Confused about what you need to do with your content in a new mobile-first world? You’re not the only one. Here are 11 best practices for mobile SEO that you need to follow.
Most people know that optimizing for mobile is no longer optional, but with Google and others constantly updating both mobile tools and best practices, it’s hard for a busy marketer to stay on top of the changes.
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This guide will help. It’ll walk you through the latest information on mobile SEO best practices so your content gets found by mobile users and looks great, too. That’ll help you get more leads and sales from mobile visitors.
What is Mobile SEO?
Let’s start by defining what mobile SEO is. Mobile SEO stands for mobile search engine optimization, which is about tweaking your web pages and content so they appear on mobile search results pages for search terms related to your business.
To put it another way, SEO is about achieving a better search ranking for your content. And the point of that is to drive more traffic to your website from search results pages. That traffic is called “organic traffic”.
Also Read: How to Use SEO and SEM to Boost Customer Experience Outcomes
Why You Need Mobile SEO
So why has mobile SEO become so important? It’s all about the global increase in the use of mobile devices. According to Forrester, 55% of the world now uses smartphones. That’s expected to increase to 66% by 2023.
That means how people access information has changed forever. Taking the US as an example, Stone Temple reveals that 63% of site traffic comes from mobile devices. Mobile page views and time on site are also increasing.
Most of that traffic is coming from mobile search. Statista records that 57% of organic search visits now originate on mobile devices.
Google handles 93% of mobile search queries and recently announced the shift to mobile-first indexing.
Mobile SEO and Sales
But mobile SEO won’t just help with traffic; it can also help you get more sales. According to Internet Retailer, sales on smartphones represented 31% of all sales in the 2018 holiday season.
People also use search to find information before they make a purchase. Google research shows that presale searches are increasing, with searches for the “best” products up 80% on average over two years.
And mobile users also search for nearby shops and attractions.
Once mobile users find information, many buy: around 30% of purchases are now made on smartphones.
The bottom line is if you’re not optimizing your content for Google’s mobile search, you’re missing out on visibility AND sales.
How to Check for Mobile-Friendliness
A good first step in handling mobile SEO is to check your site for mobile-friendliness. Google has a few tools you can use to help with that:
- Mobile friendly test tool
- Mobile speed tool
- Google Search Console
Let’s take a brief look at those now.
Mobile Friendly Test Tool
To use the mobile-friendly test, simply enter your URL on the page and wait a few seconds for the report.
Test My Site Tool
To get more insight, try Google’s test my site tool.
This works in a similar way. Enter your URL and wait a couple of seconds for the report.
The initial report focuses on speed, which, as you’ll see is hugely important for mobile optimization. It makes some basic recommendations, or you can enter your email to get a full report.
Google Search Console
Another place to investigate potential mobile issues is via the mobile reports in Google Search Console.
There are two reports to check out. The mobile usability report shows any errors and points you in the direction of fixes.
And the accelerated mobile pages (AMP) report helps you figure out if there are any issues with your AMP content.
Mobile SEO Best Practices
Now let’s dig into current mobile SEO best practices.
Improve Site Speed
As mentioned earlier, improving site speed is a crucial aspect of mobile SEO. That’s because slow sites lose visitors, resulting in missed opportunities to win leads and sales.
According to Google, 30% of mobile visitors expect your pages to load in 1 second or less. And 18% expect your site to load instantly.
Plus 45% of customers won’t visit again if the site performs poorly.
The tools mentioned above, and any mobile testing tool, will make recommendations to help you improve mobile site speed.
Common recommendations include:
- Compressing images so they load more quickly
- Combining and minifying JavaScript and CSS code
- Using caching or a content delivery network to make pages load faster for visitors
Mobile 1st offers additional tips on speeding up sites for mobile visitors.
Bounce Rate
Google values relevance above all else, and one way it checks that is by assessing how visitors behave when they visit your site from a search results page.
For example, if someone does a search, visits your site, and leaves again immediately, that’s called pogosticking, and it’s bad for your search ranking.
That’s because pogosticking makes it clear that the visitor didn’t find relevant information. If that happens too often, your site might be demoted in search results pages.
You also have to think about your bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who visit a single page. Now, a high bounce rate isn’t always bad. But unless you have a one-page site or are tracking metrics for a specific landing page, you’ll want to get that number down.
Find your bounce rate in Google Analytics, by going to Audience – Overview.
Dwell Time
Related to this, dwell time is also an SEO ranking factor. As Search Engine Journal explains, dwell time is how long people stay on your site before clicking back to search results.
It’s not the same as session duration or average time on page. It simply reflects the fact that people who have visited a page from a search results page have found what they want. Making sure that your page title and description reflect what’s actually on the page should help with this mobile SEO metric.
Responsiveness
There are so many mobile devices out there that it’s hard to know how your site will look on each. But, as you’ve seen, if you don’t create a good experience for each visitor, you might lose them.
One way to address this is by making your site responsive. This means it resizes automatically to suit each screen size. At this point, this should be the default for every site to avoid a poor user experience.
Cross-Platform Experience
While you’re looking after mobile SEO, don’t forget about the desktop experience. Many people bounce between devices when researching and shopping, and they want a similar experience everywhere. According to Google’s research, 63% of customers expect their experience with brands to be consistent.
The bad news is, only 42% of people think brands give them that consistency. The clear message is: make your site work seamlessly everywhere to keep those mobile visitors happy.
Content Optimization
Let’s talk about content. For mobile SEO, you need to look after some of the same issues that have always been important to SEO. For example, you need to:
- Create valuable content that’s relevant to what people are searching for
- Include keyword phrases and related phrases (LSI keywords) where relevant to let search engines know what you’re optimizing for
- Keep the content readable and interesting to humans despite the inclusion of keywords
- Write titles and meta descriptions that let searchers know what your content is about
- Link out to relevant and authoritative sources (and hopefully attract some inbound links, too)
When writing headlines for your content, remember that some people will see it on small screens. That’s why it’s even more important to put the most important information at the start, so you don’t lose readers.
Local SEO
You know that moment when you’re out in the city and you suddenly get a hankering for cookies (or ice-cream, or your snack of choice)? The first thing you do is pull out your phone and look for a business that offers that snack near where you are.
Learn more about local search ranking in this guide from Moz.
Optimizing For Social Sharing
Google’s never admitted that social media is a direct search ranking factor, but if you think about it, social sharing has to have some influence.
When people share and comment, they let search engines know content is relevant to their interests. And since Google is all about relevance, it’s no surprise that Cognitive SEO found a correlation between social sharing and search ranking. More shares usually relate to a higher rank, as the chart below shows:
So, why are we talking about this in relation to mobile SEO? Because 80% of social media time happens on mobile devices. So when you optimize content to make it more shareable, you’re also reaching those mobile device users.
Want to get more shares? Check out these tips from Jeff Bullas.
Voice search
Still, on the subject of content, let’s talk voice. When you ask your phone a question, you’re using voice search, and more and more people are doing it.
Now, there are even more ways to get information without touching a keyboard. According to Voicebot.ai, there are more than a billion devices using Google Assistant, and millions using Alexa, Cortana, and Siri. These include the Amazon Echo and Google Home range, which are becoming ubiquitous.
People are using voice search more and more, which means it’s another important aspect of mobile SEO. One way to prepare for this is to answer questions people are asking in your content. A good tool to help you find these is AnswerthePublic. Type in your keywords and you’ll see a visualization of the questions.
Also Read: Voice Search Habits and Their Impact on Local Businesses
Sitemaps
Adding a sitemap isn’t unique to mobile SEO, but it’s still important. A sitemap makes it easy for search engines to know what pages are on your site and follow links from one page to another. There are a couple of ways to create one.
First, if you have a WordPress-based site, you can use Yoast SEO to automatically create a sitemap. Alternatively, create one for free with the XML Sitemaps tool.
When you’re done, add it to Google Search Console, and your site is ready to be crawled.
Schema Markup
Finally, there’s schema markup, also called structured data. This is a way of helping search engines identify products, events, recipes, jobs and more. This makes it easy to show this content appropriately on mobile devices and in browsers.
Google identifies these as “rich results” in Google Search Console. You can find out if your site supports rich results here, and learn more about rich results in this guide from Search Engine Journal.
Now you know the best ways to optimize your content to be in tune with the latest mobile SEO best practices. However, don’t get complacent. Google is always refining its algorithms, so keep up to date to ensure your content keeps being visible in this mobile-first era.