Google began to roll out its mobile-friendly algorithm update just over two months ago. What has changed since then and how will this impact your business website – Nilesh Patel, founder and CEO of LeadSquared and Meenu Joshi, Lead – Digital Marketing at LeadSquared discussed just that at the webinar last Friday. Here’s a brief summary of some of the questions asked during the session.
Question 1
Can we incorporate analytics and webmaster for only mobile friendly websites?
Analytics would be there for your complete website. If you want to look at traffic separately for both the websites, then you can set different views in your analytics account – one only for mobile and one only for desktop.
Question 2
If a Facebook page is linked to the business’ website and the visits are made through its Facebook page, can we find out the analytics of that website through its Facebook page? If yes, how can we find that out?
I’m guessing you are talking about whether you can track Facebook traffic in Google Analytics. You can set it up in Google Analytics.
Question 3
How do you set up webmaster tools?
It’s a straightforward process. You just need to go to webmasters and put in the URL of your website. Thereafter, you’ll need help from the person who takes care of the website from the back-end or the actual webmaster because you’ll need to verify that you own that particular site.
Question 4
If I do not have a mobile friendly website, will it affect the traffic ratio to my desktop website in search results?
It won’t have an impact right now. But that may change in the future. However, it will certainly push down your ranking on mobile.
Question 5
What is organic search? How to check this?
When a user searches on google search bar and finds a website in the search results page, the links of the pages on the search results page are called “organic listings”.
The following links will give you a better idea:
Question 6
How much time does it takes to crawl changes made for mobile sites?
As soon as you make the changes, you can go to webmasters. There, under ‘Settings’, there’s an option to force Google to reindex your website. If you do that, it would happen faster than it would otherwise happen.
Question 7
Is the organic ranking of our website on same searches, same for Android & iOS users?
It might be different, it might be the same. But if you are logged in as an Android user and you search for something, it will be different in that context.
Question 8
I have separate mobile and desktop websites. Please elaborate on the canocalization part.
If you are not maintaining the website yourself and if there is someone who helps you with it, then it would be best if you get your webmaster to work on it.
Basically how it works is this – there are 2 separate versions of your website. Let’s say, on your mobile, it would be m.website.com and on desktop it would be website.com. Using these tags, the alternate and the canonical tags, you are just telling the bots that this particular URL resides on this separate URL on mobile, and this particular URL on mobile resides on the separate URL on the desktop. You are just telling the bots not to read them as two separate ones, rather, read them as two corresponding parts of one particular URL.
If you get your webmaster on it, I’m sure they will be able to fix it for you. This is only relevant for those websites that have different URLs for mobile and desktop.
Question 9
We use landing pages for running paid campaigns only. Do you recommend we make them responsive?
Of course. It’s about user experience. Even if it’s organic, the user experience will affect your organic ranking.
