Mobile optimisation is important for SEO. Why? Well, the number of mobile searches have increased by 250% in the past 5 years (Google), and 61% of Google searches are done on mobile devices (Statista). Consumer behaviour is changing and you need to remain ahead of the tide.
Ever since Google released the stunningly named Mobilegeddon update in 2015, indexed pages that are optimised for mobile get a little boost in their rankings. Now, Google applies mobile-first indexing to all new websites.
Google has a responsibility to present searchers with the content they need, when they need it. If your website has a frustrating mobile user experience, that would disrupt Google’s promise to deliver helpful content.
→ Check out our Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimisation
However, you have to go beyond responsive website design. It’s important that small businesses, particularly those looking to capitalise on local SEO, keep up with the demands of mobile optimisation.
In this blog, Wave will give you the mobile optimisation techniques needed to forge a mobile-first mindset.
What is mobile optimisation?
Mobile optimisation is the process of designing and writing a website to perform as well on mobile as desktop. As more users access content on their smartphone or tablet, having your website work on smaller screens is a must have.
What is indexing?
After Google crawls a page, it tries to understand what a page is about. This stage is called indexing. It includes processing and analysing textual content and key content tags and attributes.
When indexing, Google looks at your <title> elements, videos, alt attributes, images and more.
The best mobile optimisation techniques
1. Make Mobile Optimisation Part of Your Marketing & SEO Strategy
As we know, people use more than one device to browse the web and they want seamless transitions between each one.
What does this look like in practice? OK, let’s talk to Alex. Alex has just moved to a new city and is planning a birthday party. They don’t have local knowledge yet, so they decide to turn to the internet.
They notice a bar on their walk to work and check it out online. They scour the website and easily find what they’re looking for: a private hire form. They fill it in and go to work. When they get home, they open their laptop and see they have an email from a member of staff asking for more details. They reply.
The next day, Alex receives a mobile email when they are at work from the bar saying their party is booked for the chosen date and if they want to send invites to their guests, they can! Alex sends an invite out via WhatsApp. The guests then find the bar using the directions on the website or their Google My Business profile.
Alex’s story is the perfect example of an omni-channel, cross-device journey. Consumers now expect to start a task on one device and finish it on another.
If the bar’s website wasn’t accessible, didn’t get across the right info and didn’t have a simple way to contact the bar, Alex would have become frustrated and looked elsewhere.
This whole scenario relies on way more than making your website look pretty on mobile. A truly mobile optimised website needs to be baked into your marketing strategy and customer journeys. You need to analyse your data, understand your situation and make changes.
For example, if the majority of your users come via mobile, then a long and fiddly contact form will likely put people off from getting in touch. Try shortening the form and see if you get more results!
2. Make finding information easier for mobile users
Speed is of the essence with mobile users. They want information, and they want it now. Like, right now. Oh, too late!
This means you have to make the website accessible for people and have them navigate with no friction. You can do the following to make sure this happens:
- Use large, easy to read text
- Use large, clear images that load quickly (ideal image size of jpegs, svg, pngs or gifs is less than 500KB)
- Keep layouts simple and don’t shift layouts too much
- Use large, mobile friendly call to action buttons (CTAs)
Mobile users don’t want shorter content or sacrificed content. They want to find the information they need more clearly.
3. Make sure mobile users can easily click on each page element
Adding to the above, one way to guarantee your navigation is optimised for mobile is to adequately space your interactive elements out. This means links or CTAs shouldn’t be too close together or appear as one link. Elements that are too small or too close together can be difficult to click on touch-screen devices and frustrate the user.
Google Lighthouse, a tool that analyses your background SEO, recommends that elements should at least be 48x48 pixels. You can either increase their size or padding.
4. For mobile optimisation for SEO, make sure the page width matches the viewport
While responsive designs created automatically by CMSs, such as HubSpot CMS or Squarespace, should automatically amend your page width, they sometimes miss some pages for various reasons.
You can use percentage widths and media queries to force those unresponsive pages to behave. You will likely need a developer to complete this work though.
Run an audit of your pages, and edit any that are flagged. However, if their content width is intentionally wider, ignore the results of the audit.
5. Don’t use unsupported browser plugins
If you’re running any Javascript, CSS or image files, make sure they are supported by Google and that the Googlebot can crawl them. If your robots.txt files disallow crawling, they are harming how well Google’s algorithm renders and indexes your content. This damages your SEO and delivers suboptimal rankings.
You can make these elements easy to crawl by editing your robots.txt.
6. Use HTML5 standard tags on animations and video content
Some videos or animated content might not play on mobile devices. Unplayable content is frustrating for users. Instead of using a non-proprietary video player or unsupported formats, use HTML5 standard tags to include videos and animations.
You can use Google Web Designer to easily create quick HTML5 tags.
7. Avoid full-screen pop-ups
Full screen pop up partially or fully covers up the content of a website. They are the frequent pop ups we see on sites that get us to receive a 10% discount or sign up for a newsletter.
However, on mobile, these pop ups can be frustrating especially when people can’t close them without entering their details. This is because there is limited screen real estate on a mobile device.
If you want to include a pop up on a mobile device, you should use a banner at the top of the page. This doesn’t frustrate users and still gets your message across.
8. Learn the difference between desktop and mobile user intent
Your HubSpot reports or Google Analytics will let you know what devices users browsed your website on. You can track their usage and follow them around your website to discover what content they are interacting with. This will let you know what content to produce to match their intent.
Here are three analyses you can do:
Search: How are people finding you? What search terms, ads and keywords are bringing people to you. Once they’ve found you, what are users on different devices searching for?
Content: Cross reference the most popular mobile content with your buyer journeys and funnel stages to work out what trends at prospects are interested in.
Flow: What path are mobile-users following? What is their original source?
Over to you!
If you follow these tips, your website will be ready for mobile traffic and consumer’s changing behaviours. Use Wave’s free Website Grader tool to test your site’s performance, SEO, mobile design and security. All within a few seconds.
Want help with your mobile optimisation?
Wave is a team of marketing experts and SEO specialists. We’ve helped small businesses around the globe improve their localised content and rank in their communities. This includes cafes, chalet companies and tech companies with multiple branches in the UK.
If you think you can benefit from our expertise, contact us today!
