Mobile SEO is optimizing your website’s content to attain enhanced user experience. Smartphone use for Internet searches has become a norm and this handy device lets everyone make online searching possible whenever a query pops up in mind. Just imagine, you are standing in a store looking at the wide variety of products you need, confused in making a buying decision. What will be your first act, you will pull out your smartphone and start browsing for reviews or detailed product information. Here you go, your confusion is resolved and your decision is made.

What is Mobile SEO?  

Mobile phone usage has impacted everyone, especially in ways to use the Internet and make everyday decisions. Mobile SEO focuses on making your websites mobile-friendly and enhancing customer reach and satisfaction. It ensures your mobile website loads quickly without any technical glitches and provides amazing content that satisfies the customers’ needs.

Importance of Mobile SEO

The role of Mobile SEO is increasing as mobile traffic is now overpowering desktop traffic. People are addicted to their smartphones; it is always in their hands and they are checking for updates after every couple of minutes. Smartphones have become part of everyone’s life, thus it is an imperative for businesses to have a mobile SEO strategy to reach their customers. According to Google research, mobile device users are more likely to buy products after a search than desktop users. So it’s beneficial for businesses to optimize their website for mobile users.

Enhanced Mobile SEO also plays a crucial role in the branding of a business. Poor customer experience can do more damage to a business and can prevent them from visiting the mobile site in the future. A Google Insights report reveals that consumers who get a negative mobile experience are 62% less likely to purchase from that brand in the future, than if they had a positive experience. Mobile SEO involves a technically sound website, stellar content and amazing customer experience.

Google’s mobile-first index

Mobile SEO’s importance is evident from the announcement made by Google in 2016 related to the mobile-first index. Google switched to the mobile-first index in July 2019 and it plans to index all websites mobile-first by 2021. This means that Google will rank web pages based on their quality on mobile phones rather than desktops. 

Let’s see how this mobile-first index works. Googlebot’s smartphone version will crawl the mobile version of your website and rank it based on its content, performance, and user experience. If your mobile version’s performance is lacking on any parameters set by Google, your website will see a downfall in ranking.

So, when your site is evaluated by Google using mobile-first indexing, you must ensure that the mobile site is crawlable by removing all the barriers like poor loading scripts and not blocking content in your robot.txt. Your website should load extremely fast if you want it to be indexed properly.

Following are the basic factors you need to take care of your website’s mobile-first index:

• Your website should load resources across all devices
• Your website does not hide content on the mobile version 
• It loads lightning fast
• Your website has all the internal links and redirects working
• Your website boasts a user experience that is optimized for your visitors

Your website should have amazing content on both the desktop and mobile versions, providing the correct metadata,  investing in structured data offerings, and making sure that your servers can handle the high crawl rate.

Make sure that Google understands your website as being mobile-friendly. The speed at which your mobile site loads is also incredibly important, and it’s a weighted factor in the mobile-first index. It’s essential to follow best practices and do everything you can to speed up your mobile site—your customers will love you and you’ll show up higher in searches.

User Page Experience: A new Google ranking factor  

In May 2020, Google announced a new factor to rank web pages called Page Experience. Google is stressing more and more on the user page experience, in addition to site speed that has been advocated by Google for several years. User experience design of the site includes images on the website, loading speed, or any slow-loading ads harming page experience.

How to improve Mobile SEO?

Mobile SEO is all about making your website findable and crawlable by search engines. In addition, the site should exhibit a brilliant performance on mobile devices, great content, and a seamless user experience (UX). You must understand how your site is performing and what keywords your target users are typing while using their mobile devices. It has been observed that people have a different way of searching while using a smartphone. For example, if you are searching for the nearest retail store, it makes more sense when using a smartphone rather than a desktop.  

What are Mobile SEO Tools

You have to be closely acquainted with Google Search Console as its search tools help you see how your site is performing in search results. The Search Analytics feature helps you in analyzing how desktop and mobile users use words while searching the Internet. It will help you in gaining the right words to target and keywords to focus on.

Your website should be responsive enough for the Googlebot to crawl  your image files, JavaScript, and CSS to index it. The URL Inspection tool in the Search Console lets you see how your content is perceived by Googlebot. If you see an error while inspecting your site, you have to align it to be consistent with the indexer.

Mobile Usability Tool

Mobile Usability is another feature of Google Search Console that helps in checking your website and offers an overview of pages and posts that do not follow the mobile-friendly rules of Google. This is an effective tool to improve your mobile SEO.

There are several other tools for analyzing and updating your mobile SEO performance including SEMrush, Analytics, Ahrefs, ScreamingFrog, Rich Results Test, and Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

How is Mobile SEO linked to website performance?

Performance is the first thing to focus while focusing on enhancing mobile SEO. Performance is entirely linked to site speed: the faster your site loads, the better the user experience. If a website does not load in a couple of seconds, visitors are bound to press the back button and look for other resources. 

Optimizing your website’s performance is an ever going process. You have to keep a close look on how your mobile website is performing, as it helps in identifying any problem in the performance. Your customers and Google, both love sites that load quickly.