How to Leverage Mobile Interstitials Without Destroying Your Rankings

On my website, Quick Sprout, I used to have a popup.

The reason I used this popup was simple: Conversions!

I used it to drive signups for my SEO analyzer, to boost my mailing list subscriptions, and to build my Facebook fan page.

It was ridiculous how those popups converted!

I’ve made a bunch of changes to that site (Quicksprout.com). And one of the changes was dropping the popup.

No popups here!

And none here on the mobile version either!

What’s going on?

Do I hate popups? Nope, I love popups.

In fact, if you check out my homepage on a non-mobile device — voila, a popup!

But if you’re on your mobile device, no popup.

There’s another difference.

On desktop, the video is on auto-play. You don’t press play. It starts automatically.

But on mobile, you have to click to make the video play.

What’s going on here?

Simple: I’m getting super strategic about interstitials.

My old Quick Sprout site was using a type of interstitial that Google doesn’t like for mobile. So I fixed it.

On my site, NeilPatel.com, I’ve optimized the page for my thousands of mobile users. Right now, more than half of my new sessions come from mobile users.

As a result of the changes I’ve made, neither of my sites have lost rank. Instead, they’ve increased.

I owe this improvement to the amount of content that I publish and to the way I’ve optimized for mobile.

And specifically, it’s due to the changes I’ve made regarding interstitials. [click to continue reading...]