Mobile SEO

What Is Mobile SEO?

Optimising your website for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets is called mobile SEO. Search engine spiders are also able to access your site resources if your site is mobile-friendly. Many websites still don't accommodate different screen sizes and loading times since people spend more and more time on their mobile devices and tablets every year. In order to make sure your mobile visitors don't turn away by mistake, mobile optimization includes looking at your site design, site structure, and page speed.

First and foremost, according to Google mobile websites typically run on one out of three different configurations:

1. Responsive Web Design

2. Dynamic Serving

3. Separate URLs

Note: It's critical that Google can clearly understand your website's mobile setup and which of these three configurations you're using.

Responsive Web Design

When you use responsive web design, the HTML code and content of your mobile site will be the same, regardless of the device that the user uses. To determine how the Internet browser should adjust the content on your site, you simply use the meta name="viewport" tag. Once the visitor's screen size has been determined, the display settings will be adjusted accordingly.

Benefits of RWD

Experts around the world are recommending responsive web design, and Google even recommends it. Responsive design is extremely important because of:

1. Sharing content with just one URL is easy.
2. Getting higher search engine rankings is as simple as letting Google index your single URL.
3. Maintaining multiple pages of the same content will be convenient for you.
4. Using this design, you can avoid common SEO mistakes and formatting errors.
5. Additional setup time should not be significant.
6. Crawling will become more efficient and less resource-intensive with Googlebot.
7. No redirects means a faster download time since users do not have to deal with them.

Dynamic Serving

In dynamic serving configurations, the server responds with different HTML and CSS code on the same URL based on the device of the user. In order to accomplish this, you'll need to correctly use the Vary HTTP header to signal changes to the site based on what the user-agent requests. With valid headers, the browser knows how to display the content and Googlebot discovers that your site is mobile-friendly much quicker.

Separate URLs

With this setup, your website uses different URLs depending on what device it is viewed on. HTML code is different depending on the screen size of each URL.

By detecting devices via HTTP headers, the separate URL structure website redirects them to a desktop version or a mobile version of the website, which is built with different HTML and CSS. For mobile sites, the URL should be a m-dot, dot-mobi, or even a separate folder.

Avoiding common mistakes in mobile SEO

Don't block Javascript, CSS, and image files: Several web designers block some of the Javascripts, CSS, and images on their websites, which goes against Google's guidelines. To make sure that all files are accessible to search engine crawlers, let all files be visible to them. Also take the following steps:

• You can ensure your website's CSS, Javascript, and images are crawlable by using 'Fetch as Google' in the Google Webmaster tools.
• Make sure that no pages from Google are hidden in robots.txt.
• Verify that any redirects to different URLs on mobile devices work correctly.

Optimize unplayable content: On mobile devices, video content available in desktop versions doesn't always work properly, which makes for a bad user experience. In order to improve your website's usability across all devices, we recommend using HTML5 for video embedding on all animations. Additionally, avoiding flash will help you maintain content that's search engine friendly.

Fix faulty redirects and cross links: Please remove your Google webmaster tool crawl errors as you would for your desktop version. Your mobile-friendly design should always be properly maintained by regularly checking the health of the website. Google's search engine result page is always topped off by well-maintained websites.

Steer clear of Mobile-only 404s: Users of mobile devices accessing the same URL can see an ugly 404 error page when they visit these sites. Mobile visitors may find this awkward so you should redirect them to an equivalent mobile page at a different URL instead. If you want to avoid ever showing an error message that turns away customers, make sure your mobile-friendly page is configured correctly.

Keep your site lightning fast

Use 'Rel=Alternate Media': This attribute enables you to map desktop and mobile URLs easily by taking advantage of the rel=alternate attribute. Your desktop website version will need to have this information in order to specify the mobile version; however, the reverse should never be done.

Add the "Vary:User-Agent" HTTP Header: In order to use the 'Vary:User-Agent' HTTP header, you should configure your server to send it when your website redirects based on a mobile device type or dynamically displays different content. In addition, even if your redirects are working correctly, this keeps everything SEO-friendly and will keep things running smoothly.

Use 'Rel-Canonical': Content can be avoided from being duplicated by using canonical tags. Google will properly index all pages of your website when you add the 'Rel-Canonical' tag to the mobile version, and you'll avoid getting flagged for duplicate content. Additionally, this will simplify ranking and indexing and prevent confusion by consolidating external link signals.

Optimize Titles and Meta Descriptions: Keeping your website's information concise and meaningful is especially important for mobile devices, since their screens have smaller sizes.? In order to achieve the best SEO results, make sure you consider all on-page elements, such as titles and meta-descriptions.

Use Structured data: People using mobile devices to browse websites don't want to wait around for new windows to open. In order to give the best experience for users and Google, websites should load quickly, be lightweight, and ideally open within two seconds. The page speed tool will allow you to check your average download time. If any delays appear, try fixing them. A rich snippet in search results is typically clicked more frequently on a smaller screen size, resulting in increased clickthrough rates on your website. The Hummingbird update significantly increased the importance of structured data for improving Google ranking factors.

Take advantage of local searches: Mobile GPS traffic tends to convert into desktop traffic and sales for local businesses. As a result, your website must be optimised for local searches by adding information such as your company's name, address, phone number, and callouts.

Build mobile sitemaps: Lastly, but certainly not least, create a mobile version of your XML sitemap. You will be able to identify any indexing problems quickly if you keep mobile and desktop pages separate.

Benefits of Mobile-friendly designs

Investing in any of the three mobile SEO configurations will benefit your website in the following ways:

1. Traffic on the website will increase
2. Experiences for users that are improved
3. Increased conversions
4. Visits to your website are increasing
5. Bouncing rates are lower
6. Loading times for pages that are faster
7. Benefits of competitive markets
8. Engaging customers in the process
9. Enhanced performance of search engines

What Is Google’s Mobile-First Index?

Google's Mobile-first Index ranks the search results according to their mobile version. In fact, this occurs even when searching on your desktop.

A mix of desktop and mobile results used to appear in Google's index before this update.

Google would show mobile results to someone searching from an iPhone. When someone searches for something using a desktop, they get "desktop results". Any device you use today, Google shows you mobile-optimised results based on their index.

Consider Google AMP for Mobile Friendliness

There's one shortcut to mobile friendliness if your website is based on content consumption, such as reading articles and watching videos. Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is one way to achieve that goal. AMP is an open-source standard used for creating websites that load extremely fast on mobile devices. AMP does the following:

• In AMP, assets like images, videos and frames have a limited set of custom HTML properties that predetermine aspect ratios so that browsers can decide how they want the result to look before they begin rendering.
• ATF content is prioritised above other requests by AMP JavaScript, which controls the entire page load chain. Upon arrival, visitors can read/watch almost immediately after viewing the main content because third-party elements and below-the-fold content load shortly after.
• Your users won't have to worry about the choppy, jumping page rendering that is among the most frequent complaints of mobile browsers: the slow, choppy rendering that causes objects to jump around with every browser calculation. By using a predetermined layout and asynchronous loading, you won't need to worry about these issues.

In order to make sure that the mobile versions of your sites are mobile friendly, AMP pages are an easy and quick way to do that:

• Responsive web design
• Enhanced user experience
• High mobile page speed

Here are some best practises to follow to improve your website speed:

• It is important that your web host responds to any requests as quickly as possible. It is a good idea to choose a good hosting provider to prevent slow server response times and slow performances.
• A website extension should not slow your site down at all and should be tested first. Testing and comparing the speeds of your website with and without the plugins will allow you to better identify and fix the faults.
• Websites that load quickly need to optimise their images. The best practises for optimising images include compressing images to optimal sizes, lazily loading images, using WebP images, and serving responsive images with the right dimensions.
• Video content cannot be loaded using Flash. Animated content and videos can be embedded using HTML5. It is preferable to use videos instead of animated GIFs.
• The redirection of certain websites seems inevitable, but make prudent use of them. A lot of redirected URLs can slow down your website.
• During first-time visits to a webpage, HTTP caching should be implemented to save all resource components of a page, including text, images, CSS, scripts, etc. This means the browser will be able to load all information from the cache next time the website is loaded, thereby speeding up the loading process for return visitors and improving the overall website loading time.
• To ensure that your website runs as fast as possible, make sure that your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are compressed and optimized for fast performance.

Why is mobile usability important?

Mobile usability is important to mobile marketing. When all web page processes can be adapted to be used on smartphones or tablets, the user experience will be enhanced. This in turn means that users can make purchases on mobile devices without experiencing any difficulties.

Offer Seamless Mobile User Experience

Businesses today are more about experiences than products. People often remember great experiences with a company, website, or service. For this reason, Google recently announced the release of its new ranking algorithm. Page experience. And mobile is no different. Users may frequently visit your site on mobile devices. To ensure that they have the best experience possible, it is vital to understand and serve their needs. It also allows me to emphasize the need for responsive design and a mobile-friendly website.Don't assume that you are automatically mobile-friendly with your website because of its responsive design.?

Here are some tips on how to make your mobile website more user-friendly:

Readability

When making improvements to the mobile user experience, the first thing we think of is the readability of our content on the device. If a visitor finds the content difficult to read, they will leave without thinking twice.

• The use of large fonts (15px or 16px) and short paragraphs is recommended for better readability.?
• Include a lot of negative space between text and other page elements for more visibility.?
• Use high contrast text as it makes the text easier to read, even with changes in lighting or surroundings.

Navigation

No matter what device they use to access your website, users should feel no difference. They should have no difficulty exploring various sections of the site, regardless of what device they use. The screen should have adequate finger-tapping space, and the clickable area should not be too compact. It's important to keep the space between two clickable elements sufficient to avoid any confusion. A neatly arranged menu on your site should correspond to the screen resolution of each device.

Forms

Taking the display of website forms and all the fields involved next is the next step to improving the mobile experience. You should generally limit the number of fields on a form so that people won't find it tedious to fill them out regardless of the device they are using. Furthermore, people should have no trouble filling in your forms and shouldn't have to deal with any problems. Make sure that optional fields are distinguished, that dropdown menus are avoided, that placeholder text is included, and that matching keyboards are provided for the concerned field to provide the best user experience. Examples include:

• placeholder text mobile forms best practice
• matching keyboards mobile forms best practice
• no dropdowns mobile forms best practice

Make Your Website Mobile Friendly

No website is automatically optimized for mobile devices, even if you have one. This is why a mobile friendly site is worth the extra effort, even if it requires a little design work.

• Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites over those that are not in mobile search results. The Google algorithm change that occurred in 2015 tweaked the way Google displays mobile search results. Websites that are optimized for mobile rank better than those that don’t.
• Websites with mobile-friendly designs have an edge over non-responsive websites in mobile search results. Google changed its algorithm in 2015, which affected how mobile search results are displayed. Sites that are optimized for smartphones rank better than those who aren't.
• The use of mobile devices for a variety of different activities, from browsing the web to making big purchases, is ubiquitous. There is a desire among consumers for fast and easy access to the information they need. Customers can't access your services immediately if you're not mobile-friendly.
• Building credibility will help you gain the respect of your customers and clients. By providing a mobile-friendly website, your site will be a proper experience for anyone trying to view it on a mobile device, which will lead them to view you as a credible source of information, products and services.
• Standard best practices are becoming the norm. Every day more and more websites are becoming mobile-friendly. Responsive web design has made mobile optimization more straightforward and accessible to everyone, and that means users have begun to expect this level of functionality to come standard when browsing on their mobile devices.?
• Using a mobile-friendly website will automatically make your company's customer base more visible to anyone performing a mobile search, plus customers will not have to type the address of your site in to find it if they’re just searching.
• It will make a customer's experience much better. When a customer or a potential customer accesses your site for information or to look for something you sell, your goal is to make the experience outstanding. A mobile-friendly website can guarantee that users will have a good experience, as many people use mobile devices to access the internet. Happy customers will return to your website and will recommend it to others. Dissatisfied customers will do the opposite.
• Making websites mobile-friendly is necessary since Google recommends it. Webmasters know that when Google recommends something, a website should definitely do it. This is the case with making a website mobile-friendly. Mobile is so important because everyone has smartphones, and most of them are constantly using them for searches, according to Google.
• When you use responsive web design to build or redesign your site, it will look and function great, no matter what kind of device the user is using. It will adapt to the mobile device the individual is using to access the site and will render it to look and function well, no matter the type of device.
• Reputation is everything, and most businesses can't afford to give people a bad digital experience. It applies to both online and offline. People will take note of a website they have a good experience with and a website they have a negative experience with.
• Modern and relevant perceptions of your business are assured. The best products and services on the market may be valuable, useful, and unique, but if your company has a poor mobile experience, your company will be a digital dinosaur - encouraging people to look elsewhere for help. Mobile-friendly websites, however, are contemporary, cutting-edge, and legit - they are a marketing tool that will help you get a foot in the door with smartphone users.

Our fast-changing digital landscape has made it increasingly difficult for sites that are not mobile friendly to prosper. As time goes on, there will be an increasing number of websites that will be mobile-friendly, pushed those that are not even further down the search results page, making them less accessible to customers.

How to Optimize Your Website for Mobile

Make Sure Google Can Access and Crawl Everything

The first step towards mobile optimization is to let Googlebot access and crawl JavaScript, CSS, and images.

For starters, you can check the “URL Inspection” tool in Google Search Console. This is the replacement tool for “Fetch as Google,” which appeared in the old Search Console. Enter any of your website URLs there, and the tool will tell you how Googlebot renders your content.

Here is an example test from my website:

I would advise you to run a live test for your web page, which gives more information on crawling issues.?

If the tool returns any issues with your page, you have your work cut out. Expand each menu to check the issues and fix them. Next up is checking if you are blocking the Googlebot from indexing certain website URLs. The robots.txt file contains all information on resources that have been excluded from being accessed by Google. You can see your robots.txt file at yourwebsite.com /robots.txt and check the “disallow” directive to confirm no important URLs have been blocked. If you are using separate URLs configuration, please ensure to use the same meta robots tags on both the mobile and desktop sites.

Avoid Using Interstitial Popups

Taking into consideration the fact that user experience always trumps other factors in determining a web page’s ranking and performance, content accessibility on mobiles is prioritized and rightly so.

In 2016, Google expressed its concern over the use of hindering popups on websites that spoiled the page experience up to a considerable extent. There has been an update to that which says,

There is a clear hint of a Google mobile popup penalty, which usually is a drop in search rankings.

Google presented examples of popups which can cause issues in accessibility.

And then there are popups that are still acceptable and cause no hindrance.

I would recommend using a minimal number of popups on mobiles that don’t compel users to click on them or hide the background text completely.?

All in all, your popups should also be mobile-friendly.

Present Same Content on Desktop and Mobile

This really comes unsaid, but if there is a difference between your content appearing on a desktop and content appearing on a mobile, you have a problem.?

The whole idea of the mobile-first index and mobile optimization is based on enabling website visitors to perform almost every possible action in the same manner regardless of the devices they are using. This also makes it very important for website owners to show the exact same content on different devices.

Improve Mobile Site Speed

According to Google’s analysis of 11 million mobile web pages, the average mobile web page takes 15.3 seconds to load. And then there is this:

As clear as daylight, there is a lot of work to be done on mobile site speeds, and the intriguing part is that page load speed is also a ranking factor for Google.

There are a variety of tools to test your website speed, but Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool should be your first choice.

Here is the tool’s result for my website homepage on mobile devices:?

The speed of the webpage is good, but there is more to it that the tool offers. It also points out the issues and opportunities to improve speed.?

You get a complete diagnosis of your website speed.?

Some of you may be tempted to use other tools to test website speed, and you surely can, but prioritize this nifty tool by Google.