Mobile SEO: How To Optimize Your Website For Mobile Devices

                There is a more than 50% chance that you are reading this on your phone right now. Did you know that according to research done in April 2023, it was found that 50.61% of people search for things on their phones while 46.51% use laptops and only 3% use Tablets to search for things on Google?

                Interesting isn’t it? If there is so much traffic generated using phones, imagine having a website that works only on laptops. That would be a recipe for disaster I tell you. You could lose up to 50% of your audience just because your website isn’t supported on the phone. And any good businessman wouldn’t want that to happen now, would they? So here are a few tips and tricks on what exactly Mobile SEO is and how to optimize your website for mobile.

What Is Mobile SEO?

                We know that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is necessary for all websites to be able to rank on Google. This includes several things like making sure that your website looks good, doesn’t have any bugs, etc. It basically means making sure that your website works properly.

Mobile SEO means making sure your website works well and looks good on smartphones and other mobile devices. When you do this, it makes your website enjoyable to use on any screen size. As more and more people are using their phones for shopping, this trend is expected to keep growing as smartphones become even more common.

However many businesses don't realize how important it is to have a website that works well on mobile devices. When your site isn't mobile-friendly, it only hurts how and where your website shows up on search engines. In fact, if your website doesn't work well on phones, more than half of users won't want to come back.

Why Is Mobile SEO Important?

                As more and more people turn to Google for searching whatever they want, google tries to make it as easy as possible for its users. This means being able to access all information through their phone. Why? Because user can't carry their laptops everywhere mobile is the more portable option.

                But the websites that are curated and created for laptops don’t work very well on mobiles and that is why it is important to optimize your website for mobile users.

                To suit the several billion mobile users google makes tweaks to its algorithm so that websites are mobile-friendly and for this google first rolled out the mobile-friendly update, which people also refer to as the Mobilegeddon. With this update, Google started penalizing websites which didn’t have mobile-friendly layouts or features or if their websites weren’t accessible through mobile phones.

                Although this update cost a lot of money to certain companies, it wasn’t that big of a deal for companies which had a maximum target audience who searched for things using laptops. That is until Google made every search a mobile search by making their entire algorithm to be “Mobile-First”.

What Is Google’s Mobile-First Index?

                In May 2020, Google created their Mobile-First Index. This Index ranks websites based on their mobile websites, even if the search was done on a laptop or tablet. This forced everyone to optimize their websites for mobile.

                Before this update, google based the results on the device it was searched from. For example, if someone searched something through their phone, then they would be shown only the mobile-optimized websites in their SERP (Search Engine Result Page). And if someone searched on their laptop they would only be shown the desktop websites.

Today, no matter what device you use to search for something on Google, it refers to the mobile-first index before showing you the list of websites which might answer your query.

How To Optimize Your Website For Mobile?

                The first thing you need to make sure is that your website at least works on mobiles. If a person clicks on your website through their smartphone, the website that loads shouldn't be a mini version of your desktop site. Fortunately, it is easy to optimize your website for any device if you know what to do.

                There are three best strategies for mobile optimization that are used by SEO experts and give guaranteed results.

1.      Mobile SEO Strategy: Separate URLs

This is also known as the M-Configuration. A typical desktop site has the abbreviation www to indicate the World Wide Web. Instead of this, a mobile website would have m as an abbreviation for mobile pages.

https://www.yourwebsite.com would look like https://m.yourwebsite.com.

This made it very easy to look at websites, compare them to their desktop version and make sure that all the features were working. However, this needed to be added to every single page that you have on the website. As a result, this becomes impractical with websites with hundreds and thousands of pages.

2.      Mobile SEO Strategy: Dynamic Serving

In this method, the URLs of a website remain the same. Irrespective of whether a user is using their smartphone or their laptop, they are accessing the same URL. The difference is made through the back end in this case.

Meaning, that although the URL stays the same, the HTML/CSS code for the page changes. Although it is better than having m in every single page URL on your website, this method also has several issues.

Most prominent among these is that you need to constantly update your pages for the new devices that come out and even after doing so, sometimes the website shows the desktop version, while on the cell phone. And in case the code doesn’t recognize the type of device, then the page is a mix and match of all the different versions making it look terrible.

3.      Mobile SEO Strategy: Responsive Design

This is the best mobile SEO strategy to adopt so far. Using this strategy, you can curate the content on your website for all types of devices without having to change their URLs or have different codes for different pages.

Having a responsive design would basically mean that your website auto-adjusts to fit any size of the screen. This makes the UX (User Experience) better and demands only one single code and URL.

Best Mobile SEO Practices

                Now that you have understood what different strategies you can adopt to Optimize your Mobile Websites, here are a few tips that you can use to further improve the user experience on mobile websites.

1.      Tips For Mobile-Friendly Website: Mobile-Friendly Content

Content Matters! You can have an amazing website design, an excellent user interface, beautiful graphics and amazing animations. But, if your content isn’t good, and isn’t useful to the user, the user will not want to revisit your website.

2.      Tips For Mobile-Friendly Website: Avoid Intrusive Pop-Ups

If the user has to click on small crosses, again and again, it spoils their experience and they would refrain from visiting again. Instead of having popups for registration or discounts, you can add a rolling bar at the top or a sign-up page towards the side.

3.      Tips For Mobile-Friendly Website: Improve Your Site Loading Time

How fast your site loads is another factor that improves your user experience and makes the user come visit your site again and again. If they are able to get answers to their queries as quickly as possible, they are more likely to visit the website and even recommend it to others.

4.      Tips For Mobile-Friendly Website: Consider The Size Of Images

In this instance, the size of your images and graphics matters. If they have to zoom out or scroll to be able to view the full image, it may hamper the user’s experience.

5.      Tips For Mobile-Friendly Website: Optimize Your CTA Size And Location

Depending on the device which the user is using to access the website, it is better to change the size and position of your CTA. Having a form on one side might work for larger screens as they have more space but you can't do that for a smartphone as it may restrict the space for your other content. Instead, you can keep the form somewhere in the middle of your content so that the user comes across it while scrolling.

6.      Tips For Mobile-Friendly Website: Optimize Your Images

If your website is image-heavy, optimize them. This not only helps with the loading time of your website but also improves the user experience.

7.      Tips For Mobile-Friendly Website: Create A Mobile Application

Most big companies have a mobile app for their mobile users. Why? Because it works. This not only improves the user experience but is also a form of CTA which enables your user easy access to your services.

8.      Tips For Mobile-Friendly Website: TEST IT!

It is important for you to understand how well your website is working. Otherwise, how would you know if your updates were successful or not? So test it. Test your website after every update, as feedback from your customers over different updates. See whether the update you brought was actually useful or not. There are several websites like Google Search Console, Google PageSpeed Insights or Mobile Friendliness Checker that check your website’s mobile friendliness.

Signs That Your Website Is Perfectly Optimized For Mobile

• Short Load Time
• Everything Is Visible On All Devices
• Working Internal Links
• Optimized UX
• No Hidden Content

Conclusion

                With the changing times, it is important for us to change and develop as well. Just like how we are learning new things, trying new things, and changing ourselves to fit better in the world, it is important for us to update our websites and apps to fit the changing trends.