Mobile internet usage has increased significantly in the past few years. As per surveys, 54.4% of internet traffic will come from mobile devices worldwide in 2023.
Ohh! That’s a whopping number, indeed!
With the growing number of mobile internet users, businesses need to pay attention to mobile optimization of their websites.
Unless! You are okay with losing prospective buyers and slow business growth.?
Websites must load quickly, be easy to navigate on small screens, and should have a readable layout without the need for zooming in or horizontal scrolling. These are the things that potential customers look for when visiting your website on a mobile device.
Is that too much they ask for?
Well, won’t you expect the same as a customer?
If you want to capture more visitors and drive more traffic to your site, it’s essential to implement mobile SEO optimization.
What is Mobile Optimization?
No, there is nothing to get scared of!
SEO mobile optimization is the procedure of optimizing your website for devices like tablets and smartphones. The mobile site optimization process should ensure driving more organic traffic from all search engines.
The main aim of mobile SEO optimization is to offer users the best experience while using mobile devices.
Simple! Isn’t it?
Why is Mobile Site Optimization Important?
Now, why on earth is getting a site mobile optimized so important?
You have already optimized your website for desktop. Now, getting it mobile optimized seems too much, right?
Read the lines below and decide for yourself.
If your website is not mobile optimized, you will lose customers looking to purchase while they are out.
People often make decisions based on convenience when they are on the go or traveling.
Your website must offer easy navigation and fast loading speed to ensure you do not lose customers because of poor mobile site SEO.
Customers visiting your store or website on a mobile device have a different behavioral pattern than those using a laptop or desktop computer. If your site is difficult to navigate on mobile devices or your products are hard to find, you’ll lose customers before they can buy.
Now, what do you say? SEO mobile optimization is essential. Right??
Mobile Users and their Behaviors
Customers using mobile devices to browse the internet are often on the go and have less time to spend on the website.
Therefore, they tend to be less patient and less willing to have a long read about your services or products. They tend to be more impulsive, with many buying products on impulse while on the go.
Besides, mobile users are more likely to search for information and prefer visual content like images and videos.
They spend less time on websites and have a tendency to bounce back quickly after clicking on a result. As per surveys, the average bounce rate for a mobile user is 67.4% as compared to 32% for desktop users.
Now, you can understand how cheeky it can be if your website doesn’t align with SEO for mobile optimization.
Impact of Google Mobile First Indexing
You have a wrong notion if you think that only visitors or customers use mobile devices to access your website.
Google made the announcement for “Mobile first indexing” in 2016 and started rolling out the same in 2018.
It means that Google primarily crawls the mobile version of your website content via Googlebot smartphone user agent while ranking and indexing your website on a priority basis.
That has become the default trend since 2019. Most sites had taken necessary actions to cope with the new Google mobile SEO format by 2021.
Now, it is needless to say how essential mobile search engine optimization is to grow your business.
Or will you take the risk of ignoring Google? 😀
How to Improve Google Mobile SEO?
The following comprehensive approaches can improve your website’s Google mobile SEO,
Content
Content is the king of implementing mobile SEO Google on your website. Your content needs to be concise, easy to read, and to the point while still providing enough information your customers need.
You cannot offer your customers a reason to scroll past your content and click on a different site. It can hit you hard.
You can test your content using the SEO IQ feature of RankWatch. That will provide you with improvement ideas for optimizing your content.
For more SEO mobile optimization ideas, you can utilize SEO IQ content editor. It will provide you with rich keywords and query based questions to optimize your content.
Design
SEO mobile optimization also depends on the design of your website. It plays a major role in deciding whether your site is more or less mobile-friendly.
We will discuss the advantages of using RankWatch mobile friendliness and responsive checker tool in a separate section below.
However, you should remember that mobile users view your content on a much smaller screen. You must select a bigger font size to offer them the best viewing and reading experience.
Speed
Another factor that affects SEO for mobile search engine optimization is loading time. Customers expect to be able to find the information they need and leave your page quickly.
If your site takes too long to load, you’ll lose customers, and they won’t click through to your site again.
Using elements that don’t take up a lot of space can improve your page responsiveness.
It is better to avoid having too many images on the homepage, as this can make your site take longer to load. That can significantly increase the bounce rate.
Besides, you need to frequently check the size of your webpage to ensure a faster loading speed. Using the RankWatch website page size checker tool makes your job easier.
Navigation
Yes, website navigation does play an important role in Google mobile SEO optimization. How? Read on to find out.
The layout and navigation of your website must be easy to follow. It is safer to put the most crucial information at the top of the page for the ease of the users and keep the navigation consistent throughout your website.
Make sure your links are prominent, easy to click and don’t take your customers to a different web page that’s hard to navigate back from.
It is important to check the layout of your website both for desktop and mobile. You can perform this using the mobile rendering feature of RankWatch SEO web page analyzer tool.
How to Make Your Website Mobile Optimized?
Okay, so you have improved the aspects of SEO mobile for your website.
Now, you need to implement SEO mobile optimization for your site.
Following are the three best possible ways for mobile site optimization,
Responsive Design
Your website has a responsive design if it can offer the same page to all its users, irrespective of their devices.
Every time the responsive design allows the server to send the same HTML code.
Further, the CSS finalizes the page rendering process depending on the devices used by the users.
Advantages of Responsive Design
- Users can share and link back to your website content by using a single URL.
- It eliminates the requirement of website redirection to achieve a mobile optimized view. That, in turn, reduces the page loading time.
- Using responsive design eradicates duplicate content-related issues.
- It saves crawling resources as the Googlebot needs not to crawl the pages multiple times.
- It is the least time-consuming method to maintain compared to the other methods.
Besides, Google prefers and recommends responsive design practices.
Dynamic Serving
If your website is designed following the dynamic serving method, then the server sends different HTML codes depending on the users’ device.
However, the URL of the content remains the same.
Disadvantages of Dynamic Serving
Using dynamic serving can create frustration among users by offering the wrong page version. The server can show a desktop version of a page instead of the mobile version to a smartphone user accidentally.
Responsive design is way more preferred to dynamic serving by Google.
Separate URLs
In this method, you need to create separate URLs for different devices.
The website should have a typical URL for the desktop version, like,
https://www.example.com/
And a separate URL for a mobile version like
https://m.example.com/
In this method, the server checks the type of user’s device and directs them to the correct version.
Disadvantages of Separate URLs
If you choose this method, first of all, you need to create separate URLs for different devices and put in additional effort to add the following tags correctly to the different HTML codes.
On the desktop version: You need to set up a tag, rel = “alternate” directed to the mobile version.
On the mobile version: You need to set up a tag, rel = “canonical” directing to the desktop version.
In case you are not able to set up the tags correctly, it can confuse the Googlebot while crawling. As a result, Google may end up registering your content for the desktop and mobile versions as duplicate content.
Google does not recommend this design at all.
How to Check Your Website’s Mobile Friendliness?
By now, the importance of mobile site optimization is evident. If you want to drive significant organic traffic, mobile search optimization is a must for your website.
You already know the methods available to implement mobile optimization. You can go for any of them as per your choice.
So, now your website is optimized for Google mobile SEO. Great!
But hold on! Is the method you implemented for search engine optimization mobile working fine?
Is your mobile site optimization driving sufficient traffic?
How will you check on this?
Here comes RankWatch mobile friendly checker tool.
The most reliable mobile-friendly SEO checker tool available online. You can use the tool by following a few simple steps mentioned below,
- Enter the complete URL of the website you want to check for mobile responsiveness in the box.
- Enter your valid email id.
- Check the captcha.
- Click on the “Run Test” button.
- The tool will let you know whether the website under test is mobile-friendly or not in a blink of an eye.
I hope you are not anxious anymore regarding the mobile optimization of your website.
And if you have started thinking about the budget to afford this fantastic mobile search engine optimization tool, then wait!
We are more than pleased to inform you that this amazing mobile site optimization tool by RankWatch is 100% free to use.
Yes! A few boons like this still exist on this earth.
Conclusion
The number of mobile users is increasing rapidly worldwide. That, in turn, is driving a massive chunk of organic traffic. The main reason is the ease of surfing on a mobile device while on the go.
That inevitably increases the importance of mobile search engine optimization for your website. Moreover, Google prioritizes the mobile version of your website content over the desktop version during indexing and ranking.
You must ensure your website content is concise and easily readable on small screens. The web pages must load fast to avoid a high bounce rate, layout of your website should offer easy navigation to the users, and other similar categories that we have discussed above.
It is advisable to opt for the responsive design method for mobile SEO optimization of your website. Google also suggests the same.
However, the most essential part is to regularly check the performance of your website after optimizing it for mobile SEO. RankWatch SEO mobile optimization checker tool is the ultimate solution for that.
Hope this blog was useful for you.
See you soon!
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