Mobile SEO Best Practices For Every Website
You’ve built a great mobile-optimized website; you’re hard at work optimizing your content and how it performs. You’ve poked around in the innards of Google’s search algorithm, but what can you do to further shore up your rankings? What do you know about mobile search engine optimization best practices?
Here are some great tips to help you both optimize your mobile site so that you can increase your traffic, ranking, and conversions.
What is Mobile SEO and Its Impact
Mobile SEO is the act of optimizing a website to rank well in search engines on mobile devices. Unlike desktop SEO, mobile optimization is about giving a seamless experience to mobile users and the constraints and preferences of mobile users.
Things like screen size, load time and mobile user behavior need special attention. As Google is mobile first indexing, the mobile version of your website is the one that is considered first for rankings, so you need a solid mobile SEO strategy.
Key Reasons to Prioritize Mobile SEO and Increase Mobile Traffic
Rising Mobile Traffic: With mobile searches and traffic surpassing desktop, an optimized mobile experience can drive more visitors.
Mobile-First Indexing: Google’s algorithm prioritizes the mobile version of websites for indexing and ranking.
Enhanced Local Searches: Mobile users often perform local searches, making mobile SEO essential for businesses with physical locations.
Why Is Mobile SEO Important?
Mobile is the Majority
Mobile searches have surpassed desktop searches. Many users search on their mobile devices daily. So your site needs to be mobile friendly.
Google’s Mobile Indexing
Since Google went mobile first, they use the mobile version of the content to rank. So if you ignore mobile SEO you will lose visibility on SERPs.
Mobile Converts
Mobile search is a part of the buyer’s journey. For example, searches for product reviews, recommendations and “best” options have increased on mobile. By optimizing for mobile you can reach customers at points of purchase.
Voice Search Optimization
Voice search is done on mobile and optimizing for mobile SEO will prepare you for voice search as well. Being mobile friendly now will give you an edge as most businesses are still behind.
Mobile SEO Basics
A good mobile SEO strategy is about implementing specific configurations and following best practices. There are three ways to configure mobile friendly website: responsive design, dynamic serving and separate URLs.
Having a mobile friendly site is crucial to enhance user experience and improve SEO performance, especially with the rising mobile traffic.
1. Responsive Design
Responsive design is considered the best for mobile SEO because of its simplicity and effectiveness, making it crucial to have a mobile website. It uses the same HTML code across devices and CSS media queries to adjust the page layout based on screen size. Here’s why Google recommends responsive design:
Unified URL Structure: Having one URL for both desktop and mobile minimizes duplicate content issues and makes sharing across platforms easier.
Faster Load Time: No redirects means pages load faster for the user.
Easier Maintenance: Managing one responsive page is more efficient than two separate mobile and desktop pages.
2. Dynamic Serving
Dynamic serving is a more complex method where the server delivers different HTML and CSS based on the device type, with the same URL. While dynamic serving can give optimized experiences for specific devices, it requires precise configuration to avoid errors that can impact user experience and SEO performance.
3. Separate URLs
Having separate URLs for mobile (e.g. m.example.com) is less common and generally not recommended as it requires more maintenance and can have technical SEO issues like incorrect canonical tags. This method requires rel=”canonical” and rel=”alternate” tags to be properly configured to avoid duplicate content penalties.
A short introduction to mobile SEO and why you should care?
Mobile SEO is an overarching term that refers to a variety of strategies you can employ to optimize your website for mobile users.
If you’re looking to gain an edge over your competitors, mobile is one of your best bets.
As much as 67% of people are more likely to buy from a mobile-friendly company.
Since more and more people use their phones to search the web, Google is more and more prioritizing mobile when crawling and indexing websites.
Mobile has completely reshaped our marketing landscape; it’s time to catch up. Here are some tips to help you get started with Mobile SEO
These mobile SEO best practices will help you increase traffic and conversion.
1. Create a responsive site
Responsive design is a mobile SEO strategy that solves a very real problem.
Mobile devices are now used more often than PCs, so it’s critical to develop your website with mobile users in mind.
To do so, create a responsive site—one that adapts its layout to fit any screen size.
The bottom line: Your website needs to work on both mobile and desktop users; focus on how people use their phones when deciding how to present information online.
2. Improve your page’s speed
One of your top priorities when mobile SEO is ensuring that your website loads fast.
In fact, Google considers speed to be one of its 200 ranking factors, as it is proven by its PageSpeed Insights tool, but there are other free tools as well.
So if you’re not seeing success with your mobile SEO strategy, make sure you’re keeping an eye on page speed.
Google Search Console (GSC) is also a crucial tool for assessing and improving mobile usability. It can identify issues that could hinder mobile-friendliness, such as blocking important resources, and the Mobile Usability report within GSC simplifies the testing process for overall site optimization.
Optimizing for mobile pages will also boost overall website speed—so there’s double value in optimizing for mobile users!
After all, today’s consumers want everything quickly and now.
If you don’t cater to those needs, they’ll find someone who does!
3. Focus on user experience
The best advice for mobile optimization is simple—build a better website, especially for mobile sites.
That might sound intimidating, but if you focus on creating a great user experience across devices, your website will rank higher.
Focus on what makes sense from a user standpoint and include information that’s useful to your readers, like customer reviews and product descriptions.
Users want to be able to access all content on their smartphones and tablets, and they want it to work well.
They don’t want to have to scroll through long lists of links or pages because this makes it difficult for them to find what they are looking for.
4. Allow JavaScript and image formats
Formatting your site for mobile device is not enough.
There are some simple mobile SEO best practices that you can put into place on your website, including rewriting and relocating your JavaScript and allowing image formats, which increases mobile traffic.
If you have an old site, these elements are blocked from mobile crawlers because they aren’t supported, but that needs to be fixed now.
Allowing smartphone crawlers to index every aspect of your site allows them to rank your page and inform Google whether you have a responsive website.
5. Use Easy-to-find calls to actions
In order to monitor mobile SEO, you have to have a handle on what’s going on with your site.
If you don’t have a designated place where users can easily find mobile-specific calls to action, you need to add one now.
It should also include a link to your website’s existing mobile site or app (if applicable) for easier access for both first-time and returning visitors.
Give mobile users a reason to stay on your site.
Calls to action in mobile design should be big, prominent, and easy to find.
It’s common sense that people look at their phones differently than they do their desktops—but most businesses don’t realize just how different until they try creating mobile-specific calls to action that mimic what they currently have on their website.
6. Short and Scannable
Mobile content should be short, readable and scannable. Here’s how:
Short Paragraphs: One or two sentences per paragraph.
Bullets and Tables: Break up the info.
Plenty of White Space: Don’t overcrowd the layout.
7. Use Structured Data for SERP Enhancements
Structured data (schema markup) helps Google understand your content. Use mobile friendly structured data types:
FAQ Schema: For common questions in your niche.
Review Schema: Adds star ratings to SERP listings. Increases CTR.
How-to Schema: Step by step instructions on the search results page.
8. Local SEO for Mobile Users
Mobile users search for local services. Use these tactics for mobile local SEO:
Google My Business Optimisation: Keep your profile up to date with correct contact info, hours and images.
Local Keywords: Use city or suburb names in titles, headings and meta.
Customer Reviews: Encourage positive reviews to build credibility and influence local rankings.
Optimizing content for mobile search results is crucial, as it ensures better visibility and higher click-through rates on mobile devices.
Conclusion
Regardless of your skill level, mobile SEO optimization should be top of mind for all marketers, whether you’re building a brand new site or optimizing an existing one.
Mobile search is a huge opportunity for every business.
So, if you want to rank highly on Google’s mobile SERPs, it’s important to keep in mind how people search from their mobile devices.
Mobile searchers are looking for answers to problems that are specific to their everyday lives.
They might be looking for directions or places nearby or searching for products or services that can fulfill a need right away.
All of these factors come into play when optimizing your website for mobile search, so make sure you’re paying attention to each of them as you develop your strategy.
As such, using the above-mentioned mobile SEO best practices will ensure you’re optimizing your content and building a great user experience.
