Mobile SEO: 5 Ways To Get It Right

Did you know that over 60% of global web traffic comes from mobile devices? This may not come as a surprise as you probably belong to that percentage, but do you take mobile SEO into account when creating your website? Google does, so let’s discover how to fix this and gain traffic, leads and revenue given that your site’s mobile version is the primary factor for ranking.

Why Mobile SEO Matters

Before diving into tips and ways to improve your website’s traffic thanks to mobile SEO implementations, you should have a clear picture of why this is so significant. There are four main reasons for this:

• Mobile-first indexing. As you will soon learn, Google is currently using the mobile version of websites as the top basis for ranking and indexing. In simple words, you won’t get the rankings you want unless your mobile site doesn’t include an optimization.
• User Behavior. We mentioned this before, but we must highlight it again: we’re talking about more than 60% of global web traffic. We use our smartphones for browsing, shopping, searching and communicating, so imagine stepping into a website of your interest and finding it’s not mobile-friendly.
• Impact on Rankings. Coming back to Google, the search engine par excellence, it prioritizes mobile-friendly sites when showing you results for your search. This means if your website provides a poor mobile experience, it’ll definitely get lower rankings and less visibility.
• Conversion Rates. Last, but not least, think about your personal experience online. Normally, 53% of users abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load on mobile — sounds familiar? Once again, we’re talking about losing potential clients and engagement.

Key Elements of Mobile SEO

Now that Mobile SEO is clear to be one of your musts when it comes to creating a site for your business, it’s time to discover its key elements so that you start implementing them and getting familiar with each one. Prepare to focus on:

• Responsive Design. Have you ever visited a website from your mobile phone which was extremely small-sized or, on the contrary, giant-sized? This happens because we skip a step during the design process and we don’t ensure websites adapt to any screen size, avoiding the need to create separate versions for mobile and desktop sites.
• Loading Speed. Next thing you should be focusing on is fast-loading pages, which is something users expect from the very beginning. Slowness will translate into higher bounce rates and lower rankings, results you can avoid by compressing images or minimizing code, for example.
• Easy Navigation. Once again, users expect a smooth and fast experience, so why don’t give them simplified menus and buttons for touchscreens? Make it easy: use a hamburger menu from where they can select and click elements that, by the way, need to be large enough to be easily tapped.
• Readable Content. Lastly, it’s highly recommended to use larger fonts, create short paragraphs and make clear headings so that your content is easy to read on small screens — doesn’t anyone think of nearsighted people? Moreover, consider avoiding pop-ups that block content, which will definitely hurt your rankings.

5 Tips to Optimize for Mobile SEO

At this point, you may be wondering how you can include all those elements on your website and, once done, make sure it’s having the desired performance. This is when we spring into action and tell you all about the tips you need to follow to do so, so how about we disclose them already?

1️⃣ Check If Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly

Regarding small or excessively big website size, unplayable content and viewport problems, first thing you should be checking is your website’s mobile-friendliness. There are many tools that will help you on this matter as they provide detailed reports and recommendations to help you fix these issues, such as Mobile-Friendly Test o PageSpeed Insights. When it comes to startups, this will also save them money by being able to check their site’s performance on their own and not relying on a specialized team who takes care of mobile SEO.

2️⃣ Go For A Responsive Design

You surely have heard that old saying which goes “better safe than sorry”, haven’t you? Let’s listen to generational wisdom and take action so that we don’t have to worry about our website being suitable for only one platform, something that can be done from the beginning of the design process. How? Ensuring you have a responsive design that can adapt to any screen size by making use of CSS media queries for adjusting layouts, images and fonts based on the user’s device.

3️⃣ Speed Is For The Winners

This is probably one of the most important things to take into account when designing a website focused on mobile SEO, as doing so can get you higher rankings and lower bounce rates, which is exactly what you need. In order to optimize your site, start by optimizing images without sacrificing quality — choose the right format, use compression tools or resize them before uploading them —, using accelerated mobile pages (AMP) for faster loading times and minimizing code.

4️⃣ Rely On Structured Data (Schema Markup)

We all want search engines to understand our content, so why don’t we make it easy for them? If you use structured data, that is, include information about your website on the code, Google will understand the content better and will display that information in search results as rich snippets. Some of the things you can include are your business name, address, phone number or timetables, which will help you get higher positions and gain users’ attention. Remember that we’re focusing on mobile SEO and we normally don’t spend too much time navigating the results page.

5️⃣ Simplify User’s Navigation

Once again, mobile users want things to be fast, easy and intuitive. As we said before, a hamburger menu will save space and also ensure clickable elements have the right size for users to tap them. Also, this will remove complex menus from the equation and will prioritize the most important pages — straight to the point, see?

Road To Mobile-Friendly Awards

We’re quite sure at this stage you’ve already realized mobile SEO is no longer optional, but a must. Mobile users and its traffic dominates the Internet and Google’s mobile-first indexing policy is critical if you wish to stay competitive.

Lucky for you, now you have a guide with which you can make sure your website meets the criteria for Google and mobile users to pay attention to what you have to say.