India Site Clinic, Part 1

Thank you webmasters for your overwhelming response to the Google India Site Clinic initiative. The sites submitted covered 12 diverse categories, making this an excellent sample set for our analysis. As we analyzed the sites we were able to identify a few trends where we’d like to help Indian webmasters improve. So in this post we will address one of the most pressing concerns for a webmaster at this point in time: should a webmaster invest in a smartphone-optimized presence.

30% of the world’s smartphone users live in India and China (source)

India is one of the leading mobile markets worldwide. The nation has 919.2 million mobile subscribers as of March 2012 (TRAI, May 2012), which is 75% of the population. 65% of mobile subscribers are urban dwellers.

So why would your website benefit from having a mobile presence? Time for some colorful graphs and revealing statistics. The following statistics are derived from http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com. Surveys were conducted over 2 phases (March - July 2011 and January - March 2012) and 1000 sample users (across all age groups and gender) were surveyed for each of the phases.

78% of smartphone users visit a search engine on a daily basis.

Source: http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/mobileplanet/en/

Now let’s have a look at how the smartphone user spends his time on the Internet.

Source: http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/mobileplanet/en/ 

The graph indicates that 32% of surveyed users used online/mobile shopping coupons, 56% of them downloaded content, and at least 40% of them collectively spent time searching for restaurants/pubs, jobs, travel/holidays or reading news and magazines. Every site submitted for review to our Site Clinic fits one or more of the activities above so for these sites, a smartphone-friendly website might provide advantages to its users.



Good Mobile User Experience



For example, when a friend recommends a website he liked, your first reaction might be to check it on your smartphone as it may be some time before you get access to a desktop or laptop. If you aren’t able to read the content on the site or if the site doesn’t render properly on your mobile, you may be disappointed and might even forget about checking the site later on. Hence, a good user experience on mobile is very important.

Here is an example of the difference a mobile site can make:

Example site: www.caclubindia.com

These are a few simple things that have changed in the mobile version of the site:

1. Text is legible without zooming or panning


2. Links and buttons can be easily tapped with a thumb


3. Search functionality is accessible through use of a button

Is your site mobile-friendly?
To check how your site renders on a mobile phone you can simply check on your phone and see how your site looks. For a deeper analysis we recommend use of the GoMoMeter.

Now that you’ve had a look, let’s go through the steps to provide a great mobile experience to your users.

Building a smartphone optimized site

Google supports three configurations

1. 
   Sites can use responsive web design, i.e., sites serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google's recommended configuration.
   
   


2. 
   Sites can dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user-agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
   
   


3. 
   Sites can have separate mobile and desktop URLs.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

We recommend using responsive design because using a single URL makes it easier for your users to interact with, share and link to your content. It also helps Google's algorithms to assign indexing properties to the content. Redirection will not be needed for users to get to the device-optimized view, which reduces loading time. For detailed analysis of this and other approaches, please see our developers page for building smartphone-friendly sites.

We hope this post got you thinking about your site in the mobile space. Look forward to the next post in this site clinic series where we’ll address another interesting trend.



Posted by The Google Search Quality Team