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If you want to reach the top of Google’s search results, you will inevitably have to do mobile SEO. This is evident in statistics, revealing the number of desktop searches has plummeted. Meanwhile, the amount of users browsing the web on their mobile phone has doubled since 2013, surpassing desktop users by miles.
As a result, Google has changed how sites are indexed. Since 2020, mobile-friendliness has been increasingly prioritized in Google’s search results – a so-called ‘mobile-first index’. Thus, Google will consider your mobile website rather than the desktop version when determining the quality of your site.
Since Google prioritizes mobile-friendly sites, there are some consequences to neglecting your mobile website. If a user searches for your products and services on mobile, you may risk not appearing at all on the keywords you attempt to rank highly on.
“Using the desktop version of a website as their baseline is a common mistake made by businesses and people alike.” says Klikko’s in-house SEO-specialist Manne Högström. He continues, “You should always keep the fact that we live in a mobile-first world in the back of your mind, and therefore use that version as your baseline”.
According to Manne, it can be detrimental to your ranking if a large number of users bounce from your mobile website and to the next search result because your sites proves to be unreadable on the users device.
In this article, we will explore some of the measures you can do to ensure your SEO strategy is ready for the increasingly mobile-first future.
Table of Contents
A user-friendly experience and design is the key to mobile SEO
Have you ever opened a website on your phone and immediately noticed that the text is illegible and the images make the page impossible to scroll? Then you’ve come across a website that doesn’t have a mobile-friendly design. One of the most common ways to ensure a mobile-friendly user experience on your site is by building the code based on so-called ‘responsive design’.
As you might have guessed from the name, responsive web design means the website layout is adapted and scaled based on the device accessing the website. This means that text size, visual elements, and interactive buttons are adapted to the size of the screen on the device your user is accessing your website on.
We recommend utilizing Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and Mobile Usability reports in Google Search Console to easily and quickly identify and resolve mobile compatibility issues.
In addition, loading time is also essential, meaning the time it takes for your website to load on a user’s mobile device. Not only are slow loading times penalized by Google, but a potential customer can quickly think your website is down and bounce to another competitor. You can use a tool like PageSpeed Insights to get an overview of your website’s performance.
Google penalize sites littered with pop-ups and redirecting tabs unless they deal with cookies and privacy policies, so make sure you have a clean landing page with strategic headings and tags that contain relevant information for your audience.
Be mindful of local SEO
Users often seek out information about services and businesses on the go, which makes local SEO even more significant. Best practices here are, among others, to make sure information in your metadata and on your website that points to your location is updated. This involves information such as your address, phone number, and locally relevant keywords.
Optimize your headers, content, and meta descriptions for mobile
As users have limited screen space on their mobile devices, it’s important to make sure your titles are short and concise (ideally between 50 and 60 words) and contain relevant keywords that effectively convey the most important information on your page.
Present the information on your page in a way that is easily accessible and navigable for the mobile user to maximize the chance of converting your leads. This includes making the text easy to read, using an appropriate font size, and avoiding dense, long paragraphs that detract from the mobile user experience.
As SEO is evolving constantly, you may consider future-proof your strategy. One of the latest additions is voice search prompts, which are becoming increasingly common with tools like Siri and Alexa. To keep up with this, it might be a good idea to adapt your keywords and content to be compatible with long-tail search phrases like “where can I buy a PS 5” that are done in casual language.
Tip: Read our Guide to keword optimisation here
Mobile SEO is crucial
The dominance of mobile users is here to stay and is absolutely a must for an effective SEO strategy. By developing a mobile-friendly website with fast load times, local focus, responsive design, and user-friendly content, you can create a solid foundation for users to have seamless interactions with your website, and stay a step ahead of any competitors who are still operating in a desktop-first paradigm.
