We are now very addicted to our smartphones. Many people check their smartphone when they get out of bed in the morning and the last thing they look at before they go to sleep.
The mobile phone has changed the world dramatically. That’s why there is the urgency of mobile SEO. As the people are on mobile devices then it is the best place to target them on it.
Digital marketers are investing a huge amount of money to enhance their mobile SEO so that their websites will also show in mobile searches as well.
There is also a dramatic increase in the voice searches. People love to search queries in form of voice search. The increase of smart devices also increases so voice search is also a field that digital marketers should focus.
Recent Google algorithm updates also putting more emphasis on the mobile-first index. So there is no way to ignore it.
There is several resign why mobile optimization is more important than ever giving birth to Mobile SEO.
In this article, I will give you some effective tips that will help you to focus on mobile SEO.
Let’s start.
Why mobile SEO is so important now?
Page Contents
- 1 Why mobile SEO is so important now?
- 2 Difference between mobile SEO and desktop SEO
- 3 What Is Google’s Mobile-First Index?
- 4 What should you do for mobile SEO?
- 5 Is Your Site Mobile SEO – Friendly?
- 6 Avoid using pop-ups
- 7 Use clean navigation major factor for Mobile SEO
- 8 Let Google crawl everything
- 9 How mobile site speed Factor for Mobile SEO?
- 10 Make your content easy to read on mobile
- 11 Should I Implement AMP?
- 12 Use Schema Structured Data
- 13 Conclusion:
- 14 Share This Article ➡
- 15 Don’t Miss To Read
According to a recent study, Mobile traffic has now eclipsed desktop traffic. Every day, more and more people are entering this platform. So there are enormous advantages of the mobile SEO.
58% of all searches in Google are now done on a mobile device. According to Google, there are 27.8 billion more queries searched on mobile than desktop.
So to reach these people you need a good mobile SEO strategy.
According to research by Google, smartphone users have a higher buyer intent than desktop users. The smartphone user is focused and ready to buy. So, targeting these customers in the mobile devices is more favorable than desktop devices. Mobile SEO is great important.
Difference between mobile SEO and desktop SEO
You may have this type of doubt.
There is a little bit difference between desktop SEO and mobile SEO. But from a business point of view, the goals are often comparable.
As like every business want, you have to reach your targeted audience and convert them into paying customers.
In some ways, desktop SEO strategies also work for mobile SEO, but in a slightly different form.
The one of the major difference may be, In desktop SEO most of the time the focus is more on the general public. But in mobile SEO the focus is on the local audience.
What Is Google’s Mobile-First Index?
As the mobile searches increases, Google also starts giving it importance. For the first time, Google is determining rankings based on the quality of the mobile version of the site. You can check the mobile-friendly updates.
Google’s Mobile-first Index ranks means, it shows the search results based only on the mobile version of the page. Before this update, Google’s uses a mix of desktop and mobile results to index websites.
Then you should optimize your website for mobile. Then fulfill these conditions.
- Loads resources across all devices
- Doesn’t hide any content on mobile versions of your site
- Loads fast as mobile users expect
- Has working internal links and redirects
- Boasts a UX design that’s optimized no matter what device your visitors use
These are the most common things you should do to optimize your site according to Google. If you have done this already then its good.
What should you do for mobile SEO?
The recent Google updates may hurt you if you have not optimized according to it. Then the question is what you should do for mobile SEO.
Well, to say frankly some desktop techniques also help you in mobile SEO. Beyond this, you should have to perform some extra work.
Follow the techniques to overcome.
Is Your Site Mobile SEO – Friendly?
This may be the first question you should ask yourself. You check it by using some tools.
Optimizing responsive design for mobile devices so good for Mobile SEO.
Most of the website on the web have responsive designs. Means the website will automatically be adjusted according to the device size.
This is not optimizing. You just show the audience the small version of your website.
For the best optimization, you may use a sub-domain and a specially designed site only for mobile devices if you can.
This is the best possible solution but make sure that you have the correct connections between your regular desktop domain and the mobile domain. Means, tell Google that these pages are only for mobile devices. So whenever someone searches from mobile, then serve them this mobile version.
Use the header image small for mobile devices. Google mobile users need there to answer instantly.
Use a lot of negative spaces. Negative space means the space between buttons, text, and design elements. This is really important for mobile users as well as Google.
Display your social icons as a tab bar at the bottom of the page for mobile users. This may lead to more engagements and social shares. This will may lead to increase the domain authority of your website.
Avoid using pop-ups
Avoid using pop-ups that cover full device screen. This is just disgusting.
Google wants that their mobile users find fast what they need.
Google introduced a new signal in 2017 that stated:
This does not mean all pop-ups are bad. Avoid using the pop-ups that cover the full screen and completely affect the content. More annoying pop-ups may lead your site to get penalized.
Instead of this, you can use simple light pop-ups that do not affect the content and cover the full screen.
Creating a clickable, easy-to-view navigation menu is essential for mobile users.
First, understand the behavior of the user and make a menu for that.
You can use a hamburger menu. Most of the theme comes with this menu. Google has said that hamburger menus are “fine” to use in mobile sites.
Let Google crawl everything
As you know Google crawling is most important for website indexing. Do you block Googlebot from accessing CSS, Javascript or other important parts of your site’s code? The resign may be different.
Unless Google crawls your full website it can’t decide whether your site is mobile-friendly or not. If Google can’t crawl your website then how should it rank your page?
How do you detect this issue?
The first thing you should check is your robots.txt file. This tells Googlebot that not crawl or index certain parts of your site. This file is usually found at site.com/robots.txt. You can also see these things inside of the Google Search Console.
On the GEC, click on “Google Index” —> “Blocked Resources”. This will show you if you are blocking Googlebot from crawling certain parts of your site.
How mobile site speed Factor for Mobile SEO?
This may hard to digest for someone but, nowadays SEO is not limited to meta tags and keyword density.
Google’s RankBrain algorithm is so smart and specifically designed to see how Google searchers (users) interact with your site.
So page loading speed matters a lot. In fact, Google recommends that your site loads in under a second for mobile users. Who wants to wait for something. We are very busy and can’t wait for some second for page loading. This is obvious.
Thanks to Google, because it provides a free PageSpeed Insights tool for this.
It shows your page speed for both mobile and desktop devices. It also shows the optimization suggestions so that you can correct this.
If you want to get a mastery of page speed than check out this excellent resource from Google.
Make your content easy to read on mobile
You may have the best piece of content on your niche. But what happens if your audiences are struggling to read it. All your efforts are wasted.
Right?
Then they will hit their “back” button and go back. This will leads your site decrease in ranking and your bounce rate will increase.
Now the question is how can you make your content more readable? Don’t Ignore if going for Mobile SEO
- Use at least 15px font
- Use short and meaningful paragraphs
- You line should a length between 50-60 characters
- Make sure your pages have much contrast between text and background
Should I Implement AMP?
The Google-led open source project AMP. The main motive is to accelerate mobile pages in Mobile SEO strategy. This is really fast and AMP pages load about 4x faster than their non-AMP counterparts.
So, lots of SEOs rushed to implement AMP for their client’s sites. Google shows a little lightning icon next to your result in the search results that may boost your CTR.
But the question is does it make sense to use AMP?
The choice is yours, of course. But my take is: probably not.
Here’s why
Before making your decision to migrate your site over AMP make sure that it will have serious limits on page functionality.
It has full control over your ads. You can’t show lightbox pop-ups in AMP pages.
AMP can hurt your link building efforts. Link building is one of the most important things one should focus on.
When someone links to your site it may lead to boost your domain authority.
But, when someone links to your AMP pages, that link points to the Google.com domain. links to AMP pages will boost Google’s domain authority. There is no increase in your domain authority.
AMP may not be the last thing.
We are in LTE age and it is really fast. And 5G is just around the corner. The data transfer speed will also increase.
I have a question for you. Do you want to sacrifices all the above thing just to increase the page speed? If your answer is yes, then you may go for it.
So, just for increasing page speed, it is not a great deal to implement an AMP version.
My recommendation is unless you have a compelling reason to do so, I don’t go for AMP.
Use Schema Structured Data
Structured data is quite good habit and always help to rank your post in Mobile SEO. You can add structured data in the form of Schema.org to your site. The biggest advantage of structured data is it makes clear to search engines and differentiate elements on your site mean.
If you did this correctly, search engines can use this data to give you the highlighted search results. This is also known as rich results or rich snippets. In this way, your link will stand out from the crowd. It may lead to a higher click-through rate.
If you want more organic traffic and clicks from mobile Google searchers, consider implementing structured data.
After creating an m.site
I have already mentioned what is the benefits of m.site or mobile site above. If you have done this then follow these also.
- Implement Mobile Switchboard Tags
Switchboard tags are similar to canonical tags. It tells Google a mobile URL exists with a rel=alternate tag.
Without switchboard tags, Google may not crawl the mobile versions of your URL.
You can also do this in the sitemaps.
- Detect User-agent Strings
Make sure that your desktop URLs should coordinate to the right mobile URL when redirecting.
For example, www.example[dot]com/about should redirect to m.example[dot]com/about.
Thanks to Google Search Console. It will detect these faulty redirects for you.
Search Console Verification
I assume that you have verified your desktop site before. In the same way, verify the mobile version of your website in Google Search Console.
XML Sitemaps & Robots.txt
A sitemap is like a road map for Google. So, make sure that all links in the sitemaps should be available. The mobile version of the site. This includes your robots.txt file too.
Conclusion:
After a long discussion on Mobile SEO, we are in the conclusion.
Things are changing so fast. The basics of SEO are not the same as it was. You have to keep update on each day. Yes, mostly but not entirely.
Recent studies show that the mobile searches are growing so fast. In the future, the number will also increase.
You may have noticed a dramatic decrease in traffic if your website is not mobile optimized. Google has declared about this before but a lot of people don’t have any idea about it.
So this may be the right time to put your effort into mobile SEO.
You may have to put efforts on your desktop version. Some techniques may help you in mobile SEO also. So you don’t have to put too much effort into it.
As I mentioned above these are the some of the techniques you can increase your mobile search traffic. Google is also helping you in this matter by providing some must needed tools. Use these tools to identify the issues and try to solve them.
After applying these techniques you will definitely see the difference.
Feel free to share if you get any value from this. By the way, which techniques you will use after reading this. Comment below and let me know.
If you find any value in this article, we encourage to share this article in social media, so large mass of people can read and understand this a bit. Our mission to spread the Technology awareness among the people. so share this article on social media platform.
I think it is high time I become more serious with M-SEO… There are some parts you mentioned in the guide such as speed and responsiveness which I need to work on to improve my rankings and indexability.
Tnx for the tip.