As mobile use continues to grow, it’s more important than ever to follow best practices in order to rank as high as possible on SERPs. These mobile SEO best practices include several additional facets that are likely not part of the SEO procedures that you have implemented for your desktop site, but they will prove to be incredibly beneficial in the long run.
Targeted Keywords
Targeted keywords are a critical piece for both desktop and mobile SEO strategies, and keyword research should be part of your SEO marketing strategy. Mobile keywords differ slightly from desktop keywords because mobile users are manually typing their search on a smaller device, which usually means they enter the shortest possible terms. Thus, the keywords you use for mobile SEO should be shorter as well.
This is also where location comes into play, since a large number of mobile users will be away from their home when performing a search. If they are a few towns over from where they live and looking for a birdcage, their search is going to be centered around that location, so your keywords need to match.
Keep an Eye on Your Competitors
Everyone is fighting to capture and convert a certain target audience, and this is even more true for mobile SEO because the location factor comes into play. Users who are searching locally will receive a smaller number of results, since there are less options when the location parameter is added. Because of this, it’s extra important to keep a close eye on your competitors and the mobile SEO strategies that they are using.
Semrush offers a free organic research tool that allows you to explore your competitors’ keyword rankings, where they are popping up in the SERPs and how much organic traffic certain search terms are bringing in. Since you are all competing for the same viewers, having these additional metrics will help you customize the keywords and phrases in order to stay on equal footing with the competition.
Consistent Content
While desktop and mobile sites may look slightly different, having consistent content across both platforms is an important part of ranking well on Google. Say a customer performed a search on their laptop, found your site and read a blog post with a helpful recommendation. That same customer then needs to be able to easily find the exact same content on their phone a week later.
When Google introduced its mobile-first approach, it emphasized that websites needed to provide an identical experience on both mobile and desktop. This includes details such as using the same headings and confirming that Google’s web crawlers can access mobile and desktop page content and resources.
Use Structured Data
When search engines are crawling sites looking for the best results to suggest, they first need to know what your website is all about. Structured data is a set of data that is organized in a particular method on a web page and offers a way to describe your site in terms that search engines understand. With mobile SEO, structured data is labeled with specific groups of text that help search engines understand the context of the information and allow them to provide the most accurate SERPs.
Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex collaborated to create Schema.org, which is the vocabulary used to translate your website content into code that search engines can read. Structured data is a language of sorts, one that allows crawlers to understand and categorize website content.
Visual Content
Images can be a powerful tool in your SEO arsenal because they make it easier for customers to consume your content. But images that show up well on desktops can easily be too large for mobile devices, which means you will need to edit the sizing of images on your mobile site.
In addition, while pop-ups work well on desktop devices, they do not translate well to smaller screen viewing, so skip including them on your mobile site.
Google helpfully offers some image SEO pointers because many users want images along with their text results. The search engine recommends using standard HTML image elements to help crawlers find and process images, as well as using supported image formats, which include BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP and SVG.
Optimize Site Speed
Optimizing your mobile site loading speed is not the same process as optimizing your desktop site speed. People who are sitting tend to have a bit more patience than those who are on the go and in need of an answer immediately. According to Google, 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a site if it takes too long to load. That’s a huge number of potential sales to be missing out on.
PageSpeed Insights is an excellent tool for analyzing your mobile page speeds, including what users are experiencing and any performance issues. Once you have this information, there are several steps you can take to fix the performance issues and optimize your mobile site speed, including:
- Properly size images
- Reduce unused JavaScript
- Minimize redirects
- Prioritize content at the top of each page
- Decrease server response time
Choose the Right Tags and Descriptions
Title tags provide the topic of a web page to both users and search engines, while meta descriptions describe the content on a page. Both are considered on-page SEO, which means that they are elements found directly on a web page that help people and crawlers navigate the site.
Choosing the right title tags and meta descriptions is essential to boosting your rankings and getting more clicks. Some best practices for writing title tags and meta descriptions are:
- Keep title tags between 50 and 60 characters long and meta descriptions under 120 characters
- Incorporate your primary keywords
- Accurately match the titles and descriptions to your content
- Create descriptions that are unique and high-quality
- Include a call to action
