Mobile SEO
The past decade has seen the mobile revolution take the digital world by storm. Every year, more and more people are spending more and more time on mobile devices like phones and tablets. Knowing that a lot of people are going to be visiting your website from a mobile device, it makes sense that you should invest in mobile optimisation as a crucial part of any successful SEO campaign. And that’s not to mention the fact that Google itself is putting more weight and importance behind mobile search anyway.
The number of websites that are still lagging behind the curve with websites that fail to live up to mobile standards is staggering. With different screen sizes and load times, there are different requirements to mobile SEO, and organising good optimisation is now a crucial part of any technical SEOs job description.
Mobile SEO is all about creating a great experience for those visiting the mobile version of your site. From site design, page speed, site structure, and more, every SEO campaign needs to make sure that you’re not losing organic traffic by immediately turning off mobile visitors. Mobile SEO is also about making your website resources as accessible to search bots and crawlers as possible – with Google’s mobile-first index and an increasingly mobile-driven world, you’re going to need a flawless mobile version of your site for the best SEO results.
How Important is Mobile SEO?
The number of mobile searches is rising year on year – and it’s doing so quickly. With over 58% of Google searches now being made from a mobile device, it’s plain to see that, if your website is turning away organic mobile traffic, then you’re essentially shutting yourself out from over half of the market. Which, let’s face it, is a level of self sabotage no one can afford.
In short, mobile is the future of search. And Google knows it. In fact, while Google has been signalling this for years, in 2018 Google introduced us to the mobile-first index – a clear indication of how important mobile search is becoming to Google. Even before this, Google launched the mobile-friendly update – better known in some SEO circles as ‘mobilegeddon’. With this, sites that offered a poor or broken experience for mobile users were penalised.
If you want an effective and long term SEO campaign that wins the results you want, mobile can’t be ignored. But don’t just think of it as doing something to appease Google – over half of your potential traffic could be visiting you from a mobile device, and you’re going to want to give them the best experience possible.
People are attached to their smartphones, and mobile SEO gives you the opportunity to reach these customers at the right place and the right time better than desktop search ever did. People now have the internet at their finger tips within easy range pretty much every second of the day, and when they need to look something up, they can do so instantaneously. It’s your job to be there when someone is ready to buy – mobile SEO lets you do this.
How Does The Mobile-First Index Work?
The mobile-first index that Google rolled out in 2018 ranks search results based solely on the mobile version of the given page. The significance of this is that this is the case even for users searching from a desktop.
While Google’s index used to use a combination of mobile and desktop results, this is no longer the case – it’s all mobile now. Before, if someone searched from an iPhone they’d get mobile search results, whereas a different user searching for the same thing from a desktop would get desktop results. Today, it doesn’t matter what device you’re browsing from – you’ll always get mobile results.
But how significant is this really? Well, it depends on how good your mobile SEO is.
If you’ve got a mobile friendly website with loads of great resources available across different devices, that doesn’t lose content when being viewing from a mobile device, that loads sufficiently quickly enough, and has a focused user experience design optimised for all devices, then you’re going to be ok.
But if you’ve forgotten or ignored mobile optimisation, you won’t be ok. Before, you could have survived with desktop searches, but now you’re likely to notice a drop in rankings if your mobile SEO is poor.
For a quick tip, it’s worth knowing that Google really wants your content to be the same across devices, across desktop and mobile sites. If it’s different, that’s not a good sign. So the key to mobile-friendliness is not to remove troublesome content and to trim your website down. If you’ve got content, responsive design, and features on desktop that don’t translate to the mobile version, that’s a problem.
Wait – what exactly does Google mean when it says ‘mobile device’?
When you hear the term ‘mobile device’, you almost certainly think of smartphones first, but also tablets like iPads and Kindles too.
Somewhat surprisingly, Google doesn’t actually take the same view. In fact, Google sees tablets and smartphones as different, categorising tablets as their own little category entirely. So this means that when Google talks about ‘mobile devices’, they’re not including tablets or other portable devices in that. For Google, mobile means smartphone, and that’s all.
If this is confusing, don’t worry too much. The fact is that it shouldn’t actually change anything you do when approaching the task of mobile optimization. The principle remains the same – Google wants you to treat all devices as equal, and it wants you to work to optimize your website for users across all devices.
Remember, Google likes to make itself as future-proof as possible – and it always puts the needs of its users first. So when it comes to your website, Google sees it as your job to optimize for any and all devices its users might be searching from – whether that’s a smartphone, tablet, or any other new device that may become the next big thing.
The Best Practices For Mobile SEO
It should be pretty clear just how important mobile SEO is to your website, so let’s get into some of the best practices for mobile usability and optimization.
The good news is that if your website is already well optimized for search engines and desktop usage, then your work to make a great mobile experience for your users will be a little easier.
The thing to remember when building a great mobile website is to focus on performance. If one thing is true about our generation of smartphone users, it’s that we’ve got a pretty short attention span – we tend to get bored quickly and easily and move on to other things if we don’t find what we’re looking for. Mobile design and mobile configuration is all about making the most of the short time you have to grab a user’s attention and keep them on your site.
So let’s get into some of the best techniques and SEO practices to keep people glued to their mobile screens when they visit your website.
Get In Touch
Mobile is a big part of how we perform SEO here at Embryo Digital – and our ability to earn our clients excellent and consistent results for their SEO campaign. Want to find out more about what we do here at Embryo?
Get in touch with today, we’re always available for a chat about what we do and how we can help bring success to your brand online.