Unless there’s a specific requirement for bigger screens or landscape surfing, most organic search visits are completed through a mobile device. More than 60% of users prefer surfing the web through their mobile devices and refrain from using their desktops or even tablets for light surfing.
Buyer intent searches are also far greater on mobiles than on desktops. Therefore, as a website owner, your responsibility lies in optimizing your website for SEO purposes and user experience. In this article, we’ll understand what SEO strategies can be implemented to your website for mobile-friendliness.
- Improve Website Load Time
Website load time is a massive issue if you’re dealing with mobile visitors. Desktop visitors are considered to be more forgiving in this regard. This is because mobile visitors often ditch a website and bounce back if a website fails to load within 2-3 seconds, maybe even less. For digital agencies, using SEO tools tailored for digital agencies can help address load time issues effectively.
Improving website load time reduces the bounce rate and increases session duration—contributing to better auckland SEO marketing strategies. A number of tweaks that may work for you are:
- Choose a hosting provider that is nearer to your visitor’s physical location. If you’re targeting visitors from the USA, choose a server that’s in the USA. If you’re specifically targeting visitors from Los Angeles, consider opting for Los Angeles hosting providers with servers to minimize latency and ensure faster website loading times for your target audience.
- Eliminate unnecessary redirect requests while loading the website. It may be necessary in a few cases, but try to avoid it as much as possible.
- Cache your webpage. Various plugins are available in your spare if you’re using WordPress, but it can be done without those. Browser caching is also a solution to load websites faster for returning visitors.
- Content delivery network (CDN) can improve page loading time. It allows you to store your web pages in different server locations around the globe to reduce the latency presented by the distance between the visitor and the server.
- If using custom solutions like Wix or WordPress, consider limiting how many active plugins you have. Make sure to deactivate or delete the ones that you don’t need.
- Consider checking your website speed with PageSpeed Insight to get a better analysis of what is making your website load slowly.
- Content Optimization
Whether a blog or an e-commerce website, content is one of the most critical elements of any website. If you want to take your website to the next level, you can use keyword research tools. However, more than keyword research, content quality and structure can break your website’s SEO. You need to be careful about both the quality and the structure to optimize your website for search engines. In order to understand how well your site is optimized, you can use the Rank Tracker tool. It will show you the website’s position in the search engine for specific keywords and will constantly monitor them.
The most common thing that every starter does wrong is making complex content. Your visitors aren’t here to read through a 50-page paper that describes how your product is manufactured. Your content needs to be concise and valuable to your visitors without being boring or repetitive for better effective link building strategy.
A few content strategies that work are:
- Use an active voice whenever possible.
- Avoid long paragraphs and longer sentences.
- Focus more on the benefits of your product than the features.
- Establish a brand theme and stick to it.
- Understand your audience and cater to their content needs.
- Use graphic-intensive content like infographics and videos.
- Invest in white hat link-building strategies.
- Embrace Responsive Design
Mobile users don’t like to scroll horizontally. A responsive design is a concept that empowers the website elements with fluidity to fit themselves according to the screen size and ratio. The responsive design concept isn’t something new, but it has gained significant traction in recent years due to the surge in mobile visitors.
In a particularly effective responsive design, the texts warp the screen, buttons stack together in a vertical position, and visuals shrink themselves to fit the screen. While the concept isn’t limited to only these components, this is most of it. It all boils down to offering the visitor an interactive platform that doesn’t require finger movements more than necessary.
- Graphic Optimization
Graphics are an integral part of website design. With our decreased attention span and thirst to consume visual content, it’s critical to optimize graphics in creating SEO strategies. In 2022, no one likes to scroll through a page full of texts and no images unless it’s a research paper. However, that’s not enough. Graphic optimization includes:
- Use Alt attributes and image descriptions. Allow the bots to understand what your graphic is about.
- Make the graphics useful for your visitors. If you have an eCommerce website, make sure to include product images from all angles.
- Make image files as small as possible without sacrificing quality. Web browsers can’t render image resolution of more than 72 PPI. Consider limiting them to it.
- Avoid using decorative visuals like backgrounds, borders, and colors.
- Enhance User Experience
User experience (UX) is considered the gold standard of SEO strategies. With advancing technologies, you need to stay ahead of your competitors in terms of interactivity and engagement. The points that we discussed, like load time, graphics, and responsive design, all contribute to enhancing user experience. However, you need to consider a few other elements.
- Catch your 404 errors and redirect the users to a different webpage.
- Minimize your lead generation and checkout forms.
- Don’t surprise the visitors with inconsistent web pages.
- Make your website navigable. As most users may visit your website on mobile, make sure to not keep any hovering elements on the website.
- Use white space as much as necessary.
- Use bullet points and images whenever possible.
User experience isn’t only about the best-looking web pages or great content. It’s the overall interactivity of your website.
- Distant Links and Buttons
Mobile users face a particular problem with links. As they’re required to use their thumbs for interaction, closely packed links or buttons can present mistouch issues and redirect them to pages that aren’t intended. Ensure that you keep your elements distant from each other in the responsive setup. Moreover, use bigger buttons and fonts to avoid this issue altogether.
- Consider Lazy Loading
Lazy loading refers to the backend action of delaying the download of most resource-intensive elements. If your landing page has videos, huge graphics, or interactive elements, consider using a plugin to lazy load them. It decreases the load time and gives an impression of a fast-loading website.
While the visitors scroll through the first few pages, the resource-intensive elements will already be loaded for them in the background. However, make sure to not keep the lazy loading elements at the top.
- Limit Javascript Usage
Javascript and CSS often slow down websites. Try to keep them to a minimum. You can find which javascript or CSS element is slowing your website down by auditing the websites through Google PageSpeed Insight. Render blocking javascript issues can be resolved or minimized with plugins like WP Rocket.
- Allow Web Light Version
To make your website mobile friendly, until stated otherwise, Google automatically transforms pages on your website to their Web Light versions. These pages are stripped-down versions of the original pages that only contain text and images in a raw format. It decreases loading time to a great extent but often limits the interactivity of the website.
E-commerce websites that rely mostly on visual elements are negatively affected by the feature. However, it can be avoided through a simple HTML script addition. But, if you can allow Web Light to some of your web pages like blogs, it can prove to be a great addition to your current SEO strategies. As it’s directly offered by Google for mobile friendliness, the feature can rank higher on search engines.
- Submit Sitemaps
If you have different mobile pages on your website, submit different sitemaps for them. After you’ve created your sitemap, log in to your Google Search Console account and add mobile sitemaps to the existing one. If everything is alright, you’ll soon start to see your pages enlisted on the console as mobile pages. However, be mindful when you submit sitemaps. If you have different mobile markup languages, create separate sitemaps for each of them.
- Enable Rich Results on our Website
Rich results go beyond the usual SERP blue texts and include carousels, ratings, images, and all other structured data from your website. Including rich results on your website allows Google to make you appear on pages beyond the search results, like Google Images, and Shopping. It helps grow SEO strategies to a great extent. By appearing in different locations, you also can leverage the features of local search results.
- Consider Using Different Languages
If your website serves different demographics with different languages, make efforts and upload versions of the website with such languages. It tells Google that you’re catering to the users from that demographic and you might appear higher than internationally optimized results. You’ll be perceived as a partially local business by Google.
- Avoid Infinite Scroll Pages
Infinite scroll pages on a website make it harder for the bots to index your web pages. If the bots can’t index your website, you can’t rank higher on SERPs despite having the content and intentions in mind. For mobile friendliness, it’s better to use internal linking than use infinite scroll options.
The Bottom Line
Hopefully, you’ve understood what it takes to optimize your website for mobile-friendly SEO. Creating working SEO strategies all starts with improving website load time and content. Later on, consider graphic and content optimization for better visibility and ranking.
Furthermore, try to enhance the user experience by embracing a responsive design, distancing links, and lazy loading. If possible, allow Web Light versions to appear on the SERPs and avoid infinite pages.