You must have heeded responsive websites as the most crucial factor in better ranking on the SERPs, right? Then, why is your business not getting enough leads? Is your SEO backfiring? Or are you not focusing enough on mobile SEO? Let’s understand this in detail!
Mobile SEO: What’s this?
In layman’s terms, mobile SEO involves optimizing a website for better functionality over smartphones considering their increasing usage among the audience. As smartphones are becoming more accessible than before, the proportion of readers accessing a website via their smartphone is rising exponentially.
Statistically, approximately 76% of consumers use their smartphones for purposes like online shopping, payment, exploring a website/blog, etc. That’s one and the dominant reason why investing in mobile search engine optimization or mobile SEO is the need of the hour!
However, most people assume that mobile SEO is all about their site’s responsive design. In reality, it’s more than just having a website with a responsive design that looks great and functions properly on all known screen sizes.
If you’re not serious about optimizing your website for mobile SEO, it’ll not only hurt your overall SEO but the audience’s perception of your business. To support this, 52% of the users don’t feel it is worth engaging with a business due to a poor mobile experience.
You wouldn’t like your customers to add up to the above 52%. For this, you’d optimize your website for its mobile-friendliness and I’ll take you through such ways later in this article. But before that, below are some statistics for you!
Why is mobile SEO the KING?
The following digital marketing statistics prove why mobile SEO matters.
- Mobile phones generate 76% of all website traffic.
- Over 67% of consumers feel it is worth purchasing from a mobile-friendly website.
- On mobile, 96% of the visitors use the Google search engine.
- Of all the PPC clicks your website receives, 52% of them come from mobile phones.
- Over 66% of the emails are read on mobile phones.
- Over 50% of YouTube views are produced from mobile devices alone.
- Google prioritizes smartphones when crawling and indexing websites.
These facts demonstrate how much value mobile SEO holds for your business and why more and more companies that provide SEO services are embracing it like never before. But how to optimize a website for mobile SEO? I bet my following tips will answer this!
Check out these awesome mobile SEO tips of 2021!
Below I’ve curated a list of awesome mobile SEO strategies that’ll start showing results from the word “go”.
Focus on your site’s loading time.
The main reason why mobile SEO is rocking the digital marketing field is that people are nowadays more inclined towards accessing information on the go. Due to this, if they are unable to access your website quickly owing to its poor loading time, the higher are the chances of them bouncing from your site.
To avoid this, you should keep a track of your site’s loading time using Google PageSpeed Insights.
This tool will thoroughly analyze your website’s loading time and suggest easy ways to rectify the errors if any.
Responsive design is a must!
For any website, a responsive design is a must as it allows its smooth functioning on all screen sizes a user feels comfortable accessing it from, say their desktop, tablet, or smartphone. To understand how a responsive design works, try viewing your site’s desktop version on your mobile.
Everything on the mobile screen will appear crowded and unreadable. The viewer will have to continually zoom in and out to read all that’s there on your website. This will not only hurt your regular audience but will drive the leads away from your business.
Be mindful of the pop-ups
Several companies use pop-ups to catch the reader’s attention towards certain things that include subscribing to their newsletters, download any free content, etc. These pop-ups can trigger at any particular page of the website or while the user has just landed on the site or randomly while scrolling.
However, note that while pop-ups are certainly a good thing on websites when they are accessed from a bigger screen, they might trigger issues for the customers active on their smartphones. For example, if the pop-up takes up the entire screen space, the user will be unable to view the content they dived into your website for or hard to get rid of that pop-up. This will leave them frustrated and leave your website as their last resort.
Hence, while using pop-ups on your website, use them sparingly in such a way that:
- No pop-up appears over valuable information,
- Pop-ups appear only a fixed number of times instead of rocking the device repeatedly,
- The pop-up appears where it matters the most, and
- There is an easy way to get rid of the pop-ups, for example, ensure a prominent “x” on the top right corner.
In a nutshell, be cautious with your usage of pop-ups as nowadays, people don’t like encountering pop-ups on a website irrespective of the device.
Don’t ignore the local part!
Interestingly, the mobile searches accompanying the “near me” phrase have tripled in the last few years and indicate the growing prominence of smartphones in local businesses.
Some other ways/phrases mobile users access a local business’s website include “open now”, ” where can I buy”, and so on. Hence, if you’re a local business owner serving locally, you can’t miss out on this intuitive feature of mobile. Thus, incorporate more widely used local keywords into your SEO strategy and appear in more local search results. For the best results, you’d partner with the best local SEO service providers who’ll take care of your local and much more.
Use an easy-to-use navigation bar
The navigation bar on your website must enable easy and quick access to the various sections. If it’s not so and proving out to be challenging for the visitors, they will have no other option left except to leave your website. Hence, a mobile-friendly navigation bar is a must-have to create a positive environment for your audience.
As in the above image, you can see three horizontal bars well set near the top-right corner of the website, also known as the hamburger menu. Such a navigation bar keeps the various sections of the website well-organized and makes it seamless to access them.
Emphasize the title tags & meta description
Without clicking on your site’s URL, the reader would like to get a glimpse of your business or its services through the title tag and/or meta description. Hence, you should optimize both of these as per the SEO standards.
Both the title tag and meta description should well utilize your primary keyword(s) and briefly describe who you are and what you provide. Plus, keep in mind the lengths of both these as long titles and meta descriptions don’t attract most clicks.
Don’t forget a separate mobile URL
Yes, most companies create a separate mobile URL and you should follow their footprints. By doing so, you create a parallel website for your mobile users and enrich their browsing experience. A typical example of a mobile-centric URL is m.website.com or website.com/mobile.
The final takeaway!
Mobile search engine optimization is critical for your business’s growth in today’s era where instant information holds great importance for customers. While doing your website’s SEO, you’d also focus on the above mobile-centric SEO tips. A robust mobile SEO strategy will help you welcome more leads for your business which otherwise will slip away from your grip.