Why Mobile Audit Tools are important for SEO?
The point is our users are searching from mobile devices. Mobile Audit tools help SEO experts to validate website visitors are going to have best experience. This is very important to pay very close attention to mobile version of website.
Google announced Mobile-first indexing. As we know that almost 50% of total worldwide search is based on mobile devices and its growing. Now Google prefer to use the mobile version of the website for indexing and ranking.
Mobile Audit best practices by Google
In-short mobile version of your website should match desktop version.
Resources
All the resources for your mobile and desktop website should be accessible by search engines. Check your robots.txt file that you are not blocking any resources.
Website Content
Your desktop and mobile version should have same content. In-case your website mobile version have less content than desktop version, it will definitely impact on your search ranking.
Headings
Make sure that your website is going to have same meaningful and clear headings. Do not change headings or their hierarchy on both versions.
URL Structure
In-case you are using a different mobile version for your website. The URL structure should be exactly same.
Structured Data
You should use the same structure data for both desktop and mobile version of your website.
Why do we need Mobile Audit Tools
Now that we know the best practices by Mobile-first indexing by Google. Follow the below list of important Mobile Audit tools to check your website mobile version. All these tools provide different metrics for mobile audit. It is recommended to check website with these tools.
Mobile Friendly Test
The first thing we need to check if we have a proper mobile version of our website. Google Mobile Friendly Test tool help us to validate if website is mobile friendly.
This is a pretty basic and easy to use tool. Simply add URL of your website, the tool list down any mobile usability issues detected. The Mobile Friendly test tool also display the indexing status of the mobile version of your website.
Zeo’s Mobile First Index Checker
Mobile First Index Checker is an important tool as it provides a checklist of Mobile-first Indexing by Google. The tool is very simple to use, just enter the website URL and get a useful list of important factors. Mobile first index checker shows a comparison of both versions of your website.
Zeo’s Mobile First Index Checker validate following checklist on both desktop and mobile versions.
- Metadata
- AMP Page
- Internal Links
- PageSpeed score
- Breadcrumb Data
- Number of Images
- Looks in Screenshots
- Structured Data Types
- Similar HTML Content
Mobile Moxie Device Emulator
Live emulator where you may check the comparison of two different devices. Moxie device emulator offers desktop, android and IOS versions of your mobile page. This emulator offers more than 50 devices which covers IOS, Android and Windows OS devices.
Moxie device emulator also offers country specific live testing of your landing pages. It is very important in-case you have different versions as per country laws or cookies for specific regions.
Mobile Moxie device emulator process following devices
Apple IOS
- iPhone
- 12 Pro Max, 12 Pro, 12 mini, SE(2nd gen), 11 Pro Max, 11 Pro, 11, XS, XS Max, XR, X, 8, 8 Plus, 7, 7 Plus, 6S, 6S Plus, 5
Android
- Google Pixel5, 4a, 4XL, 4, 3a XL, 3a, 2, 2XL, XL
- Google Nexus 6P
- Samsung GalaxyS20, S10, S9, S9+, S8, S8+, S6 Edge+, S5, Note20, 10, 9, 8, 5, 4, J3 Eclipse
- Asus Zenfone 2
- BlackBerry KEYone
- HTC U11
- HTC One M9
- Huawei Honor 7
- LG G6, G4, X
- Motorola Moto X
- OnePlus 2
- Sony Xperia Z5
- Sony Xperia Z5 Compact
- Xiaomi Redmi 2
- Xiaomi Mi Note
Windows OS
- Cube WP10
- HP Elite X3
- Microsoft Lumia 950
- Nokia Lumia 630
Desktop
- Desktop
Mobi Ready
Mobi Ready is another free mobile audit tool. It gives visualization for specific screen sizes that includes 1024 x 768, 375 x 667, 320 x 533 and 240 x 320 pixels. Apart from visualization it gives a report of 38 validations and their recommendations.
The Mobi Ready tool validation and recommendation includes
- ETag support
- JavaScript placement
- favicon
- CSS import
- internal CSS directives
- inline JavaScript
- image alt tag
- image specify size
- viewport meta
- sprites CSS
- image crunch
- cookie size
- redirect error
- DOM too large
- duplicate resources
- DNS lookups
- CSS expression
- stylesheet placement
- gzip encoding
- empty image
- table nested
- tables, styled markup
- popups
- page title
- applets
- frames
- HTML minimize
- JavaScript minimize
- Minimize CSS
- CSS measurements
- image resizing
- image map
- external resources
- input type
- valid markup
- charset and caching control.
Parito
Parito is a mobile audit tool that gives difference in Googlebot Mobile HTML and Googlebot Desktop HTML difference. It also shows headers for both versions of desktop and mobile version of the website.
Conclusion
Check your website’s mobile version using the mentioned mobile audit tools in this article. All these tools provide different metrics for analysis.
Let me know in comments below if there is any website mobile version testing tool which is missed in this article.