Mobile SEO is the practice of optimizing your site to fit Google’s mobile guidelines. This means making sure your site loads quickly and delivers a good user experience to people who are visiting on their smartphones and tablets.
The web is increasingly mobile, and users are searching for services and even buying on their mobile devices; so it’s important to make sure your site ranks high for mobile search queries. In 2015, Google confirmed that mobile searches surpassed desktop and tablet search queries (combined); and mobile search queries have only grown since then.
To satisfy its growing number of mobile users, Google is prioritizing sites that are optimized for mobile, and pushing sites that aren’t optimized down in the rankings.
This process began in April 2015 with the release of Mobilegeddon. Google stated that sites should be mobile-friendly if they wanted to rank for mobile searches, and released a free tool that site owners could use to check if their site passed or failed Google’s test.
You can use the tool here to check whether or not your site is mobile-friendly. If you pass, it doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods yet, because it’s a very simple pass/fail tool. But if you fail, that may be cause for concern.
Google continued their push to make the web mobile by announcing a new separate mobile index. This means that instead of one main index that everyone ranks for, there will be two indexes: one for mobile queries, and one for desktop queries. Depending on how your site is optimized, you may rank higher or lower in one index.
This can have substantial consequences. Imagine if you’re a local plumber and you don’t rank well for Google Mobile. It would be a huge missed opportunity, because so many people are searching for plumbers on their cell phones and not finding you.
Additionally, Google’s new mobile index will be their primary index being updated more frequently–so making sure your site is optimized for mobile will be crucial. When you sign up with Colorado SEO Pros, that will be one of our first priorities.
Mobile SEO is all about how good of a user experience you can create for people who visit your site from their mobile phones and tablets. Below, we share key mobile SEO best practices to help you make mobile users love your site.
If you have a modern web developer already, you may be able to make your site mobile-friendly on your own; and if you follow the tips below, you can do some basic mobile SEO. But bear in mind that while these tips will give you a foundation, on their own they won’t put you on top of Google. If you want to maximize your mobile web presence and drive real traffic and sales from mobile, it helps to work with a professional agency like Colorado SEO Pros.
Speed is critical. Mobile devices still tend to be slower than desktops, and users are impatient. Amazon recently released a study showing that every 100ms of additional load time translates to a 1% decrease in sales. If your website loads 1 second slower, you’re losing 10% of sales–because people will get irritated and leave. If your site isn’t blazing fast, a substantial number of users will bounce to a site that is.
This free tool will let you check your site’s speed, and find ways to improve it.
Make sure your site is responsive. Last year, Google offered three ways to make your site mobile-friendly: an m.DOMAIN site that mobile users go to, dynamic serving, and making your site responsive. The third way is widely considered a mobile SEO best practice.
Responsiveness means that your site should resize for different browser sizes. So, it will look different on mobile than it will on desktop.
To test your site’s responsiveness, visit your site and then experiment with shrinking your browser. If your site automatically reacts, so that it rearranges content for any screen size, it’s responsive.
Most good WordPress themes are responsive, and any modern web developer knows how to build a responsive site. If your site isn’t responsive, it’s time to fix it.
What looks good on mobile? Big text that the user can easily read on mobile. Buttons they can click. A navigation menu that’s easy to access on your iPhone or Android. Having images that are easy to see on mobile–avoid small, cramped images just like you avoid small, cramped text.
When you’re analyzing your site on mobile, go to it from your smartphone and see how it looks. Is the text small and cramped and hard to read? Are the images tiny? Does it look overwhelming, or does it look clean and simple? Is it easy to see what you can do on the page, and where you should go next?
Because there are so many different screen sizes–from the giant iPhone 6 to the BlackBerry–it’s a best practice to test your site on multiple different mobile devices.
Finally, if you want to take your mobile SEO game to the next level, you can experiment with AMP.
What is an Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP)? It’s essentially a very slimmed-down, lightweight page: it uses a stripped-down version of HTML and CSS, and uses very little Javascript. The page is built to be light and therefore very fast to load.
To make these pages even faster, Google is caching them–which means that Google doesn’t have to fetch the page from your site, and can load it even faster.
AMP was mostly being used by news sites early on, but is ideal for any trimmed-down page that doesn’t have a lot of formatting and javascript functionalities.
If you want to make your site mobile-friendly, the above mobile SEO tips should help you understand the basics. But, unless you’re a developer or have a great one in-house, it can be difficult. DIY website design can be tricky. That’s why we offer industry-leading mobile SEO services.
Building a mobile website is great for your users. Building it from the ground up for SEO can make it great for users and bring in search traffic that can dramatically boost your bottom line.
We have a lot of experience building gorgeous, fast, high-quality sites that look good on every device. You can see one of the websites that we’ve built here.
Bariatricsurgeryco.org on desktop:
Bariatricsurgeryco.org on mobile:
If you want a site built from the ground up for mobile SEO, reach out to us today.
