Every website should be designed to be mobile-first and there is a good reason why. Mobile device usage has skyrocketed and more than 70% of consumers now shop on mobile devices. If your website is not optimised for mobile devices, there is a high chance you will lose customers. Mobile SEO ensures that the website looks great and also functions properly on mobile devices. Another reason why SEO for mobile is important is that Google’s crawlers read the mobile site first.
If your site is not mobile-friendly, it will definitely hurt your Google search ranking. Your website’s SEO is critical to draw more traffic, get more leads, and therefore more customers. But there are a number of factors that can improve the SEO ranking for your mobile site.
Why Mobile SEO is Important
In 2015, Google rolled out its Mobile-Friendly update, which will boost the ranking of mobile-friendly sites on their search results. But later they decided to make their entire algorithm mobile-first. What this means is, no matter which device a user searches from, the search engine will look for mobile sites.
This is the reason why mobile SEO is important. With Google’s mobile-first index, you can forget about achieving a top Google search rank unless you also focus on SEO for mobile and not just the keyword placement and content creation.
If you do all of that but not optimise the website for mobile views, your website might not show high up in the Google search results. This would mean poor visibility of your website on the Internet. Only those who know the exact URL of your website will be able to reach it.
What is a Mobile Optimised Website
Now that you know how critical it is for a website to be mobile-friendly or mobile-optimised, let’s try to understand what it means.
- It should load quickly on mobile devices
- No content should be hidden on the mobile version of the website
- The width, height, and font size of all elements should adjust based on the screen size
- All internal links should be working and have redirects
- The user experience should be optimised for all types of devices
7 Best Ways to Improve Mobile SEO Rankings
Create a responsive website design
Some designers may redirect their mobile viewers to a different URL, usually beginning with ‘m.example.com’. But the best approach is to code in a way that renders different HTML and CSS components for different sized devices.
What does this mean?!
Simply put, this means that your website grid will adjust according to the size of the device. Also, some HTML elements will be hidden from the main view of the mobile page and may be accessed using a button.
There are different approaches to designing mobile responsive sites. But the end result should be a design that can be accessed from all kinds of mobiles and tablets without any glitches. Responsive design is achieved by coding it in a certain way. It requires the designer to use media queries, responsive font units, percentage widths, Flexbox, etc.
Focus on the user-experience
A website designer must always prioritise user experience, even more so when designing the mobile view. One example of this is to implement a ‘thumb friendly’ design. Since mobile users will use their thumbs to scroll through a page, they should find it easy to scroll and press a button.
CTA (Call to Action) buttons are very important and should definitely be noticeable on a mobile site. Visitors should see them immediately and the button should be large enough to be clicked easily on small screen devices.
Buttons and fonts that are designed for desktop view may appear too small and illegible to read on smartphones. This can have a negative impact on your audience and your reputation as a brand may be harmed due to this. Professional designers must know how to fix this issue so the font and button size would adapt to different screen sizes.
Create mobile-optimised content
A great layout will enable the users to easily navigate your site; however, great content would hold them longer on your website. This would not only enhance the chance of conversion but also improve the SEO for mobile.
How can you optimise your content for mobile devices? This is usually achieved by formatting the content to look good on phones and tablets. Limiting paragraphs to 2-3 sentences will make the content easier to read or skim through the article.
Photos, videos, and interactive elements should adjust to mobile screens and help make the content more engaging for your viewers.
Let Googlebot crawl your web pages
Crawling is the process by which Googlebot fetches pages on the web and adds the new and updated pages to the Google index. If your site is blocking Googlebot to access certain pages, it won’t be able to declare it as mobile-friendly and therefore affect the SEO.
The robot.txt file in your website directory will tell you if a certain page is blocked for Googlebot. If an important page is unknowingly protected from access by the bot, you can undo it.
Google hates mobile popups
Popups can be distracting and irritating on the web, but they are extremely intolerable and can block the entire view on a mobile device. If the content is hidden behind a giant popup on the mobile view, Google will consider it as an intrusive popup and this will have a negative effect on your website’s SEO.
Certain types of popups are permitted by Google. These include; a popup requesting to store cookies, alerting the user about 18+ content, or a small one displayed on the top of the screen without covering any important area of the page.
The website should load fast enough
If you don’t want the users to leave your website unsatisfied and grumpy, don’t ever waste their time. Everything on the website should load really fast. People are looking for information on the go. They want the page to load in an instant. A professional website designer knows the tricks to speed up a website.
Faster load time for a website should be a priority. If you are having trouble with this, our designer might be able to fix this for you. There are certain best practices that help make the website load much faster than before. Google’s PageSpeed Insights will help you check how much time your site takes to load.
Avoid distracting content
You can get away with a cluttered page on a desktop, but mobile users are pretty unforgiving about it. There is too little space on mobile screens that unnecessarily large content that isn’t of primary importance can have a negative impact on the viewers. Here are a few tips to keep your page neat and avoid clutter.
Make header images really small
Some designs have a large header image to catch the instant attention of first-time users, however, on a mobile display; such an image can hide everything else and repel users with a low attention span. You need to either get rid of those images or make them smaller.
Use plenty of empty spaces
What do empty spaces (padding and margin) do for your mobile web page? It makes every element clearly and distinctly visible. There is less chaos if there is proper spacing between elements.
This is more important for mobile-friendly websites because you may want to show an excess of info on a small-sized display. A cluttered page looks really bad on a phone or a tablet. Using lots of space will improve your site’s dwell time, which will improve SEO for mobile.
The placement of social icons is quite important on a website. But these may often appear crowded on a small mobile screen. The main navigation bar might not have the space to accommodate social media icons on a mobile display.
To deal with this issue, our professional designers place them in the sidebar or in the footer so they are not distracting but easily accessible.
Conclusion
These are some of the mobile SEO best practices for those who want to boost up their website’s ranking on Google. If it ranks among the top, more people would see your website in the Google search results. That could fetch more traffic to your website and thus more potential buyers or subscribers.
Mobile SEO impacts your online presence in a tremendous way. The effort you put in creating a website at the very beginning would pay off later when the revenue increases. Mobile SEO is a major part of improving the search visibility of your website. You may spend a lot of money on SEO, but if the website design is not adapted to mobile view, you won’t see noticeable results.
If you still find this confusing and are unsure how to improve the mobile SEO of your website, our professional designers are experts in this field. We can fix websites that have poor SEO for mobile or create a new website design that is mobile-friendly. Contact us now.
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