Mobile SEO: The Definitive Guide

As of 2015 or 2016, depending on who you ask, mobile searches online outpaced searches on desktop for the first time. This change marked a dramatic shift in the way that users interact with businesses online, and their priorities when it comes to using search engines. As of August 2022, 53.74% of total website visits worldwide were mobile, compared to 46.26% coming from desktops.

With the number of mobile search users not looking to slow down anytime soon, there is an increasing need for sites to be optimised for mobile. Search engines want to deliver users the best possible results for their searches, and so if a site isn’t mobile-optimised, it will impact how search engines see you.

With more users than ever interacting with their favourite brands on their phones, having a mobile-optimised site is a massive positive social signal for your brand. If your site is light, fast, and easy to use on mobile as well as on desktop, users will have a simple, familiar experience when interacting with you online.

A poor website experience on mobile, however, can really harm your brand, especially in today’s digital landscape. A non-optimised mobile site instantly sows the seeds of distrust in users’ minds, whether consciously or not. A poorly designed/optimised mobile site presents your brand as untrustworthy, slow, and unwilling to invest in the channels that users want to interact with you on.

Mobile SEO is particularly important when it comes to local and voice searches, which are more likely than any other kinds of searches to be carried out on a mobile device. Voice search, in particular, tends to be overwhelmingly carried out on mobile, so optimising for these more specific, active searches can help increase foot traffic in your brick-and-mortar stores, as well as online!

Generally, voice searchers are much further down the sales funnel than text searchers (who may well still be in the information-gathering and evaluation phases). Voice searchers are more often ready to convert and to convert quickly, which means they’re also looking for something local.

Voice searches are also more likely to be grammatically correct searches as someone speaks a full sentence. For example, you might text search “X store opening hours”, whereas if you were voice searching, you’d ask your assistant “when does X store close on Sundays?”. One of the many facets of optimising for mobile search is understanding these patterns and adjusting your site copy accordingly!

It’s not just website traffic that is becoming increasingly mobile – it’s conversions too. During the initial uptick in mobile traffic, mobile conversions didn’t quite increase at the same rate. However, in today’s digital landscape, mobile sales are following suit.

Studies show that three-quarters of consumers carry out purchases on their phones and tablets because it’s quicker than doing so on desktops. Payment methods like Google Pay, Apple Pay and PayPal integrations make it simpler than ever for users to pay for purchases on their mobile devices.

However, it’s worth noting that while the number of users making mobile purchases is rising, up to 90% of shoppers say that their e-commerce experiences on mobile devices could be improved, with the top concerns being cited as potential security risks, and **links that are too small to click** (read: e-commerce sites that haven’t been optimised or designed for mobile devices!). All of this shows the importance of mobile SEO for e-commerce businesses as well as service-based organisations.

It’s official, mobile SEO is a ranking factor for websites. That means that Google will use whether you’re mobile optimised or not as a checkmark on the list of things they’re looking for on a “fully optimised” site.

Mobile search is absolutely the norm today, and in its quest to serve users the best possible pages for their queries, Google and other search engines now demand that your site is good to go on mobile.

If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’ll see a decrease in all of your rankings, which means a loss of all-important visibility in the SERPs, lower traffic, and ultimately, fewer conversions.

“Hey Siri”, “Okay Google” “Alexa?” – if you’re not a voice searcher yourself, you almost definitely know someone who is. And, chances are, you’ll know even more in the coming years!

Voice search is a hot topic in the world of digital marketing and has been a point of contention in the SEO community for years. We could talk about all the opportunities and challenges associated with the growth of voice search for days, but aside from everything else, it’s clear that smartphones dominate the voice search space. For this reason, one of the key considerations you’ll need to have when optimising your digital presence is how mobile devices interact with your site, both in traditional search avenues, and when it comes to voice search.

Of course, page speed is important for desktop SEO as well as mobile SEO, but there are a few different things that go into page speed for mobile sites. Optimising images, slimming down website code where possible, reducing the number of redirects and utilising browser caching are just some of the actions you can take to improve your mobile site speed.

In the past, many websites and website owners would block CSS, JavaScript and certain imagery on mobile devices to prevent slow loading times or missing functionality for users if they weren’t supported. Today, these are supported in the vast majority of cases, and they are an indicator that Google’s bots want to see when crawling a site. They also tell bots whether your site is mobile-responsive or not.

One of the most important things you can do to optimise your site for mobile is to take it into consideration throughout the design process! On mobile, you’re working with considerably less real estate, so avoiding pop-ups, massive chunks of content and designing for the “fat finger” (leaving enough space between clickable elements for mistakes by the user), are all important things to remember. Popups should also be avoided unless the button to close it is front, centre and clear on all devices!

When it comes to mobile sites, there is a little bit less space to play around with on the SERPs. Page titles on mobile sites can actually get away with being 7-8 characters longer than on desktop, but when it comes to meta descriptions, mobile optimisation forces webmasters to make things a bit briefer. Meta descriptions on desktop can be up to 160 characters long before being cut off – on mobile, this is only 120 characters.

Your meta descriptions don’t actually impact your rankings but do play a massive role in improving click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates.

Responsive web design is the process of creating websites and webpages that render differently on different-sized devices. This means that users on tablets, phones and other mobile devices won’t have to pinch to zoom, scroll side to side to read your content or have to scroll past huge images that don’t resize with the dimensions of the screen they’re being viewed on.

RWD is all about accommodating all of the ways that a user might interact with your website, be they on desktop or a mobile device of any size!

Responsive design is one of the most important pillars of mobile SEO strategy, particularly from a user perspective, but also when it comes to your rankings. While Google has never confirmed that responsive design is a ranking factor they take into account, they have heavily implied the importance of responsive design on more than one occasion and have said that it is their “recommended design pattern”!

There are both technical/structural elements and design elements involved in responsive site building, which can be a complicated process. However, it’s well worth the work in the long run, as it has a massive effect on your mobile SEO.