How to do Mobile SEO

Wondering how to do Mobile SEO and keep up with the changes in mobile search optimization? This article will help your customers find you on any device, read on to know more…

According to Hitwise, in recent years, around 58 percent of all Google searches are carried out on a mobile device. This means that even if you’ve previously optimized your website for SEO, and you have not optimized it for mobile, there is a possibility that you might be losing almost 60 percent of your potential customers.

What Is Mobile SEO?

Mobile SEO is the method of creating your website to be well-designed with easy navigation for visitors on mobile devices, as well as for search engine spiders who index your site for those mobile users. This procedure takes into consideration things such as page speed, different screen sizes, website structure, and site design to ensure that your website is a great experience for each visitor.

A recent Google update makes it a point that a website should be mobile-friendly to be operative on Mobile Search Engines. Point to be noted is that a website which is not mobile-friendly will not have any effect on regular search engines either.

A website is mobile friendly if it has the following qualities –

1. has a responsive design
2. easy to read on a mobile device
3. easy to navigate
4. lightweight and loads quickly
5. has all then important links on the home page

Why Mobile SEO is such a big deal?

The number of mobile searches is BLOWING UP.

As previously stated, 58% of all searches in Google are now carried out from a mobile device. Implementing mobile SEO properly could lead you in achieving the following benefits:

1. More website traffic
2. Improved user experiences
3. Higher conversion rates
4. Increased time spend on your website
5. Lower bounce rates
6. Faster page loading times
7. Competitive market advantages
8. More customer engagement
9. Improved search engine performance

How to do Mobile SEO?

People who are wondering how to do Mobile SEO ? Will it be difficult process?
RELAX..! The Mobile SEO process is quite simple and takes place generally in three main steps:

First Step – Selecting a Mobile Configuration

Seond Step – Notify Search Engines

Third Step- Avoiding Common Mistakes

Let’s understand this in detail:

1. Selecting a Mobile Configuration

There are generally three types of configuration you can choose from:

• Responsive Web Design

Google recommends responsive web design because it is the easiest mobile configuration and very simple to implement. It serves the same HTML code on the same URL; nevertheless it alters the display according to the screen size of the mobile device.

• Dynamic Serving

Dynamic serving is a kind of mobile configuration in which the URL of your website remains unaffected, but it serves different HTML content when opened from a mobile device.

A major disadvantage of this method is that you will have to do extra processing on your content at the server level before showing it to the user.

• Separate URLs

When you keep two different URLs — one for mobile users and another for desktop users – make certain you notify Google clearly when to serve which version. Google does not recommend separate URLs since it can detect automatically that your mobile pages are dissimilar from your desktop pages.

The most recommended type of configuration by Google is to pick Responsive Web Design(RWD)

What are the benefits of Responsive Web Design?

1. It’s simple to share content from a single URL.
2. Google can effortlessly index your single URL intended for higher search engine rankings.
3. You’ll discover that it is convenient to sustain numerous pages for the same content.
4. This design overcomes common SEO plus formatting mistakes.
5. There won’t be much extra setup time.
6. Googlebot will make use of very less resource and thus make crawling more effective.

Users won’t have to deal with redirects, which offer shorter page download times.

2. Notifying Search Engines

Informing the search engines about your mobile site is contingent on which sort of configuration you select.

If you have a responsive design, ensure that you have the meta-tag listed below in your webpage header −

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″>

How your webpage will be presented on a device is decided by viewport. A site with responsive design changes its size according to the size of the device screen. State a viewport so that your webpage displays accurately on any device.

If your website is dynamically served, make certain you permit Google to detect your configuration by using the Vary HTTP header −

Vary: User-Agent

The Vary header is crucial in-order to inform the search engines that different content will be served on desktops and mobile devices. This header is certainly vital when your content is served by whichever cache system such as Content Delivery Network and those systems will utilize this header while serving content on different devices.

If you choose separate URLs configuration, e.g., example.com and m.example.com, then you can notify Google by inserting a distinct link rel=alternate tag in your desktop version and vice versa as mentioned below.

Desktop page should contain the following code in its header:

<link rel=”alternate” media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)”

href=”http://m.example.com” >

Mobile page should contain following line of code in its header:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com” >

So how can you tell if Google can crawl your entire site?

First, navigate to your robots.txt file, which gives Google directions for which parts of your site to crawl. You can see inside of your Google Search Console. Next, click “Google Index” > “Blocked Resources.” this will tell you which parts of your site Google can’t crawl, and will allow you to fix those issues.

3. Avoiding Common Mistakes

When optimizing your website for mobile devices, ensure stay away from following mistakes –

1. Slow Mobile Pages

Mobile networks are generally slower in comparison to wired Internet networks, that’s why it is essential to pay attention to how fast your mobile pages load.

It is an essential Google ranking factor. Use a mobile SEO tool like https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ to find out your mobile page speed.

2. Avoid Blocking CSS and JavaScript

Google recommends using inline CSS and JavaScript for mobile friendly websites in order to be downloaded along with the content.

So if you have less CSS, then try to adjust it within the tag itself; however if you are using a plenty of CSS in different files, then try to place it at the bottom that will stop blocking the other content being downloaded.

Similarly JavaScript can be kept inside the page itself or placed at the bottom of the page. If you can avoid placing the file at the top of the page, then ensure you use async attribute while including them.

<script async type=”text/javascript” src=”jquery.js”></script>

3. Reduce Mobile Redirects

As mobile networks are usually slow, excessive redirects can harm your page speed.

Mobile users are looking for your site on-the-go, so they want your pages to load speedily.

So in order to increase your mobile speed you must reduce redirects, reduce needless code, and utilize browser caching.

4. Optimize Images

Heavy images results in increased load time, though we cannot entirely avoid them as they are valuable and effective. So you should preserve a good balance amongst text and heavy images.

Make use of a decent tool in-order to optimize your images and save them at low resolution to escape heavy downloads.

5. Avoid plug-ins and pop-ups

Plug-ins such as Flash and Java may be unavailable on user’s mobile device. Always confirm you don’t have any unplayable content on your mobile page. Avoid usage of pop-ups on mobile pages since it becomes quite irritating to close these pop-ups on a mobile device.

Here is a list of some useful tools that you can use to find out how mobile friendly your site is-

1. Google Webmaster Tools

   Use this Google tools and techniques to recognize what should be used and what should be ignored while designing desktop and mobile websites.

2. Mobile Emulator

   It lets you view how your site looks on a wide range of mobile devices.

3. Responsive Web Design Testing Tool

   This tool will help you to see how your responsive site appears on different mobile devices with different standard screen sizes.

4. Screaming Frog

   This tool is very helpful which lets you to examine your site and double-check all the redirects.

5. User Agent Switcher

   A Firefox add-on used to see how your site will be displayed when opened from a different user agent.

Final Thoughts,

Overall, when you devote in giving your website a makeover with any of the three mobile SEO configurations you will benefited a lot in return.

With these useful tips, you’ll be easily able to secure that top spot in Google’s mobile search results.

So hope by now you have understood the process of how to do Mobile SEO.

Don’t forget to share this article with your friends.

Do share your comments at info@numero-uno-inc.com

Cheers,

Hemant

Kindly read our other blog articles on SEO, Adwords, Social Media etc.