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Mobile SEO: How To Optimise Your Website For Mobile Devices

Mobile SEO Is Frequently Overlooked. Here’s How You Can Optimise Your Website For Mobile…

When you first begin working on your website, your focus may lie solely on ensuring that everything looks great when you access it on your computer. The problem? When you’re only focused on the desktop experience, you’re missing out on a considerable audience that will be conducting search queries from mobile devices.

In fact, research shows that 63 per cent of organic search engine visits were conducted via mobile devices in the fourth quarter of 2021. Put simply, if you want to reach today’s consumers, you have to employ mobile SEO to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. This can be accomplished with a solid mobile SEO strategy.

But what exactly is mobile SEO, and what does it look like? If mobile issues have been making it difficult to improve your reach and grow your traffic, this comprehensive guide will help you better understand mobile SEO and how you can begin working on your own strategy.

What Is Mobile SEO And Why Is It Important?

Aptly named, mobile SEO is the practice of optimising your website for mobile devices, whether these be electronics like smartphones or bigger items like tablets. Mobile SEO and desktop SEO are relatively similar, but we’ll dive deeper into what the differences between the two are in the next section.

Why is mobile SEO important? While desktop and laptop computers are still a staple for the average consumer, more and more people have mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Whether they’re on the go or want a more convenient search experience, they’re naturally going to use these devices for queries or to find products or services.

Much like with your desktop website experience, users are less likely to stay on your page if it suffers from design issues, bugs and slow loading times, or other problems that make it impossible to use. If you want to reach these users and maintain their attention, you need to optimise your website for desktop and mobile.

Put simply, mobile SEO is an essential aspect of any modern business’s digital marketing strategy, and it’s critical to your success that you establish an SEO strategy for both desktop and mobile devices. But where do the two vary? What do you need to focus on in order to get the most out of your SEO efforts?

Mobile SEO Vs Desktop SEO

There’s a lot of overlap between mobile SEO and desktop SEO, but there are some major distinctions that will ultimately affect how you approach your strategy. What are some of the key focuses of mobile SEO? Let’s take a look at a few differences between the two.

SERPs: While one would assume that search engine results pages (SERPs) would remain the same across both mobile and desktop search engines, there are some significant changes that impact your SEO strategy. SERPs on mobile show fewer rankings and integrate both ads and organic rankings together, meaning that your ranking on desktop can look different from your ranking on mobile. Making sure that you understand these changes and how to navigate them is critical to ranking well in both desktop and mobile.
Location: Because mobile searches are often focused on things to do or things to purchase near the consumer, mobile is more focused on aspects of marketing like Google My Business listings or helping users find landmarks near them. This is much different from desktop search results, where location-based results are on the right side of the page.
Screen Size: The smaller the device, the fewer search results available. Screen size plays an important role in mobile SEO.
Phone Operating System: If Google believes that someone is searching for an app or needs help with something that an app can support, mobile search results will be geared towards these types of mobile-friendly suggestions that help the user find exactly what they want.

Mobile and desktop SEO do share some similarities, but it’s important to understand the key differences listed above and how they will make it a bit more challenging to tailor your content and optimise your website for the best possible results.

How To Check For Mobile SEO Keyword Ranking And Traffic

Mobile SERPs can change where and how you appear to those conducting relevant search queries. The good news? You don’t have to stay in the dark about why your organic traffic is not performing as well on mobile as it is on desktop.

How? All you have to do is use Google Search Console’s Performance Report! Just go to Google Search Console’s Performance Report, click on “new”, click on “device”, and compare your click-through rates (CTR) to see what the difference is between devices, especially for certain keywords.

Once you know how well you’re performing on each device and what the analytics are telling you for the keywords you’re looking to rank for, you can develop a strategy to boost your rankings on mobile searches.

But with that in mind, what are some of the best ways to boost your mobile SEO rankings? How do you set yourself and your business up for success?

Mobile SEO Best Practices

As with your comprehensive SEO strategy, there are some essential guidelines to follow to ensure that you’re getting the desired results. While you shouldn’t scrap the SEO best practices for desktop, there are a few you need to add that affect mobile specifically. Let’s take a look at some of these mobile SEO best practices.

1. Mobile devices aren’t built with the same hardware as today’s laptop and desktop computers. In many cases, connectivity problems and issues loading the page as effectively on mobile as you would on a desktop can be a major barrier to success. It’s important to focus on boosting mobile page speed by reducing redirects, minifying code, and utilizing browser caching to keep your website moving speedily.
2. Make sure that you allow for images, Javascript, and CSS to work on your mobile site and on your desktop site.
3. Optimise your content for mobile. Whether it’s meta descriptions, title tags, or URLs, you might find that some of your metadata is being cut off and lost in translation. Look for issues between desktop and mobile content to see where you can make your content more mobile-friendly.
4. If you are a local business, make sure you take advantage of the mobile-first focus on search engines like Google. With assets like Google My Business, you won’t have to rely solely on your content strategy to get in front of your target audience.
5. Focus on a responsive website design that’s free of pop-ups and that visitors can easily navigate whether they’re on their desktop or on their mobile device. Things like ads that block content, buttons that are difficult to press, and dead links can make for a poor user experience.

With the right tactics, crafting a mobile SEO strategy that helps you attract viewers on desktop and mobile is more than possible!

Get The Mobile SEO Support You Need With Sydney Digital Marketing

Mobile SEO can be difficult to navigate, especially if this is your first time focusing on it in your broader SEO strategy. Fortunately, you’re not alone. Sydney Digital Marketing is your go-to mobile SEO agency in Sydney! We’re here to help you with all of your SEO needs and any other digital marketing needs you might need support with.

Ready for high-quality SEO agency Sydney support? Contact us at Sydney Digital Marketing today!