Mobile Site or Responsive? Make up your mind Google – SEO Video

Hi and welcome to this week SEO video blog, recently James and the development team have been covering responsive web design and considering both usability and SEO. With 33% of all searches now conducted on mobile devices and search behaviours now similar to desktop, we need to consider a dedicated strategy for your mobile audience.

The development team at Creare have been refining our techniques to ensure we can provide a solution for our clients that will delivery content for mobile, tablet and desktop users in the most effective way, check out our youtube channel for more info on responsive design good practice @ /crearegroup.

Supporting this Google have recently created a page on ‘building mobile optimised websites’ on their developer support website, we have linked this from the supporting blog and it makes a clear statement

“Google recommends webmasters follow the industry best practice of using responsive web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices and using only CSS media queries to decide the rendering on each device.”

So.. pretty conclusive stuff. However, after visiting ‘Google engage for agencies’ at Google HQ this week, a representation discussed the mobile opportunity and how to capitalise on mobile exposure.

While discussing mobile websites, it was suggested that you will be provided with a better a Ad-quality-score from Adwords if you serve your users a mobile version of your website and not a responsive friendly site.

Mmmmm, so essentially a contradiction between their organic and paid advice, I caught up with the presenter and discussed further after the conference and he suggested for SEO purposes to consult advice from Matt Cutts. When I got back to the office I did exactly that and from a youtube video on mobile sites and duplicate content, Matt Cutts states ‘it’s very handy to have a separate URL like m.domain’. The video was back in Jan 2011 so a little out of date, but we have ended up not knowing what Google favours.

As we’re trying to provide the best solution for our clients, this is obviously extremely important to get right. We are strong believers in the responsive solution to provide the best result across all platforms, however if a mobile site is favioured in paid search, could organic be affected also?

We would love to know your thoughts, please leave an comments or questions on the supporting blog post.