Presenter: Carolyn Shelby of TRONC Description: A technical dive examining mobile SEO. Featuring the mobile-first index, differences between optimizing desktop and mobile experiences, AMP implementation, the importance of speed, design and other ranking and UX factors.

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Optimizing for a
Mobile First World

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Carolyn Shelby
Director, SEO at tronc,Inc.
Organic, technical, enterprise, and news
20+ years experience

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Even if most of
your traffic is
desktop, focus
on MOBILE first
The mobile
content IS the
content now
Speed and https
more important
than ever

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The Mobile First Index is
Happening Now

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Oh no! Our mobile
version is heinous.
What am I going to
do?

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What we used to do is now wrong
Desktop content is no longer used to
calculate relevancy, the mobile experience
is now primary.
Mobile content – titles, meta desc, etc. –
takes precedence.

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Reasons to be concerned
• If you have no mobile site at all.
• If your mobile site contains FAR LESS content
than your desktop site.
• If your mobile site has been heretofore treated
as an after thought.

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Options for a Mobile Solution
• Responsive
• Stand alone mobile site
• … but we have an app!

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SEO is still SEO
• Meta data should match between the two versions.
• Content should be as close to the top of the page as
possible.
• Responsive sites should “collapse” in the correct
order.
• Mind your load times. Excessively large images,
scripts and other items that aren’t visible in the
mobile view anyway, etc.

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Poor placement when
“collapsing”

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Fancy, but practically
useless at this size

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On the desktop,
this looks okay.
Here, it looks like
there weren’t
enough listings to
populate the field.

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Make Google Happy
Do not make users scroll eternally to get to the content
Make sure navigation in both views connects to the same content
Ads should not overwhelm the small, single column mobile version
Any scripts or functionality must work in both mobile and desktop.

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TOOLS TO HELP YOU IMPROVE

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Check functionality and UX on all
devices.
Beyond that, your usual SEO tools
should be fine.

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Tools for Page Speed and Load Times
• Google PageSpeed Insights
https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/
– Follow guidance for both mobile and desktop
• Many SEO tools pull in PageSpeed and Yslow
into their auditing tools.

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Conversations to have…
• Fonts based on ease/speed of load vs what the
designer used in the photoshopped mock up?
• Content to suppress on the mobile site? (Using
detection to deliver only the pieces necessary to the
UX)
• How many different tracking tools do you need? How
many customer analytics/behavior monitoring
beacons?

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More Speed and Performance?
For more performance
and speed advice (which
is very applicable to
mobile first), see my talk
from last year.

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Twitter @cshel
Linkedin linkedin.com/in/cshel
Google+ +CarolynShelby
THANK YOU!

25. @cshel
Even if most of
your traffic is
desktop, focus
on MOBILE first
The mobile
content IS the
content now
Speed and https
more important
than ever

26. @cshel