3 Easy Tips to Get Your Mobile Site Optimized for SEO
With more than half of all Google searches happening on mobile devices making sure your site is mobile-friendly is critical. How to go about that is pretty straightforward. We have put together the top three tips to set up and optimize your mobile SEO.
Tip #1 – Make sure your design is responsive
Your customers don’t want to look at a mini version of your website on their phone. The best way to set up your site is by having a responsive design. Here are a few reasons why.
- One URL instead of multiple – mobile no longer requires a separate URL or M configuration. This way was hard to manage, confusing, and over complicated.
- It’s more user-friendly – the user experience is really important because attracting traffic and converting that traffic is the goal. You want a site that will work well, look good, and increase your rankings.
- No more redirects – 93% of people purchase after doing a mobile search. Having a site that is fully responsive, means your visitors will stay, browse, and most likely purchase. If your site is not optimized for mobile, your site rankings on SERP’s will be terrible.
Tip #2 – Improve your technical SEO
Last year Google launched mobile-first indexing, which considers the mobile version of your site first. In other words, if you have a mobile site, and you should, this is what will determine your rankings more than your desktop version.
The next step in optimizing your mobile site is improving the technical SEO. You can test out how mobile-friendly your site really is by using these handy tools.
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Google’s Search Console (GSC)
and the Mobile-Friendly Test are great tools that let you view your
mobile usability issues. They can provide you with important data
about how user-friendly your mobile experience is. Mobile-friendly
will provide a full report, so you can fix issues from slow-loading
pages to illegible font sizes.
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Fix your sitemap – You want
Google to be able to crawl everything, if you block Google
from accessing your Javascript, CSS, or other code, your rankings
will suffer. This is an easy fix. Head on over to
site.com/robots.txt (it also might be under your GSC) click on
“Google Index” —> “Blocked Resources”. If you are
blocking something unblock it. You may have specific pages that you
might not want Google to crawl, like promotional landing pages that
offer a discount code to the visitor. In that case, you have to
modify your site map and make sure that Google is very clear about
which pages it needs to crawl.
- Test your mobile site often – If you use Google Merchant Center it will automatically alert you of any 404 errors, mapping issues, and crawling errors as well. Make sure that you check these often and fix errors as they come.
Tip #3 Improve your site speed
The third and final step after you’ve built and optimized is to check the loading speed of the site. You only have a few seconds to grab a mobile visitor’s attention so you have to make sure that your site speed is optimized. Here are a few tips:
- Use Google PageSpeed Insights – If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, statistics show your visitor will leave. The goal is to get every mobile page loaded in under two seconds. To do this check your Google PageSpeed Insights.
- Compress all your images – you want to make sure you minimize any images that are on your site.
- Make sure all your content is playable – If you have an embedded video or other multimedia, make sure it works and that it plays on any and all devices. If you have bulky videos you might want to have them load last, so your user could browse your site while they load.
- Eliminate any extra scripts – look through all the apps and various snippets of code that load when your site starts and make sure to eliminate all the ones that you don’t need. Remember – every additional app slows down your site.
Recap
On average, more than half of your traffic will likely come from a mobile device of some kind. Making sure your site is accessible, fast, and optimized for mobile will make a massive difference in your rankings and overall performance. To ensure you are ranking as high as possible, use the above tips closely. Need extra help? You can always contact a mobile SEO company for more tips and steps to optimize your mobile site.
