5 Essential Elements for Mobile SEO Success
2016 marks the year when mobile traffic surpassed desktop traffic, but still many businesses neglected the importance of mobile devices. As a result, they started suffering in terms of profit and popularity as well.
Is your website mobile-friendly? Do you think your website looks good on phones and tablets? These are a few questions that you should focus on in order to reach your business goal. Not having a mobile optimized site can cause a huge problem for your SEO as well.
It was in the year 2015 when Google confirmed that mobile-friendliness of websites will be considered as the most important ranking signals. Therefore, it became mandatory to check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not.
The first step is to check mobile friendliness of your website through mobile-friendly test tool. Just enter your site’s URL and Google will let you know the result.
After you are done with the testing, here are five areas that you must pay attention to in order to succeed in mobile SEO.
Mobile Website Types
Basically there are three types of mobile sites; responsive, parallel and dynamic serving mobile site. Choosing the type is the vital decision you can make regarding your mobile site.
Responsive site is the technique that shows your website exactly the same on mobile devices, with the same website code. Sites like Starbucks, Boston Globe and Mashable are all responsive websites. Businesses choose this type for its low cost, convenience and ease of maintenance.
Parallel mobile site is a separate version of website created for mobile users. Creating a separate website for mobile users is a good way to offer customized mobile experience for users. This is the best for large scale websites.
In a dynamic serving website, the web server detects and serves custom page that suits the visitor’s device in the same URL. This approach delivers amazing user experience.
Content
Optimizing content for mobile users is a must. This includes headlines, copy, images, forms and call to actions. In responsive design, the same page content is used and thus you need to create two copies of content – one for web users and another for mobile users.
The mobile content should include short headlines, short content with bullets, mobile-friendly images and so on. Ensure that the content looks good on mobile screen.
Mobile Speed
Google considers loading speed as a ranking factor. Slow speed impacts user experience. Therefore, it’s a must to focus on mobile loading speed. There are several methods that can help you improve mobile speed like minimizing CSS and Java Script files, reducing HTTPs requests, avoiding bad requests from broken links, using CDN to cache static content and so on.
Mobile Local search
If you are having a business with local location, you will definitely want users to find you out. Local SEO is the way to optimize your content so that you get more users who are close to you.
Using local SEO practice, it’s easy to find keywords that you thought were too competitive to rank for.
Your site may not rank within the top ten search results, but will rank #1 in the Google map results. In case your business has physical location, it’s better you verify your Google My Business listing.
Mobile SERP Display
When it comes to mobile, the SERP display is precious and the competition is worse sometimes. Because of the portrait landscape of mobile devices only top two Google results appear above the fold in SERPs. Optimizing your SERP listing using relevant snippets and rich cards will definitely help you gain a competitive edge and capture more attention.Implementing the above strategies will definitely help you bring satisfactory mobile site solutions for your business