Transcript
Hi, guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk and Tea.
Today what we'll be talking about is SEO and it being mobile first. This is a video and a conversation that has already been talked about a lot over the years, but I feel like it deserves its own video.
But before we begin, of course we're going to talk about the tea. Today we have this very special tea, it's called the Ryokucha Green. I might be butchering that, but it's okay. It only matters that it tastes good. This is actually one of my more favorite teas now. It actually tastes... It's a green tea but it tastes like toasted brown rice. I know that sounds weird, but if you drank it you would know what I mean. I did not get paid to do this. This is actually just one of my more favorite teas. And actually the reason why this tea is so important, it was actually gifted to me by a friend of mine named Brad. Brad's a great, good guy, great friend. I met him through a local AMA event where he was speaking and we just decided to keep talking and chatting and he's a great friend. We've had tea before and this one's essentially for you, Brad. Thanks again for the tea.
So let's jump on into the conversation. So the conversation again is about SEO being mobile first. The reason why that's so important is because a lot of people, when they think of SEO and they do marketing, a lot of design development and just overall thought process occurs with desktop in mind. And that's because a lot of people use desktop in their day-to-day business life. Now, the issue with that is it can cause down the road trickle down issues. So let's slow it down just a bit. The reason why SEO and mobile first matters is because there's two major areas of distinction when it comes to mobile first. First, when you're designing a website, a lot of people to this day still design with desktop first and mobile second. And so there's a great company called Vincit that has a great article about why you need to think of development in mobile first, but that's not really what we're talking about here today about development. You can read the article and I'll link it in the notes.
But what I want to discuss is that when you design a website, if you are designing it with a desktop in mind, the problem is when it shrinks to mobile, a lot of things will be cut off. And everybody thinks that that's fine, which it kind of is fine, but what Google has discussed is that they actually index mobile first. So they will read your mobile site as the main site. If your desktop site has much more information, but then on the mobile site it gets cut off, they will not index the cut-off portions of the desktop. They will take the mobile one first. That's how much emphasis they want to put on mobile. So when you're doing your website design and you're putting in content, you're doing everything on the website, first variable. Your mobile site cannot be a stripped down version of the desktop. It almost is the opposite. Your mobile site actually needs to have a better experience than desktop because of Google's mobile indexing first. So if you are in the area of designing a new site or you already have a site but you know that your mobile version is a stripped down version, you need to go edit that, because actually that penalizes you.
So the second thing, what I want to focus on, is that also when it comes to mobile, it's also about the page speed. So when you talk about page speed, a lot of people, the desktop speed's fine but the mobile can be slow. And there's a great tool Google offers called Google PageSpeed Insights that will score your website based on the zero to 100. And what you'll find a lot of the time is a lot of sites score fine when it comes to the desktop speed, but when it comes to mobile, it's terrible. And so that's important. If you're mobile first indexing by Google and your mobile site speed is really slow, but your desktop speed is fine, they're going to take the mobile one first. So when you're doing SEO and web development, ensure that the mobile site is fast. It doesn't have to be 100 out of 100 on their page speed score, but it can't be really low. And the best way to tell how fast it needs to be, one, use it yourself; and second, look at your competitors, see how fast theirs is, and make sure that you at least are above them.
So hopefully that goes into detail about why mobile is important. There's a lot of implications from what I just discussed. And so what I want you to leave with is ensure you're checking your mobile site for speed and the content on there and that it's not stripped down. But again, I hope that this was beneficial. I'm going to go ahead and enjoy one of my favorite teas, this Ryokucha Green. I just call this brown rice tea, to be honest, at home. I'm going to go enjoy some. But hopefully today's video was valuable to you guys and I hope you guys liked it. So please, if it was enjoyable, like and subscribe. I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks. Ooh, that was really good.