How to Perform a Mobile and Desktop Parity Audit
SEO Company Scotland, A mobile parity audit is a great way to make sure that your website has the right amount of content for each device type. It also ensures that your content is properly indexed by Google.
A mobile parity audit involves crawling two versions of the same web page, then comparing them for errors. It is a little labor intensive, but it can be a good way to catch issues that would impact rankings.
1. Crawl the Site
If you have a website that has different versions for desktop and mobile, or if your site is responsive and displays the same content on both devices, a parity audit can help you assess how well these two versions are working together. A parity audit is a process that uses software to crawl the site as a desktop user, then again as a mobile user, and then combine the outputs to look for differences. This is a great way to spot issues that may have been overlooked when the site was first set up or switched over to mobile-first indexing.
It’s not too difficult to perform a parity audit, though it is time consuming and requires some advanced tools. You’ll need a web crawler that supports both desktop and mobile user-agents, like screaming frog, deepcrawl or sitebulb. Then, you’ll need to crawl the desktop site and the mobile site, export URL reports, and then compare the results.
Discrepancies between the two versions of a page are common, but they can be difficult to identify. For example, a recent study found that the average mobile webpage has a lower word count than its desktop counterpart. This is because websites often thin out their mobile pages to reduce loading times and because users tend to read less text on their phones than on desktop computers.
A parity audit can also help you ensure that metadata such as title tags, meta descriptions and internal links are the same on both desktop and mobile versions of the same page. You can check for this by using a tool like XML Sitemaps to check for any duplicate titles, or a tool such as SEO PowerSuite to compare the structured data of a single URL across the different user-agents.
For large websites, it can be useful to run a second parity crawl after the first one to identify any changes that occurred in between. This is particularly helpful for larger sites with lots of duplicates that may have been missed the first time around, or for pages with substantial amounts of duplicate content.
2. Crawl the Mobile Site
As mobile usage increases it’s becoming increasingly important to make sure that the mobile version of your site is fully optimized. This is especially true now that Google has announced a shift to mobile first indexing. A parity audit can help ensure that any disparities between the desktop and mobile versions of your site are settled before this change occurs.
A mobile parity audit involves comparing the content and metadata of your website’s mobile pages to its desktop counterpart. This can be done by using a tool such as screaming frog or deepcrawl. It’s also a good idea to run a separate crawl with the same user agent as your desktop crawl, in order to catch any instances of duplicate content or missing meta tags.
In addition to checking the content of each page, a mobile parity audit should also look at the structure of the site. This can include looking at the way in which the website is dynamically served, and checking that each desktop page has a corresponding mobile page. It’s also worth looking at the way in which internal links are set up, to identify any instances of orphan pages that may be causing issues.
It’s also important to check that any redirects between the desktop and mobile sites are functioning properly. It’s common for websites to use a different URL pattern for their mobile pages, which can lead to redirects that are not needed or even cause issues with search engines. This can be a big problem for sites that are moving to mobile first indexing, as it can mean that some of their content may not be getting indexed correctly.Property management Dundee
It’s also a good idea to check that any JavaScript errors are being corrected. In particular, it’s worth looking for changes to self-referring canonicals, as these can affect how a page is ranked. One such issue was discovered on a shoe brand’s website, where they had 301 redirected their subcategory pages to their category pages. This caused the category pages to be ranked higher than the subcategory pages, even though the content and metadata on those pages were identical.
3. Crawl the Desktop Site
Now that we have our mobile site re-crawled, it is time to do the same for the desktop site. There are many ways to do this, but we recommend using a tool that allows you to crawl a website twice – once as a mobile user and then again as a desktop user – then combine the outputs to look for errors, gaps or differences. This is one of the most important parts of the process because it gives you a good understanding of what search engines see on the desktop site that may not be as visible to mobile users, and vice versa.
For example, if a blog category page has different content lengths on the desktop and mobile site, this could be a problem for the page in terms of ranking. Similarly, if there are differences in title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, robots tags, canonical tags or other types of tags, it is critical that you take the time to look at these and make sure they are all identical across platforms.
Another issue that often comes up is the lack of breadcrumbs on pages – especially e-commerce sites. This can be difficult for both mobile and desktop users to find products that are hidden deep within the site, and is also a signal to search engines that there is no clear path to these pages. If this is an issue, it can be easily solved by implementing some simple navigation on the desktop version of the site that links back to the homepage and other main categories to help people find what they are looking for.
It is also worth checking if there are any differences in JavaScript between the two versions of the site. Although Google effectively renders all web pages today, if you have any pages that rely on client-side JavaScript rendering, it is important to run a JavaScript parity audit on these to ensure search engine bots are able to crawl and index the correct HTML for these pages. This can be done by opening a project in Hextrakt, switching to database storage mode and performing two separate crawls with the 'Compare' configuration selected (Config > Compare). One of the crawls should be performed with 'Mobile User-Agent' and the other with 'Desktop User-Agent'.
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