Over 50% of Google users now do their searching a mobile, so your site needs to appear on Googles mobile SERPs pages. Google announced early in 2016 that one of the biggest ranking factors was going to be mobile page load speed, we all hate waiting for a page to load and it hurts Google reputation, so as well as it affecting your conversions and user experience it now hurts your rankings.
But how do you check your Mobile Page Speed?
There are many ways to check this, but the key is to always be consistent so that you have a benchmark to measure changes against.
The method I prefer to use is using Googles own Mobile Page Speed tool. This is a free tool part of the Webmaster tools series. If you are unsure on how to add Google Search Console there here is a great article from Google.
It’s pretty easy, chuck in your URL and it gives you a score out of 100. Anything above 85 is good and you aren’t probably going to get 100, you would have to do away with some much stuff on your website to hit 100, it wouldn’t make commercial sense.
Google does give you recommendations on where they believe you can improve. If you are unsure on how to fix these speak with your developer, if you don’t have a developer Google for the answer. **** Before making any changes to your website we recommend you take a backup ****
If you don’t want to make the changes or are unsure, feel free to get in touch.
It’s done on a page by page basis so you may want to analyse your pages and make changes on a page by page basis.
Because it’s not technically part of the Webmaster tools set and a feature on it is own, it does mean you don’t need to verify you own the website to get the information – which is great, it means you can do analysis against your competitors and see how you stack up.
It’s also great, if say your stuck on a score of 83 and to get any higher would require a change to your website which means the website wouldn’t perform correctly, and all your competitors have a score in the 60’s and 70’s I would recommend staying at 83 as you still perform much better than them.
Once you have a score you are happy with, I would check this monthly to make sure Google doesn’t move the goal posts or you haven’t made changes to your site which can affect it.
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I am the Managing Director of Coreter Media and have been in Digital Marketing since 2009. Initially in-house working for some of the UK’s biggest brands, but now I run my own agency helping small businesses grow.