The mighty GOOG has announced a major update to its mobile ranking algorithm. Starting in July 2018, page speed will be a major ranking factor for mobile searches.
How does this affect your WordPress website rankings in a Google search, and what should you do to make sure that your web pages get high rankings on mobile devices?
So what exactly has Google announced?
It’s actually fairly simple. Google has announced that, starting in July 2018, their measure of page speed(yes their own) will be a ranking signal for mobile searches on Google. Page speed has been a ranking signal for quite some time now, but only for desktop searches.
“People want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible — studies show that people really care about the speed of a page. Although speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches. Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.
The ‘Speed Update,’ as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.”
So to cut this down to the basics:
you simply need to make sure that you have web pages on your WordPress website that load quickly on mobile devices if you want to get high rankings in Google’s mobile search results.
But will this even affect any of MY web page rankings?
According to Google’s latest announcement, this all new ranking signal ‘will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries‘.
Here’s the thing though, Google processes literally billions of searches every single day. Even this ‘small percentage’ of queries will amount to thousands or more likely millions of keywords and websites.
Check the speed of your WordPress website as seen by Google using their Google’s Page Speed Insights tool. It’s likely that your website has ‘average’ speed. If the Page Speed Tool shows that your website is ‘slow’, you really need to act.
How to optimize your web pages for mobile
Follow the tips of Google’s Page Speed Insights tool to improve your web pages. We also used GTMetrix to help us see what is taking time to load.
This latest of Google’s announcements indicates that the overall mobile user experience is now a real factor.
Mobile optimization is more than just optimizing the load time of web pages.
Monkey Help?
If this is all too much for you and you want a chat over coffee about the results you are getting from any of the above tools, drop us line in the Monkey Treehouse and we’ll be happy to discuss your options and some simpel ways to improve your score!
