What is Mobile SEO?
Mobile SEO is a practice of making your website more optimized for mobile and tablet users. It is not only for users but also for search engines to crawl your website better which reflects in the ranking.Â
Why Mobile SEO is Important?
According to statista, Mobile accounts for approximately half of the web traffic worldwide. In the second quarter of 2020, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 51.53 percent of global website traffic, consistently hovering around the 50 percent mark since the beginning of 2017.Â
More than 40 percent of transactions happen over mobile. As Google is implementing mobile-first indexing, mobile SEO is more important than ever. If your website is not mobile-friendly, you will not just lose mobile ranking but also your mobile users due to a bad mobile experience. If you are a beginner in digital marketing marketing, and want to gain expertise, check out our digital marketing courses from top universities.Â
When the mobile usage level is increasing day by day, you need to provide a good user experience by having a website that gives a rich experience no matter the device user is utilizing.Â
By making your website mobile-friendly, you ensure:
- Your website is responsive and adjusts based on device screen size.
- Implements fonts that are readable on any screen.Â
- Easily navigating menus
- Not hiding crucial content because of pop-ups or graphics.
What is Google Mobile-First Index?
According to Google, Google mobile-first index is ‘Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking.’ Prior to Google mobile first indexing, Google’s index used to be a combination of both mobile and desktop search results.Â
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Check if Your Website is Mobile Friendly
If you are not sure if your website is friendly or not, don’t assume. Check with Google’s mobile friendly test to find out.Â
It is important to find out how easily Google index your mobile website. Go to Google Search Console. Go to Mobile Usability option under Enhancements. The Mobile Usability feature will help you get the types of errors Google finds and the list of pages that has the errors. By clearing the issues, you can make your website more mobile friendly.
Also, you need to check if you are blocking Google to access JS, CSS, and other parts of code.Â
You can check this with the Robots txt file. If you are blocking any essential part of code unintentionally, unblock it.Â
How to Make Your Website SEO Friendly?
1. Make Your Website Responsive
When you make your website responsive, your website adapts to any screen your user use. You can provide the best experience no matter what device they use. It implements fonts that are readable on any device.Â
2. Clean Navigation
Keep the navigation simple and clean. Users should be able to understand where the navigation menus are.Â
3. Don’t Hide Anything From Mobile Readers
Web masters used to hide a few elements from mobile readers. Less content for mobile readers for a better user experience. But this can be an issue because of Mobile-first index. Because Google considers your mobile site as the main site. If the content is not visible, Google will not crawl. So, keep each and everything available for mobile users.Â
4. Site Design
To make your website easy to access, don’t use Flash, give enough space between paragraphs and lines, avoid unnecessary pop-ups.Â
4. Limit the Pop-up
Pop-ups are not bad but the type of pop-up makes the difference. If you implement a pop-up that is repetitive or fills the entire page is not recommended. It should be helpful to the readers and should be able to close easily if not needed.Â
5. Improve Your Website Speed
It is obvious that website speed is a very important ranking factor for Google. The faster the website, the lesser the users the website loses.Â
How to improve website speed:
- Compress and optimize images
- Minimize HTTP Requests
- Improve your website hosting
- Enable browser caching
- Enable Gzip compression
- Asynochronous loading for JS and CSS files
- Minify CSS, HTML and JS Files
6. Local Search Optimization
People search for nearby businesses on mobile than desktop. So, if you have a local element, optimize for local search in your mobile content for better results.Â
7. Make Your Content Easy To Read
Font size is not the only factor to consider while making a website easier to read. Longer paragraphs are not easy to read so consider having short paragraphs.
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8. Viewport Content Tag
The viewport content tag helps the website to make changes based on the size of the device of the user. By adding the viewport content tag, you are ensuring your website doesn’t look funky to mobile users.Â
9. Optimize Title and Description for Mobile
When mobile users bigger share of your traffic, optimize title and descriptions especially for mobile users. The size of the mobile SERP is smaller so consider this in mind while creating title and description.Â
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10. Use Schema.org
Due to limited screen size, when your mobile SERP has rich snippets, it will make your search results stand out even better.
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Conclusion
I hope you liked the article about how to optimize your website for mobile. Let us know your opinion on the comments. You don’t need to think only about search engines while optimizing your website. When you improve your website for users and work on improving their experience, it will reflect on your website ranking as well.Â
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upGrad’s digital marketing course duration is 6.5 months. The course is fragmented into various modules consisting of theory, case studies, and live industry projects on topics like SEO, SEM, social media/content/email marketing, marketing analytics, campaign management, and marketing strategy, among other things.
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What is Mobile SEO?
Nowadays, mobile phones have liberated people from using desktops computers. In this phase, Google Search Engine has also changed its ranking from Desktop to Mobile First Indexing. This change in the ranking system was made by considering the volume of searches made through mobile phones every year. Year after year, the number of smartphone users has been steadily increasing. As a result, 60% of Google searches are being made through smartphones.
This progression and change in the pattern have made Mobile SEO an essential part of any business and any website. Companies now have to modify a couple of odds and ends to make their websites more mobile-friendly for users who are possibly in a hurry.
Why is Mobile SEO important?
Mobile web use has witnessed a boom in the past few years, with most sites now seeing more traffic from mobile devices than from desktop computers. Mobile SEO is vital if you want to be sure that you are visible to the customer at the right time and place. According to Google research, mobile device users are more likely to buy following a search than desktop users. So, they are more valuable to your bottom line.
There is a lot of overlap between Desktop SEO and Mobile SEO. You still have to focus on performance, content, and user experience. However, one primary difference of SEO on mobile is that you are typically focusing more on local results on mobile SEO.
How to check if your website is mobile responsive and friendly?
If you have a website, it is imperative to make sure it looks right on a small screen. While you can use a smartphone to do that, there is an easier way. If you have a Google Chrome browser, open a website, just like you usually do. Then press the F12 key on your keyboard, which will open the developer tools panel. If it is your first time using it, it will probably be docked to the right side of a screen. Once it is open, you will see an icon of two devices on the top left corner of the panel. If you click on it, you will toggle the device toolbar. This creates a frame around your website, and you can quickly test it at any width. If you want to test your website on a specific device, you can choose it from the drop-down list. But generally, you should test the range from 360 to 420 pixels since they are the most common mobile screen sizes.
