An Introduction To Mobile SEO Best Practices

With billions of algorithms and millions of guides present on global platforms, you stand alone in the digital SEO market to keep up with the ever-working and ever-growing trends of today such as Mobile SEO marketing.

Furthermore a report by Statista stated that, “52.2% of all website traffic from around the world comes from mobile phones.”

Through which the question of to improve mobile SEO becomes the epitome of every online marketing agency.

Therefore, it is an opportunity for your business website to score better online traffic and rank in SERPs which requires more service on mobiles by your website or stores than on any other devices such as desktop, tablets and others.

Because as per a Google report on purchase and sales of products, “51% of smartphone users have found a new company or product when searching on mobile”

Making the mobile revolution a great opportunity to get visibility online through organic traffic along with a great number of opportunities to convert the online users to customers.

Now, this requires you to accomplish the process of knowing, growing and providing a better user experience through mobile SEO marketing as it covers your queries from “What customers want” To “Where customers are” problems.

You need to understand all about mobile SEO marketing and market them on their most suited spot. such as Mobiles.

No worries! The best practices for mobile SEO that I am going to provide you with below will help you improve your Mobile SEO game. 

So, let’s now cover the basics and understand Mobile SEO best practices in Digital Marketing.

Understanding Mobile SEO

Mobile SEO is the most essential marketing strategy to build your business’s ranking through online visibility.

Since 2018, Google has been promoting the use of mobile-friendly websites by including them as an indexing factor.

The algorithms of Google measure mobile optimization as a metric to provide a website’s ranking, causing almost half of the world to shift from desktop-responsive websites to mobile SEO platforms guidelines that are followed by digital marketers today.

The reason for this is that, firstly, among more than 200 factors in the Google search engine’s algorithms,one of the major metrics is mobile optimization. 

Google states that, “70% of those shown in our search results have already shifted over to mobile-first indexing.”

Providing opportunities to your website for building traffic engagement and ranking. You should have optimized it for a better user experience because Google metrics has become customer-centric with over a decade of updates and still counting.

And secondly, mobile SEO marketing which is 55% of online traffic today, is estimated to reach a new high by 2025 according to some statistics that state, 

“By 2025, nearly 73% of internet users will access the internet solely via mobile devices.”

Marking new opportunities to attract users and potential customers, such as voice search, featured snippets,etc.

With these aspects in mind, let’s move on to our topic of mobile SEO best practices to get a better understanding of Mobile SEO elements.

Mobile SEO Best Practices

With mobile searches rising at an exponential level, many digital business owners have included mobile SEO marketing in their improvement list and consider it a must to have element when preparing their website for online visibility as well as to gain revenue.

The thing is when you don’t apply the best practices of Mobile SEO Marketing, with the knowledge that more than 50% of websites have already been optimized for the mobile SEO platforms (such as AMPs).

But, you are still not mobile SEO tested, you are basically letting Google decide that you are non-relevant for the searching traffic and therefore, would not show within the SERPs.

But worry not! Here, I have provided you with some technical, human and search engine centric Mobile SEO best practices, there are:

Responsive Site

With the in-demand mobile culture, online searches have made businesses evolve their SEO techniques, considering that more than half of the world’s population searches online making it essential to build a mobile-responsive website today.

Also, mobile-friendliness has become a major metric for Google Analytics to measure the website’s relevancy. In return the search engines rank your website minding the ever-changing algorithm that it follows.

Your responsive web design and codes must sync in order to complete the task of providing functional optimized and compelling websites on devices of different sizes. The mobile first web design makes a responsive web design, look at the illustration below.

What happens is the algorithm and codes are adjusted according to the ratio and proportion of displayed structure and elements of your website within the screen of the devices it is shown on such as desktops, mobiles, tablets.

The report by ‘Think With Google’ states that, “51% of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product when conducting a search on their smartphones.”

Making responsiveness a major element of Mobile SEO Marketing.

Accelerated Mobile Pages

With keeping an index in check for the comfort and ease of Google bots, the high speed of your website when loading on a user’s mobile is considered a metric too.

The page load speed as per Google guidelines must be between 1 to 3 seconds utmost and as the seconds increase the presence of traffic on your website decreases exponentially.

Here, AMPs (Accelerated Mobile Pages) come into play as it increases the speed by taking in less data, improving the performance of the server, and building a free content delivery network to give your web pages their Page Load Speed.

All of these combined, provides your website with higher visibility, exploration and ranking while you are getting potential customers for your products and services that they are interested in.

These stripped down versions of your web pages are held in cache forms within Google CDN to let the user directly pursue them as shown in the picture below.

You can see the traveling of data from your own servers to the webpage users take at least two extra steps from searching to clicking to going to your servers and at last the information is too late to download that the user has moved on from your website.

With AMPs you can cut short this data exchange extension while providing you with a unique identity in SERPs. Look at the SERPs results below.

This symbolizes faster loading of results to a searcher’s query making it visible for online traffic creating lower bounce rates and increasing your users’ engagement on your site. Here, potential customers increase conversion rates and revenues for your business.

For how to improve mobile SEO, the stripped down version, AMPs, are the best tool by Google for your website that excludes advertisements, pop ups and other elements that may interfere with your customers’ exploring and engagement.

Sitemaps Or XML

Sitemaps or XML are easy-to-use roadmaps of your website that work for the search engine and help to crawl web pages of your website.

The Google crawlers swipe up and down within your website’s codes and URLs which needs to be structured in order to form a plain list of contents that provides basic indexing of web pages on your website.

Look at the picture given below which shows the proper structured web pages and their authority distribution.

The detailed timeline of Mobile-first indexing by Ahrefs states that, “In 2018, 50% of websites have been crawled using the mobile-first indexing algorithm and since then the Google search engine has crawled 100% of websites online to this algorithm.”

This makes mobile-first indexing to be easily analyzed by the search engine crawlers and makes it an important metrics introduced by Google.

Of course this is done for better user-experience which requires proper instruction within codes and proper structural planning of your website.

Here, sitemaps or XML files come in easily crawled, get web pages face value distributed properly, and lastly to help your websites ranking.

Better User Experience

Readability, Content relevance, Navigation and other elements of a website makes your user experience that sets future interaction, buying decisions and lastly, word-of-mouth advertisements.

Keeping your website SEO-enabled is a major part of any type of optimization, plus the mobile searches by your potential leads drives sales too.

Pay attention to all these things:

1. Faster Loading Speed With No Popups: The page loading speed of a mobile site should take less than 3 seconds to load and if more happens try to delete some excessive cache and try to use no pop ups or high resolution pictures and videos.

Shown below are statistics of increasing page visits and average longer sessions of organic traffic when you keep your speed faster making this how to improve mobile SEO fast and efficient for your website visibility.

Therefore, keeping your website’s visual elements compressed, deleting unwanted codes and uploading caches on the servers available online such as Google servers helps page loading to remain under 3 seconds.

Also, never use full page or content blocking pop-ups as that annoys the customers more than anything nowadays, additionally pop-ups are a waste of space and money because most of the browsers today have no pop-ups shown option in their settings.

2. Proper Metadata: Metadata are mini-ads for the content of your webpage that was shown in results against your customer’s query. Meta descriptions include headlines and descriptions that are a brief summary, a CTA even for your content that must be compelling for your users.

Now for mobile devices the max limit set by Google is about 680 pixels and up to 120 characters for meta description in order for complete visibility on SERPs. You should also include the target keyword 1 to 2 times in your metadata.

Read More: Tweaks For Page Title & Meta Description That’ll Boost Your SEO Traffic & CTR

3. Voice Search Optimized Content: Understanding your customers makes a major portion of your content relatable to your website and so, creating persona-based content while focusing on conversational keywords help you pass mobile SEO tests among users.

And according to Search Engine Watch, “Mobile voice searches are 3x more likely be for something local than text searches”

Hence, voice search is the now-and-next trend of the digital industry and is among the mobile seo best practices.

The subheadings within your content should be query-based questions and solutions must be in listicles format, so that Google algorithm could easily detect your content.

If it falls under the Featured Snippets, you get increased visibility from user traffic which increases your CRTs while also, giving you opportunity to compel customers to engage in your content.

Read More: Google Voice Search: How to Optimize Your Content for the Voice Search?

4. Header (h1, h2, h3) Tags: Header tags, let you highlight your content hierarchy from title to subheadings and basically fulfill two major tasks of SEO: attracting user engagement and letting Google understand the content better.

This has been pointed out by Google’s J. Muller states that, “When it comes to text on a page, a heading is a really strong signal telling us this part of the page is about this topic.”

Clearing the understanding of Google bots of the wanted content from the unwanted content, that is stating the target keyword at the center for Google to take what information it can provide in SERPs for users’ query.

5 Easy Navigation: The navigation of a website comes under the proper functionality of your website and hence, is a very important point to consider when taking User Experience into consideration.

Now, most of the time when you provide your URLs of web pages, homepages and other such content pages of your website, you are hoping for backlinks from other websites similar to your niche or are trying to get organic traffic from other platforms.

Think of it this way when your customers are clicking on the link of a content provided in the SERPs through ads, interlinking and external linking, whatever the means be.

They only hope to get directed to your web page that contains the content which appealed to them in search results of their query.

But, if the URL that the person clicked was unreachable or took too much time to open.

Wouldn’t the customers just back off and move on to find another site?

That too without waiting for a second more.

The thing is yes they would leave after the 3rd second they have to wait because your website URL failed to direct them to your website’s landing page indicating lack of the optimization and a faulty navigation. This is not a good user experience for them.

Also, now the search engine would have to take actions and you would decrease your rank in SERPs.

Let’s see what the problem was!

The problems may be that your content or URLs are duplicated causing the search results to not be able to direct you to the primary page, your links are broken or content couldn’t load fully, in both cases the content looks unappealing to the users.

So, in this journey of getting visibility online, given in the picture below are different ways to get your navigation straightened out and open pages without any difficulty.

Some of the methods used to fix these faulty problems are redirects, canonical tags, nofollow, etc.

This helps in directing the links to open to the one primary web page that gets the authority of all the duplicate URLs, content and pages online.

The conclusive part of these points are that mobile SEO marketing takes user experience as the fundamental level of improving your website.

Not Using Robots.txt

Robots.txt is the command from your website’s code that shuns or blocks the search engine crawlers from crawling some web page URLs, CSS and Java Files.

Making Google work around those pages and not letting the search engine understand your website to its fullest by bots generally checking the robots.txt file before visiting your site.

This leads to Google becoming suspicious of your web pages, files and folders that are programmed to not be crawled by search engine bots and most experts on SEO state that the robots.txt files (if any) present in your website must be mentioned at the starting of the codes so that the Google crawlers recognize them as files not to be analyzed.

The examples of ‘robots.txt’ forms to use within your website are User-agent:

Disallow: (allows Google’s crawl) or Disallow: / (Doesn’t allow Google’s crawl). Look at the picture below

The HTML code is inducted in the head of your document that you do not want indexed.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

Here, the coding is conducted on the page which is not to be indexed but the linking may follow and you can then upload your robots.txt file on robots.txt Tester by Google Console.

Now, here is a fair warning for you which is pointed out in the following regarding usage of robots.txt:

1. These web pages lack the authority within your website, so are basically raiding your space.

2. If robots.txt applied webpages do have authority that is another website had backlinks to that page Google would be able to crawl your web page and enlist it as an authority web page within your website. Therefore, the authority is distributed.

This Google crawler ban and distributed authority on your website marks your website as irrelevant to the search engine and your rank may decline due to this.

So, instead of using robots.txt elements try to structure the content as simply as possible without giving search engines a choice to decrease your rank on a small metric of face value authority distribution.

Mobile SEO Software

In the bonus tip I would like to suggest some mobile SEO software that would help you to learn whether your website shows the results on mobile and if those results have similar optimized properties as the desktop version or not.

The advantage is to keep a check on the statistics, errors and alerts that might be occurring in your mobile-optimized website.

This would help you understand the areas that your SEO hasn’t reached yet and you can work on how to improve mobile SEO fast loading, efficient solution and responsiveness as per your website’s requirement.

Here are five Mobile SEO Softwares to test your website elements.

1 Mobile-Friendly Test (Tests whether your webpage is mobile-friendly as per Google’s requirements)

2 Page speed Insights (Test speed on desktop and mobile both, elements that can be improved for easiest performance)

3 Google AdWords Keyword Tool (Volume keywords searches on desktop as well as mobile, provides local search term variations)

4 Google Search Console (Check mobile site setup, examines effectiveness of your website by issues such as poor links or URLs, etc)

5 Mobile First Index Checker (Free, checks the similarity of elements on both desktop and mobile versions)

These are some of the free tools available online that could help you in gathering data and analyzing your website in its desktop as well as mobile version. Providing you with enough information to optimize your website accordingly.

Conclusion

In this blog you have met with some of the most needed SEO that you require when you are optimizing your website according to its mobile-version.

Now, this is because Google, being the user-centric search engine, has announced Mobile-first indexing as a ranking factor in its algorithm since 2016 which has become a very important and a 100% used mobile SEO marketing technique today.

So, follow the mobile SEO best practices given above and find out their performance, error and speed through the tools given in bonus points.

For more marketing tips and services, you can schedule a free-of-cost 30-Minute Strategy session with our experts. In this call, our experts would discuss your business and provide you with the free strategies that you can use to boost your sales and revenue.

FAQs

1. Is mobile SEO important?

If you don’t want to lose out on a significant portion of that traffic pie, mobile search engine optimisation (SEO) is important. You can prepare your site for mobile users in a number of ways, including by having a mobile-friendly design, optimising your content for voice search, and making sure your site loads very quickly.