Free Consultation

Mobile SEO

Everything You Need To Know About Mobile SEO.

What is Mobile SEO?

mobile seo

Mobile SEO refers to the search engine optimization of websites combined with flawless viewing on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

It is to ensure that mobile visitors have an experience optimized for their mobile device and takes into consideration site design, site structure, page speed and more to ensure quality mobile user experience.

A statistic shown by Shock Media Studio has stated that 64% of Malaysians are using their mobile devices to search the web. People all over the world are glued to their smartphones all the time.

Even if you do have a website, but the website is not mobile-friendly, you are essentially losing out on 64% of searches, as your business will not be listed on the mobile search results.

Why is mobile SEO important?

Why

It is obvious that the need for businesses to have a mobile-friendly website is important in this era of evolution. It does not only help you to reach your potential customers when they are on the go, but it will also help in improving your website SEO as well.

In fact, mobile users exhibit different behavior than desktop users where there is more urgency to the request. They want to find what they’re looking for immediately. Optimizing your website is a key part of mobile marketing.

Mobile SEO is also vital for Google to rank you in the organic search intend for mobile users. Google has started favoring responsive websites that are designed to lodge both mobile search and viewing.

These are why mobile SEO has become mandatory for online businesses if they really want to enjoy the taste of success in their competitive niche.

How can I improve my mobile SEO?

mobile seo

If your site is already well optimized for search engines, there are only a few additional things that you need to think about when optimizing your mobile devices and Google’s move to mobile-first indexing.

Site design for mobile
Mobile devices are simplifying and revolutionizing the ways sites are designed. Touch screen navigation can lead to accidental clicks if your buttons are too big, small, or in the path of a finger that’s trying to get the page to scroll.

All DON’Ts

  • Don’t block CSS, JavaScript, or images
  • Don’t use Flash/Plugin
  • Don’t use pop-ups

Optimize titles and meta descriptions
Since mobile devices, there is lesser screen space when a user searches using a mobile device. Be as concise as possible when creating titles, URLs, and meta descriptions to show off your best work in SERPs.

Due to limited screen space, a search result with rich snippets is even more likely to stand out than on a desktop. You might want to optimize your content to be the best results in your niche.

Page Speed
Page speed is described as time it takes to fully display the content on a specific page or how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte of information from the webserver.

It is vital for mobile SEO due to hardware and connectivity issues. You might want to consider to minify code, leverage browser caching, and reduce redirects.

You can evaluate your page speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It will give insights on two important speed metrics: First Contentful Paint (FCP) and DOMContentLoaded (DCL).

What are the three Google mobile websites configurations?

configuration

Responsive Web Design
Responsively-designed sites use CSS3 media queries to serve the same content to mobile and desktop users using a fluid grid and a flexible design to automatically adapt to the size of a user’s screen.

Pros:

  • You should definitely consider responsive design because:
  • It’s easy to share content from a single URL.
  • Google can easily index your single URL for higher search engine rankings.
  • You’ll find it convenient to maintain multiple pages for the same content.
  • This design avoids common SEO and formatting mistakes.
  • There won’t be much additional setup time.
  • Googlebot will use fewer resources and make crawling more efficient.
  • Users won’t have to deal with redirects, which offers shorter page download times.

Cons:
Might require redesign and there is no mobile-specific content.

Mobile Site Configuration
Dynamic serving configurations are designed to have the server respond with different HTML and CSS code on the same URL depending on the user’s device.

Basically, you want to show a different or a part of your content for mobile visitors than you do for desktop ones.

You will have to properly use the Vary HTTP header to signal changes based on the user-agent’s page requests.

Valid headers tell the browser how to display the content and help Googlebot discover that your website has mobile-optimized content much faster.

However, whenever there is a new mobile device comes to market you have to update the list of user agents every single time.

It is also uncommon for desktops and mobile devices to be wrongly served with the HTML for the other device.

Pros:

  • Only 1 URL
  • Consolidated authority
  • Can use mobile-specific content

Cons:

  • Difficult to implement
  • More difficult and expensive to maintain

Separate URLs
Another option is to create a second, parallel site for mobile users. This allows you to create completely custom content for mobile visitors.

You have to do a setup configuration that involves having different URLs for your website. This is to make sure your website is successfully displayed accordingly on different mobile devices.

Each URL is equipped with different HTML code for every respective screen size. To avoid URL confusion, most parallel mobile sites use an “m” subdomain.

It can be as imperfect as dynamic serving sites at sending visitors to the right version, so be sure to make it easy for visitors who end up in the wrong place to click over to their preferred experience.

Make sure that your site redirects are all in place and as lean as possible to decrease page speed as well as to avoid duplicate content issues.

Pros:

  • Easy to implement
  • Can use mobile-specific content

Cons:

  • Content duplication risk
  • Lots of redirects
  • Splits authority
  • Expensive to maintain

How does mobile optimization differ from SEO?

mobile optimization

As you continue to read on mobile SEO and understanding the fundamentals of mobile SEO, it might come to thought what’s the difference between SEO and mobile SEO. There are different standards for mobile sites because of the different user experiences.

We’ll list a few main differences between these optimization strategies.

The amount of text included on a webpage
SEO best practices suggests that each webpage should have at least 1500 words of text. However, it is different for mobile SEO. You need much less content as the device a person is using will make it difficult to read large amounts of text.

Usage of keywords
There might be a difference in the keyword search for desktop and mobile devices. They might as well use voice-activated search tools. When creating content, it is important to take this into consideration when creating content for your website and research mobile keywords in addition to desktop keywords.

Ranking Algorithms
Algorithms for mobile searches are different to desktop algorithms, therefore doing a mobile keyword research is equally important. If you are not in the top four ranked search results, you may not even show up on the screen at all.

Levels of engagement
If you are forecasting traffic for your SEO campaigns and you’re not taking mobile click-through-rates and mobile search volume seriously, you might underestimate the number of mobile visits from natural search.

How do I optimize my website for mobile devices step-by-step?

Based on DreamHost.com, these are step-by-step on how to optimize your website for mobile devices:

 

  1. Test your site using Google’s Mobile-
  2. Friendly Tool
  3. Use a responsive WordPress Theme
  4. Choose a reliable web host
  5. Improve your site’s loading times
  6. Redesign your pop-ups for mobile devices
  7. Enable accelerated mobile pages (AMP)
  8. Create a mobile app

What is mobile-friendly SEO?

You should look forward to mobile-friendly designs as these will give advantages to your business and branding as well.

How?

  • More website traffic
  • Improved user experiences
  • Higher conversion rates
  • Increased time spent on your website
  • Lower bounce rates
  • Faster page loading times
  • Competitive market advantages
  • More customer engagement
  • Improved search engine performance

Quickly Schedule For A Free Audit

4 + 9 =

What We Can Help You With In SEO