Mobile SEO: The Ultimate Guide (2021)

What is Mobile SEO?

Mobile SEO is determined and explained as optimizing your brand’s webpage or website for easy access on mobile devices such as cell phones and tablets. It clearly describes the procedure for optimizing website content for search engine web to ensure that your content is indexed and ranked up in the digital world. 

Surprisingly, 96% of mobile searches are made through Google, and Google is prioritizing and initiating a mobile-first index. 

Following their recommendations and other factors, we can conclude that mobile SEO is a definite and sure-shot “YES” if you want to be ranked up on search engines and the digital world.

Why is mobile SEO important?

As we have understood that mobile SEO is crucial and truly valuable to your business, but let’s take a look at a few pointers that make us understand why mobile SEO matters to us: – 

1) People spend 70% of their Internet time on mobile.

With the advancement and technological development, many people have transformed their internet usage and switched to mobiles to browse their essential products and services. 

When users opt for browsing online, 70% of the time, they’re adopting portable devices to do it. If they spend most of their time using mobile devices to search the web, it has become crucial and essential to ensure they have a positive experience on your site and get to know about all your services and products on mobiles. 

If you don’t transform your mode of selling, you are at a considerable risk of losing an abundance of leads for your business due to poor mobile experience.

2) 74% of internet users are more likely to return to a mobile-friendly website

It is a fact that people could relate to good experiences and come back if they had an amazing experience. 

So, it only makes sense that if users have a positive mobile experience on your business website, they’re more likely to turn back again to your pages quite often. 

Coming back to your site has a good and significant impact on your business growth, and there is a strong chance of the visitors becoming leads for your business.

3) Mobile-friendly websites encourage the opinion of more than 60% of users.

The best part of mobile SEO is adapting and accepting your website to provide the best experience for your audience. Suppose you don’t have a mobile-friendly website. 

In that case, you are at significant risk that your target audience and potential people may negatively perceive your brand or business and bounce off your pages, which eventually hinders your ranking on social media. 

By having a mobile-friendly website, your brand will sustain, and you’ll improve the opinion and perceptions of more than 60% of users that find your business.

4) 67% of users are more likely to buy from a mobile-friendly company

Your mobile-friendliness makes people interested in your brands and sharply impacts your conversion rate. 

If your webpage or website works properly on smartphones, your target audience is more likely to prefer your website for purchasing products and availing services from your company. 

Therefore, a mobile-friendly website definitely will help you earn and gain more conversions and leads for your business. 

Mobile SEO Strategies: –

To manage and monetize your mobile SEO strategy and increase your efforts in your mobile SEO strategy, you should start with Google’s Mobile Usability Test. 

You can search for the same within the Google search console . It is an easy and simple tool to understand and analyse if your webpage or website has any issues or problems regarding mobile usability. 

Following are some of the Mobile SEO strategies that can begin to incorporate and enhance into your mobile site:

1) Responsive Design:

It is necessary to ensure that you test your website on a wide range of devices to monitor and understand that your user and viewers’ experience is good and they are not suffering. 

There are also a wide range of screen sizes there, which has led to another challenge. You need to ensure your webpage or website is optimized and is operative and responsive for all the major brands’ factors and parameters. 

It includes buffering time, loading all site resources, not hiding content, and being navigable. This is why responsive design is the crucial factor for mobile SEO. It helps in: –

• Reducing SEO headaches
• Extremely user friendly
• All content is present on one URL for sharing and linking
• No redirects that eventually slow down your site overall

2) Don’t Use Different URLs for Mobile and Desktop:

Many websites had a desktop version and a different ‘M’ version for mobile in the past. Now, handling and monitoring this procedure of separate URLs is a bad idea for SEO, and it is also a real pain to manage with different tags and URLs for all the content and graphics. 

However, in today’s era, mobile search has been a priority for Google, so having the same URL for all devices and a mobile-ready, responsive design is the only and best way to go.

3) Non Intrusive Pop Ups:

Let’s face it, popups are not very likeable, not even for Google. And popups on your phone are even worse as they can cover the whole screen and be challenging to close. 

These popups are mood spoilers, frustrating, annoying, and will have your bounce rate and lessen your conversion rates. 

There are a few easy tips and tricks for using popups if you must use them in your mobile content strategy, as the average conversion rate for best-performing popups is an impressive 92%. Avoid or reduce interstitials popups and ads, like:

• Content-covering popups
• Popups that could be quickly closed before viewers can even access your content
• Deceptive page layouts that redirect or monitor users who accidentally click them
• Ads that interrupt or distract users and viewers as they navigate between pages
• Fresh window popups that open upon clicking through

 4) Don’t Hide Content on Mobile Version:

We need to be more careful when we are making our website for the mobile version. Just let go of those ‘Read More’ buttons that reveal additional or extra text. 

Google may not index or search content that’s hidden from mobile operators. Earlier, people used to hide content to improve page speed or enhance and upgrade the mobile experience. Nowadays, this strategy is too distracting and damaging for your SEO. 

Again, Google considers your mobile site version an amazing version, so hiding content means it’s not crawlable and, therefore, not added to the mobile-first index. 

5) Ensure Your Pages are Crawlable:

If Google cannot crawl your entire webpage and all its content, how will it understand if your page is mobile-friendly or not? And you want Google to understand that your site is mobile-friendly! 

To search out and acknowledge if you’re blocking content from being crawled, go to your Google Search Console to check if you’re inadvertently damaging yourself in the SEO foot with blocked content.

6) Optimize Page Speed:

One of the most crucial steps for great mobile SEO is page speed. Unfortunately, mobile devices have their own set of issues and problems, including hardware and connectivity. 

For example, depending on a device’s processing power, your webpage and website could take a substantially longer time to load than they would on a desktop. Similarly, the factor may vary in terms of internet connectivity. 

As a result, mobile devices can suffer slow and difficult load times, especially on the go. To rectify an optimized speed, try to reduce redirects, optimize images, and limit your code. 

7) Accept and implement a clean, easy-to-use navigation bar:

Your navigation is one of the most crucial parts of audience engagement. It plays a vital role in how your audience finds and access information about your brand and business. 

If your navigation is confusing, not easily understandable or too challenging to use, your audience may get annoyed or will get frustrated and leave your site. 

There are chances that you may never revisit your website also. To ensure you’re developing an easy and positive environment for your target audience, try to develop mobile-friendly navigation.

The optimum way to create mobile-friendly navigation is by adopting the usage of a hamburger menu. Hamburger menus usually appear at the top of a web page with three easily acceptable and usable lines.

When your audience clicks on this button, they’ll be able to visit the detailed version of your website through a drop-down menu with all the different pages where they can visit and choose their open shot to roam around.

The hamburger menu is beneficial as it makes it easy and accessible for you to keep your navigation systematic and organized for your target audience and potential customers. 

It also allows your site to stay clean and is easy for your target audience to search for and to find information and data in a much easier way.

Mobile SEO Best Practices 

As we have clearly understood the seriousness and importance of Mobile SEO for brand reputation and brand engagement, 

here are some critical checkpoints that will help your brand boost up on social media platforms in the longer pace of time. 

These are some of the mobile SEO checklists:

1) Take proper guidance and assistance from Google Analytics. It is essential to understand what is best for your brand promotion and reputation. 

2) Keep track of what percentage of your website traffic is via mobiles. It will help you to analyse and monitor your mobile SEO in a better and more efficient way.

3) Analyse, monitor and manage your mobile traffic through Google Search Console to check the clicks, impressions, and click-through rate (CTR). It will help you work on your weak points, understand the loopholes and manage your future proceedings for your brand promotion.

4) Leverage various effective and efficient tools to monitor if your present website is mobile-friendly or not. If not, try to make it operational as soon as possible for your brand listing on social media and brand promotion among your target audience and potential customers.

5) Use the all-new URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to initiate and validate how your website appears, works and operates on mobile.

6) Confirm crawling errors and other ailments that may occur on your site and rectify as many errors as possible for a better customer experience. It will reduce the feeling of frustration and enhance the feeling of connection and relativity for your brand from your target audience and potential customers. 

7) Make sure to let Google visualize, analyse and crawl everything on your website. 

8) Monitor and enhance your website’s speed on mobile using the Pagespeed Insights tool for easy and practical customer experience and work on opportunities to load your website faster and easier.

9) Implement and activate mobile-friendly popups to attract your target audience for your brand and business.

10) Ensure that you acknowledge and pay attention to your mobile UX and optimize all of your content, data and information for mobile.

11) Put in dedicated efforts for mobile keyword research and analysis and start giving technical SEO for mobile.

12) Last but not least, ensure that you don’t forget to improve and enhance your local SEO for mobile.