Mobile browsing is dominantly preferred by users searching on the go. In fact,
over 50% of global web traffic comes from smartphones and tablets.
This shift has revolutionised SEO techniques, putting mobile SEO at the centre. It’s a trend that has driven Google to embrace mobile-first indexing to rank pages.
Mobile SEO is a specialised practise of optimising your website to ensure it’s suitable for mobile device viewing.
This has become so important that anyone who fails to get their website viewable on mobile devices will see their page ranking and overall visibility plunging into oblivion.
Understanding Mobile SEO
With the rise of mobile usage, it becomes a necessity for businesses to optimise their site for mobile users.
Let’s explore the importance of mobile SEO and what makes it different from traditional SEO.
What is Mobile SEO?
Mobile SEO is structuring your website so it performs well on mobile devices. This concept is nothing new, though; it just progressed because of the widespread usage of smartphones. And alongside the speed of adoption, expectations for a more refined mobile experience also grew.
Nowadays, mobile SEO has become so important in the entire SEO strategy of an organisation, especially for businesses seeking SEO services in Sydney to improve their online visibility.
So, how different is mobile SEO from the SEO practice you’re used to?
Mobile SEO focuses on getting your page accessible on the phone. This encompasses responsive design or faster load times, factors that instantaneously impact your page ranking.
By making a mobile-friendly website, you can access more people who primarily rely on mobile devices for their searches and altogether enhance their experience.
Meanwhile, traditional SEO is concentrated on building your website for desktop users.
The Role of Mobile-First Indexing
Mobile-first indexing is Google’s way of focusing on the mobile version of your site first. Basically, they’re moving from the typical way of indexing content from desktop to the mobile version.
With this new system, your search ranking will suffer significantly if your site isn’t mobile-friendly. This translates to a poor online presence and fewer conversions.
On the flip side, if you have an excellent mobile user experience, you can raise your search rankings and boost your visibility.
Key Best Practises for Mobile SEO
More and more people are doing their searches on mobile devices. With this newfound mobile-first approach, shifting your SEO techniques to adopt mobile SEO is imperative so you can offer the best possible user experience ever.
Responsive Web Design
Why does Google strongly favour a responsive web design? Because it facilitates the content consumption of your human readers.
A responsive design is when your website has fluid grids and flexible layouts that perfectly adjust to the screen size it is being viewed—from tablets to smartphones.
When responsive, your website can perform better and faster, providing a superb visitor experience. This means more people will frequent your site, further growing your traffic.
Page Speed Optimisation
Page speed is an important ranking factor that is leveraged by Google because a slow-loading mobile page can drop your user-experience dramatically, impacting your website’s SEO.
So, how fast should your mobile page be?
Well, if it takes about 3 seconds to load the page, you have a problem. You will lose 53% of your mobile visitors and trim your conversion by 7%.
Don’t worry though, there are techniques that you can use to improve your page speed, such as image compression and minimising HTTP requests.
Image compression is changing the image format on your website by compressing the size. This way you can decrease the time it takes the picture or file to load, speeding up the page’s loading time.
On the other hand, minimising HTTP requests means removing elements that are unnecessary on your page, such as plug-ins, images and videos that don’t really add value to your content.
To inspect the speed of your mobile site, you can leverage Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It’s a free tool that can provide a score on how fast the loading time of your page is on mobile devices. On top of that, it can give suggestions on how you can improve your mobile score.
seoClarity is also a great ally for monitoring your page speed and giving instant reports on issues that affect your site’s usability.
Mobile-Friendly Content Creation
Your website needs to build scannable content suitable for mobile screens, allowing visitors to consume content conveniently and comfortably.
If your site’s users have to squint and zoom in to read your content, they would likely leave your website to visit another. Use readable font sizes and short paragraphs. This offers fast scanning and easier perusing without visual breaks, making your content more enticing to read.
Optimising Titles, URLs, and Meta Descriptions
Meta titles and meta descriptions are pivotal to your SEO strategy, letting Google read your page much better while powering up click-through rates.
So, when optimising titles, URLs and meta descriptions, keep them brief, relevant and clear.
Your mobile devices have smaller screens, so ensure that your title tags don’t go beyond 50 to 60 characters and your meta descriptions within 150 to 160 characters.
Also, make sure that they match your user’s intent, straightforwardly addressing their needs.
Local SEO Optimisation
Local SEO optimisation is a great way to enhance mobile SEO because most users perform customised, on-the-go queries based on location, like “near me” searches.
These types of online searches are time-bound where swift action is required. This makes local SEO optimisation highly necessary to attract high-intent audiences and foot traffic.
One important strategy to optimise local content is using location-based keywords, containing phrases and semantic terms linked to the same location. These keywords have a strong impact in driving your target market in your business area.
Another key local SEO strategy is ensuring accurate business information across online directories, including phone numbers and websites.
This leads to Google and other search engines trusting your company data, which will then enhance your local search rankings.
Enhancing User Experience on Mobile Devices
People have high expectations when it comes to the tools they use. Although visuals are essentials when designing products, functionality is just as central for mobile application users.
That said, here’s how you can raise the user experience of your website.
Designing for Touch Navigation
Create a “thumb-friendly” design with easily clickable elements to encourage ease of use of your website. Your site’s visitors will be more engaged if your design considerably caters to natural thumb movements. This creates a mobile user experience that is effortless and efficient.
You can also add an interactive element to boost mobile SEO in the form of a call-to-action button. Craft a brief and compelling CTA button with bright colours and a contrasting background that aligns with your brand’s identity.
Any visitor can’t help but click on a well-designed CTA.
Avoiding Intrusive Interstitials and Pop-ups
Google has a specific algorithm that checks for pop ups and interstitials on mobile. If they’re found intrusive, your content will have a bad ranking.
Pop-ups can be effective for sign-ups and alerts, but using them excessively can annoy users and increase bounce rates.
To use interstitials without hindering navigation, correctly scale them to be mobile user-friendly. They should not block or restrict the content on the screen. Create a responsive design that ensures interstitials are aesthetically appealing and functional for mobile users.
Technical Considerations for Mobile SEO
Check out the behind-the-scenes SEO elements that you should consider if you wish to power up your site’s organic traffic.
Avoiding CSS and JavaScript Blocking
You’ve been told to block Googlebot from crawling your CSS and JavaScript files. But, you shouldn’t listen to this. Google needs access to CSS and JavaScript files to render your page and rank it properly.
CSS enables your page format to be readable, while JavaScript makes it easier for Google to understand the entirety of your content. So, if Google can’t see them, you’re losing the opportunity to have your site rank higher as it should.
One technique you can use to ensure proper rendering of mobile pages is to design a flexible mobile-first layout and features. This mobile-first website approach provides better performance and a seamless experience.
Implementing Mobile Sitemaps
A mobile sitemap is a framework for your mobile site. It’s a roadmap helping Google and other search engines crawl your page and index your content more efficiently.
A mobile-specific sitemap gives fast updates and accurate research, enabling any changes to be reflected swiftly on search results.
Here’s a quick guideline for submitting sitemaps to search engines:
• Build a mobile sitemap in XML format.
• Deliver your sitemap to search engines via Google Search Console.
• Make sure the sitemap is reachable using your site’s robots.txt file.
• Leverage the correct URL encoding
• Maintain sitemap updates for your content.
Remember, every search engine has its own set of tools and procedures for submitting sitemaps, so you better check those thoroughly before submission.
Testing and Monitoring Mobile Performance
Testing and monitoring are crucial for the development of your mobile application. In doing so, you can evaluate how well your app performs under different conditions. The main goal is to ensure your mobile site gives a positive and consistent user experience.
Regularly Testing Mobile-Friendliness
Receiving an excellent mobile-friendly score from Google tells you that your website is highly optimised for mobile devices. As such, your visitors can seamlessly browse your pages.
Applications like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and Google Search Console can be leveraged to assess the performance of your site on any mobile device. These tools can determine apparent glitches concerning loading times, page layout or any element that makes surfing challenging on small mobile screens.
It’s highly necessary to address these concerns to promote a pleasant user experience at all times and maintain mobile traffic.
You see, performance instantly affects your mobile SEO. If you continuously ignore it, your bounce rate and engagement will drop simultaneously.
Analysing Mobile Traffic and User Behaviour
There are applications like Google Analytics, Amplitude, Firebase and Mixpanel that monitor mobile traffic and user interactions. These tools will help you determine primary sources of user traffic and explore patterns or trends for engagement on mobile devices.
Here are some key metrics to track mobile performance:
• Bounce rate: The number of site visitors after one viewing without taking any action
• Session rate: The percentage of visits made to your website
• Pages per session: The number of site visits by users in one session
Conclusion
Mobile SEO plays an important role in building up your website’s online presence and user experience.
Don’t forget that the main point of SEO is to generate the most relevant content for users. As such, Google and other search engines will rank highly the content that people respond positively to.
And since more than 50% of people do their searches on mobile devices, Google’s algorithm has addressed this by recognising mobile search as a key factor and adding it into its equation.
That’s why you should prioritise mobile optimisation and follow through our Mobile SEO best practises as part of your comprehensive SEO strategy to reach today’s audience.
