Search Engine Watch Spotlights Mobile1st & Google Mobile Optimization

Perfect Your Mobile UX with Bing, Mobile1st, and Google Mobile Optimization Tools

Online marketers strive mightily to ensure their mobile customers’ experiences are engaging, seamless, and effortless.

But there’s a daunting roadblock to mobile friendliness: Your team must roll out a website that functions well on an incredible variety of smartphones. OpenSignal identified a stunning 24,093 different Android models accessing its site in 2015, and while you don’t need to be mobile optimized for all 24,000+, you ought to be looking good on devices that account for the majority of your traffic.

To implement a bug-free, smoothly functioning, mobile-friendly website on multiple mobile models is a difficult task. Testing can be time consuming and overly technical. Worse, commonly used mobile testing tools like Chrome DevTools can be marred by inaccuracies. Due to inadequate visibility into user experience across a range of devices, website rollouts can often be disrupted by unintended bugs and glitches that can significantly decrease conversion rates.

Mobile1st, Bing, and Google Mobile Optimization Tools to the Rescue

Fortunately, as Search Engine Watch reports, Google and Mobile1st are here to help with new tools for mobile optimization. These fresh apps are remarkably easy to use. You just insert your website address, sit back and drink your Dr. Pepper for about 30 seconds and voilà! – Google and friends deliver data and screenshots that expose exactly where your mobile UX is faltering. The entire corporate team ‒ including web developers, marketers, QA, and even managers and VP ‒ can identify your users’ less-than-stellar experiences on mobile and then deploy all their talents to perfect a mobile-friendly experience.

Mobile1st and Google promise to help you understand exactly what your mobile visitors experience across all popular tablets and phones and to help vanquish the mobile issues plaguing you and your customers.

Tool 1: Ensure fast load time with Google mobile-friendly test

When you insert your website’s address, the Think with Google mobile optimization test quickly assesses your web page and supplies three scores.

• Mobile load speed issues
• Desktop load speed problems
• Mobile-friendly defects

Google then provides a detailed breakdown identifying where your website is succeeding or failing and the elements that need correction to achieve Google mobile optimization.

The Google mobile friendly test is definitely a force for good, fighting for the average mobile user (all of us!) to ensure a flawless user experience.

Tool 2: Inspect your web page’s visual display with Mobilizer

For too long, many B2B and B2C online businesses have delivered a severely flawed user experience on mobile. Mobilizer estimates 7 out of 10 websites have at least one significant problem across 14 of the most popular phones and tablets.

In a mere half minute, Mobilizer delivers screenshots from actual mobile devices — all displayed side by side for easy identification of mobile user issues. Now WebDev teams, project managers, and marketing VPs can see exactly what their website visitors are seeing on phones and tablets and ensure a flawless UX for enhanced engagement and conversion.

In addition, Mobilizer conveniently delivers mobile-targeted analytics for each device tested. These critical mobile analytics include load time, bounce rate, and conversion rate. Load time, in particular, impacts conversion rates. For instance, in one case study, conversion rates fell by more than 25% for every second the website took to load above 2 seconds. While the Google mobile optimization test offers only a generic assessment of your website’s load time as “good,” “fair” or “poor,” Mobilizer supplies the number in seconds.

Mobilizer also identifies which devices deliver the biggest share of the traffic to your site. With this essential metric, your team can determine where to invest its resources to most fully optimize your users’ experiences.

Tool 3: Score your mobile friendliness with Bing

Like the Google mobile friendly test, Bing also offers a simple, fast mobile optimizing tool. Type in your URL and the Bing test evaluates your website’s mobile friendliness based on these five metrics:

• Correctly configured viewport
• Page content fits the device width
• All words on website are legible
• Buttons and links are touch friendly and don’t overlap with other touch targets
• Only mobile-compatible technology used (e.g., no Flash)

Technological innovation is always disruptive and unfortunately accompanied by multiple, competing, often incompatible versions of the same novel product. Think, for example, of the competing systems for the delivery of electricity – AC and DC – championed by Edison and Tesla.

Sometimes the government steps in to mandate standards, sometimes the market. But in the best cases, new tech tools eliminate the complexities and incompatibilities that hinder a flawless user experience. Now thanks to Google, Bing, and Mobilizer, the day when the mobile web experience matches the speed and smoothness of desktops is one day closer.