Mobile SEO: Why should you focus on optimizing it?
Mastering Mobile SEO: Essential Tips and Strategies for 2024
Mobile SEO: Why should you focus on optimizing it? A good mobile SEO is just what virtual businesses need to improve their profitability in today’s market, but how to achieve it?
A good mobile SEO is just what virtual businesses need to improve their profitability in today’s market, but how to achieve it? In this content you will find the answer!
Do you have a mobile SEO strategy for your business? If you don’t, you are ignoring the majority of your potential buyers. That is a big mistake.
Mobile devices have become increasingly important for generating leads and making sales. Additionally, Google is modifying all of its algorithms, including for desktop search, to reflect this change.
That means unless you bring SEO practices in line, your site could be virtually invisible in search results.
Mobile SEO: What is it?
Mobile SEO is the practice of optimizing a website for smartphone and tablet users. Device enhancement also includes making your site’s resources accessible to search engine spiders .
Google also supports mobile SEO websites as the number of mobile users is higher than that of PC or laptop users.
What do you mean by mobile SEO friendly site?
We can summarize that a site is compatible with mobile SEO, when:
- loads successfully on Android, iOS phones, such as laptop or PC;
- lightning fast charging;
- presents the content in a readable way so that the reader does not have to resize or zoom in on the text;
- offers ample space for easy touch navigation;
- provides added value especially for mobile users;
- it is immediately understandable to Google search engines;
So what is the significance of all this? We’ll touch on that topic soon.
How is mobile SEO different?
Optimizing for mobile devices requires many of the best practices of desktop SEO. But mobile search results are much more variable, because they are influenced by an additional set of factors.
This is where they diverge:
Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)
What differs the most between mobile and desktop SEO is the layout of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Because mobile phones are smaller than desktop screens, Google doesn’t have enough space for 2 columns.
This means that anything on the right hand side of a desktop search result will be applied above or below the organic search results, and fewer results will show on the first page; this is especially true for paid listings (pay-per-click results).
Similarly, results from Landmarks, Things to Do, and Google My Business appear at the top of the mobile SERPs. This engaging and highly interactive content pushes search results further down the page. However, on desktop, it’s to the right of the results.
Location
Most modern mobile phones have GPS, giving search engines more accurate location data than stationary desktop computers.
Even if a device doesn’t have GPS, they have other ways of providing location data to search engines, which influences what the engines will show them.
This is one of the main reasons why mobile search results are so much more variable than desktop search results: if you search for something in Buenos Aires, the results are likely to be very different than if you search in the City. from Mexico.
Phone operating system
Mobile search results are also affected by phone operating systems. This is especially true if Google thinks the query might have an app-oriented intent.
In this case, search engines are more likely to return an app bundle: the colored grids of app icons that link directly to an app in the app store.
Keywords like “running tracker”, “fun game” or “image editor” tend to rank apps, because they are associated with some software that people use and download frequently. Since most of them don’t work on the desktop, they usually don’t show up in the desktop results .
Screen size
Google adapts search results to fit the device we are using to search.
This affects the number of links visible on the page. When tablets flooded the market, they added even more variations to SERP layouts.
To tell the truth, why is it now more important than ever?
It is not a secret that the world is becoming more mobile by the day.
So if you don’t want to miss out on a large potential customer base and scale to high-value target audiences and markets, you need to focus on your website and provide more and more valuable content to mobile users.
Google also provides some guidelines regarding mobile-optimized websites mentioning that mobile-optimized sites will rank higher than non-mobile-optimized websites.
So if you want to get more Google rankings and high revenue returns, you need to give your mobile users a good experience.
3 options to achieve mobile SEO that ranks well in Google
To be successful with mobile SEO today, your site must work on at least mobile devices. So if visitors of this type are given a mini version of the desktop site, you’re in trouble.
Fortunately, implementing a mobile website is not difficult or complicated, and here we are going to give you the 3 options that you can take into account so that you do not fall behind and appear at the top of Google.
1. Separate URLs
With this setup, you have the “main” desktop version of your site, along with a mobile (“M”) version.
In other words, the website finds out what device your visitor is using, and then directs them to a URL optimized for that device.
Separate URLs were popular in the past. Today? Not so much and this is because, each one on their own, they are very difficult to manage and monitor.
On the other hand, “M” sites have a lot of SEO issues (such as the fact that you need multiple URLs for each content on your site, and that you require complicated “rel=canonical” and “rel=alternate” tags).
2. Now, we have Dynamic Serving
When you publish content dynamically, it’s all on the same URL, but it shows each user different HTML/CSS depending on the device they’re using.
You also need to constantly create different versions of your content for the new devices that are emerging. If you don’t, the website might not recognize a new device, and show them a version that looks terrible.
But how can we avoid this constant modification work? There is an answer and it is in the last alternative that we bring you.
3. Finally, we have the Responsive Design
I saved the best for last!
With Responsive Design, the design and content of your page responds to each individual user. The best part? The responsive design achieves this without separate URLs or different HTML for each device.
In terms of being SEO friendly, responsive design trumps all other options.
Why? I explain it to you in 3 key points:
- all the content is in a single URL (good for sharing and getting links);
- minimal SEO headaches (no “rel=canonical tags”, duplicate content issues, etc.);
- very easy to use – UX is a big part of SEO;
- no redirects that cause SEO glitches and can slow down your site.
Other very useful tools for SEO: