5 Tips for Using Mobile SEO to its Fullest Potential
In this video by Search Engine Land, the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are explained, and an overview of its uses is provided.
Written by Frederick A. Hasney IV
What is Mobile SEO?
When we talk about mobile Search Engine Optimization (SEO), we are referring to the development and design practices that allow for a seamless user experience when someone visits your site. In its most basic sense, it is the improvement of a site to increase its ability to appear in a user’s relevant search. Search engine companies, such as Google and Bing, utilize bots that skim through a site’s data, including its metadata, keywords, images, tags, etc., and sort it into an index. This data is then processed by the company’s search algorithm to determine the placement of the site in search results when a user inputs a given query. With this in mind, it can be understood that with strong SEO techniques and practices your site will become more visibly relevant to the search algorithm and users!
Tips and Suggestions relating to SEO on your site!
Below, we will cover some of the best practices for SEO in terms of your mobile site. By utilizing these, your site will see direct improvements to its ranking in the search results and gain positive feedback from users in relation to their experience. Additionally, these techniques will allow you to better tailor your site and content to queries from specific locations and demographics. The primary goal for all mobile development and design is to be found, so understanding the processing that is behind linking search queries to results is vital for every kind of business in this technology-driven era. While not every tip will be practical for implementation on your current site, it is still important to recognize the benefits of the practice, and how you can use these tools for future jobs and projects.
1. Improve your Site Speed
Since Google implemented their search speed update in 2018, the speed at which your site processes and loads is a major factor when it comes to results ranking. In addition to it being a ranking factor, the speed of your site is one of the first attributes that will affect a user’s experience. There are many factors that play into the speed of a website or page.
First, pages and sites become “heavy” when they are embedded with a lot of videos and images. To avoid this, consider compressing and optimize your visual content to lower the amount of bandwidth that your site takes. Additionally, simple changes, such as formating images as JPEGs rather than PNGs, can make a significant difference over the course of your site.
Second, try to identify potential areas of “bloat” in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. All of these files add to the number of request instances that a site has to make before loading for the user. Moreover, it is a good practice to enable browser caching on your site to allow for the storage of certain static files, which will help the site to load faster for the user on consecutive visits.
Lastly, identify the speed performance of your web hosting platform. Whether it is changing hosting providers or upgrading with your current one, this act will provide a quick and noticeable increase to the speed of your site.
2. Understand your Mobile Site’s Development Process
The chart above is important to understand when determining how you are going to develop your mobile site. Each of the methods of mobile development has its own set of strengths and weaknesses, so be sure to weigh your options before committing to a certain development process. In many situations, it will come down to technical capabilities, content needs, and project funding; however, there may be other specifics that you may need to consider as well for your site.
For most businesses, companies, and sites, it would be ideal to create a responsive design since that is becoming the mobile standard since Google tends to prefer responsively designed sites. There are many way achieve this design process. As a good practice, try to scale images for mobile users to avoid situations where images cover the entire screen. Additionally, shortening text or adding expandable widgets are recommended techniques to maintain the user’s attention and decrease the bounce rate on your site.
3. Use Relevant Keywords in your Content
It can sometimes feel necessary to load your site with a wide variety of keywords to appeal to a larger range of queries. While this can have its benefits, it is a better practice to stick with relevant terms and keywords related to your content. As Nathalie Nahai expresses in her book “Webs of Influence - The Psychology of Online Persuasion”, by using relevant terms in headings, subheadings, and introductory / concluding paragraphs you can, “… provide a more holistic context to your keywords.” (Nahai, 82)
To help identify keywords that aren’t hyper-competitive, check out these online tools:
- Google’s Keyword Planner: https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/
- Moz’s Keyword Explorer:
https://moz.com/explorer
4. Benefit from Voice and Speech Searches
With Voice and Speech recognition technology on the rise, learning how to adapt sites to better fit these types of queries is an important new feature of mobile SEO. Based on data that was collected by Clutch, around 27% of people own some sort of virtual assistance, and 77% of those people also connect their smartphones to that device. In addition, it is also important to note that smartphone features, such as Siri and Google Assistant, have become very user-friendly and accurate in their searches. This ever-increasing influx of new users to voice searches provides you with an opportunity to build your site with these types of queries in mind.
5. Develop Content for Local Search
As anyone who has looked for restaurants in their areas knows, one of the most commonly searched phrases now is “near me”. These types of searches aren’t limited just to the food and dining industry though. This form of search can be applied to nearly every type of business, so it is important to recognize the utilization of location data and settings when developing your site. Keep in mind that users searching in this manner are looking for fast results and will want exactly what they asked for.
The best way to open your site or business up to these queries is to create an account at Google My Business. This will allow you to be listed near the top of a search results page based on location data collected by Google. To start the process of getting your site listed, use the link below to create an account and input the needed information.
Google My Business: https://www.google.com/business/
Conclusion
To conclude, as you can see, there are plenty of different ways to use SEO to gain a competitive advantage for your mobile site. Using these practices and techniques, your site will connect better to user queries and provide a quality, modern user experience. Beyond what is discussed here, there are many other methods to SEO, so be sure to conduct your own research as you design and develop. Hopefully, this has given you some insight into the process of Search Engine Optimization, and good luck with your future mobile development!
Our Sources:
What is Search Engine Optimization / SEO - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF515-0Tduk
7 Top Mobile SEO Tips to Improve Your Rankings - https://www.spyfu.com/blog/mobile-seo-tips/
Mobile SEO - SEO Strategy 2021 - https://moz.com/learn/seo/mobile-optimization
14 Mobile SEO Tips and Best Practices - https://www.position2.com/blog/14-mobile-seo-tips-best-practices
Mobile SEO: The ultimate guide - https://yoast.com/mobile-seo-ultimate-guide/#:~:text=In%20July%202019%2C%20Google%20switched,should%20be%20indexed%20mobile%2Dfirst.&text=For%20the%20first%20time%2C%20Google,instead%20of%20the%20desktop%20version
Defining SEO and its best practices - https://statuslabs.com/defining-seo-and-its-best-practices/
Webs Of Influence - The Psychology of Online Persuasion by Nathalie Nahai
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1292134607/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=1292134607&linkCode=as2&tag=thewebpsyc-21&linkId=7dd668cf54c3705853442d9244f67c34Virtual Assistants and Consumer AI - https://clutch.co/bpo/virtual-assistant/resources/virtual-assistants-consumer-ai