Mobile SEO

As you create your digital advertising strategy, you should never overlook the importance of mobile SEO. Mobile SEO lets you optimize your website so that it functions well and is user-friendly when accessed on mobile devices. Mobile SEO t is an important part of your overall SEO strategy. 

Why You Should Follow Mobile SEO Best Practices 

The reason mobile SEO best practices are so important is simple. A very large portion of your audience will visit your website on their mobile devices, and you want to ensure that they have as positive of an experience as they would on a desktop or laptop computer. One survey indicated that 52% of users would be less likely to interact with your company following a poor mobile experience. On the other hand, 74% of users said they have a higher chance of going back to a mobile-friendly website. Don’t forget that 70% of time online is spent on mobile devices. 

It is also important to note that your website’s mobile-friendliness can directly affect your overall SEO rankings, thanks to Google algorithms. 

With its importance firmly in mind, it is time to look at some mobile SEO best practices. 

Boost Your Load Time

One of the most important parts of browsing on mobile or any device is how quickly the page loads. If a website takes too long to load, users will give up and look at another page, making your bounce rate worse. You can take advantage of services, like Google PageSpeed Insights, to see your overall load time and the other areas you can improve. 

Incorporate Local SEO

Another important aspect of mobile SEO is to incorporate local SEO into your strategy. Mobile searches involving “near me” are increasing, having tripled in the past several years. If you do not account for this with local SEO efforts, you will miss out on a lot of traffic. 

You should incorporate a range of local SEO strategies, including optimizing for geographic keywords or adding in “near me.” Also, make sure your Google My Business profile contains accurate information. 

Use Responsive Design

Incorporating responsive design into your mobile SEO strategy will make a significant difference, including helping various other points on this list. Responsive design refers to a design that automatically adapts to the device the page is viewed on, including tablets, smartphones, and computers. 

By using responsive design, you can ensure that all users, including those on mobile devices, will be able to view your website correctly. Failing to incorporate this type of design can make a hard-to-navigate mobile website that feels crowded and unusable, driving away leads and increasing your bounce rate. 

Or Consider a Mobile URL

If you are not a fan of responsive design, you could also create a separate mobile URL that users get automatically redirected to. This lets you create a website that has been optimized for mobile users, giving them their own unique experience. It lets you keep your desktop website how it is, yet still bring in and keep mobile visitors. 

Reconsider Pop-ups

Some pop-ups will work fine with the mobile experience, while others can hurt your mobile SEO. Many websites use pop-ups to encourage visitors to sign up for newsletters or take other actions, but you have to be careful when designing them. 

Most importantly, make sure that the pop-up does not completely fill the screen on a mobile device. Users need to be able to click the “x” to close the pop-up on mobile devices. Ideally, they can do so without having to scroll around your page. If the method of closing a pop-up is not immediately apparent on a mobile device, you are likely to have a high bounce rate as visitors give up and head somewhere else. 

Think About AMP and SEO

AMP used to be called Accelerated Mobile Pages and is Google’s lightweight pages designed to provide a more engaging and fast experience. If someone visits your page on a mobile device and you have an AMP, the AMP is what they will see. 

You could theoretically skip creating an AMP page as it does not directly affect your search engine rankings. However, the increased mobile-friendliness and website speed associated with AMP pages do improve your ranking. There is still some debate about whether AMP is a best practice for mobile SEO, with some arguing that it is most useful for content-based pages. It is at least worth consideration. 

Prioritize the User Experience

Incorporating responsive design is just one step towards improving the user experience. You should supplement it with other changes or considerations to further boost your mobile-friendly SEO strategy. While the entire user experience is important, three elements should be your primary focus. 

Choose a Legible Font

When you choose the font for your website, consider how it will look on the small screens of mobile devices. This can involve changes like adjusting the font size or using bold font. Just be sure to test the font on a mobile device to confirm it is readable. 

Make It Thumb-friendly

Although everyone holds and uses their smartphones in a different way, many people prefer to hold their phone in their dominant hand and use their thumb to navigate. To ensure that this strong segment of mobile users can use your website, make sure that it is thumb-friendly, meaning fairly easy to navigate just with a thumb. 

Large CTAs

While you do not want your call-to-action buttons to be overly large to the point that they detract from the rest of the website, you do want them to be big enough for users to find on mobile devices and for them to get clicked easily. You want the CTA to be immediately visible, whether it is a form to fill out or a phone number. 

Keep Navigation Clean

Whether visitors are on mobile devices, you want them to find the information they need on your website, which is done via the navigation bar. Stick to simple, clean navigation, so your visitors do not get annoyed and leave your page. The standard for this aspect of mobile SEO is to use a hamburger menu (three horizontally stacked lines). Clicking on this menu will show a drop-down navigation menu.