go to a PDF menu and I’m like starting to scroll and I’ve honestly just started to give up and like, tell me what you want me to eat here because I can’t see your menu. I’m trying to think, are there other industries that you’ve seen that COVID has greatly impacted, whether it’s… I know we just said okay, back tracking, but the mobile-first and mobile ready, that’s what all this is about. But have there been other industries where we’re saying maybe people are not on the go as much and they’re still relying really heavily on desktop or vice versa that have become hyper mobile. Like if you’re not on mobile, it’s not going to work.

Ross (21:04):

I think the service industry, or the blue collar professionals, things like HVAC systems-

Meghan (21:14):

Oh, like home services.

Ross (21:15):

Home services, definitely. I think you traditionally, rightly or wrongly, look at those things while you’re at work or on a desktop that tends to be when you are doing that kind of thing. Whereas you doing something that’s fun, like restaurants or entertainment, you’re doing that on a mobile device whenever you’ve got a moment. So I think that there’s a definite split where it’s just kind of a service area as opposed to an entertainment area. I think entertainment is definitely gone full mobile. The whole experience, like you say, the QR codes. I don’t think they’re going to go away. I think people have realized that you don’t need to spend that money producing that paper menu, especially cause it changes on a frequent basis. So if they can save that money by having a PDF or some other way to-

Meghan (22:12):

Webpage.

Ross (22:12):

Exactly. So one of the industries that I’ve seen that has really taken this on board and is thriving from it is breweries and places like that who have welcomed apps like Untapped and Digital Pour, where they have their inventory on an app where they can just put in the QR code and they’ll send them directly to that menu on the app. So you can see what’s available right there and then, without any need for having to create a paper menu for it, it’s right there on your phone. And once like Digital Pour actually will tell you how much is left in the keg.

Meghan (22:50):

Yeah, that’s awesome.

Ross (22:51):

So I’ve got to get there and have that beer before it’s gone.

Meghan (22:54):

Hurry up.

Ross (22:54):

Exactly, yes. So I think there’s definitely areas like the entertainment and restaurant arena that probably will not go back fully to paper menus. But I think there are definitely industries that will still need that desktop presence.

Meghan (23:12):

Yeah. I mean, mobile-first is still mobile-first. I know on our last episode we were talking with Allie about if you’re paying for a click, you’re driving them there. I use the example of like, “Hey, my garage door is broken”. I wasn’t like, I’m going to go to my desktop and see this first, I was doing that kind of stuff on my mobile. So that probably still stands really heavy mobile for this home service industry, like the emergency type.

Ross (23:35):

And I think it’s generational too.

Meghan (23:35):

Oh yeah.

Ross (23:38):

I’m kind of on that cusp of old person and young person. So I grew up with when computers came around, so I’ve of grown up with them, whereas like the younger generations have been born into them. And then my parents obviously didn’t have anything electronic when they were young. So they probably won’t be embracing the mobiles. They’ll still be picking up the yellow pages if it’s still around.

Aaron (24:03):

I’d definitely say the way I kind of look at it as far as industries go is just the more research that is necessary, the more likely someone’s going to go to desktop and the simpler the experience needs to be, the more they’ll gravitate towards mobile. Like e-commerce in particular I think is so heavy mobile now because there’s not a whole bunch of research that goes into that. You just are looking at stuff you like, and if you decide to buy it, you decide to buy it. But like Ross said, if you were researching someone to renovate your home or something like-

Meghan (24:38):

Some of our B2B clients are super technical.

Aaron (24:40):

B2B clients is a great example. I think we’re desktop, it’s probably getting closer to 50/50 or so, but not like that super strong, heavy mobile. Yeah.

Meghan (24:51):

Yeah.

Ross (24:52):

Because I think, I think the desktop usage hasn’t dropped, I just think the mobile usage has continued to grow. So I think when we see the lines that the desktop, maybe there’s a very steady drop, but it’s still kind of flat line. Desktop is still very much used. It’s just that the access to mobile devices has just skyrocketed over the last kind of 10 years or so.

Meghan (25:12):

Oh, I mean, there’s plenty of times where I’m on both like you’re looking something up here, you have it opened in some window and then you go about your day and you’re like, “Oh yeah, I was looking at that”. And you pull it up on your phone too. So it’s you go between experiences and you want to be able to pick up where you left off.

Ross (25:29):

Absolutely.

Aaron (25:29):

Yep.

Meghan (25:30):

Cool. Well, any other things you want to share about how we can help optimize, help our clients optimize for mobile-first?

Ross (25:38):

It’s not too late. Obviously everybody went mobile-first in March, but it’s not too late. If you don’t have a mobile presence, we can help you definitely. And we can get that presence and we can get that presence done pretty quickly, just so that you can be back on that same playing field as your competitors

Aaron (25:57):

And to kind of go along with that point, make the commitment to it. Don’t go half in by just trying to turn what you have into a mobile-

Ross (26:05):

Exactly. Yeah.

Aaron (26:06):

Experience. This is here to stay, this is the future. So the best way to approach this now, if you haven’t already, is to kind of zoom out, look at what would matter most on mobile and then kind of rebuild the site around that, including the design and the content. So don’t feel stuck with what you have and trying to make it work. Maybe with where this is going and how impactful it is. It’s worth it to take that step back and kind of reinvest and reinvent the site based on…

Meghan (26:38):

Yeah. It’s a big opportunity. It’s again, like its kind of makes that level playing field. I, if you haven’t optimized, maybe your competitors haven’t either and yeah. If you can grab that market share, then it’s yours for the taking.

Aaron (26:49):

Absolutely.

Ross (26:50):

Yep.

Meghan (26:51):

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Ross and Aaron. It’s pleasure speaking with you guys. I appreciate your expertise.

Aaron (26:56):

Thank you Meghan.

Ross (26:57):

Thank you.

Speaker 1 (26:58):

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Speaker 5 (27:07):

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