Mobile SEO

The Rise of Mobile SEO

If you’re not sure about the critical importance of mobile search, consider these statistics:

• More than half (55%) of the world now uses smartphones, and by 2023 that ratio will increase to two of every three people on the planet.
• Mobile search has steadily been growing and has now outpaced desktop search.
• 40% of people prefer to use mobile devices to research and buy a product.

When it comes to mobile search, Google accounts for almost 95% of the market. As of 2019, Google will use mobile-first indexing for all new sites – the Google bot will now evaluate mobile versions of websites first before desktop versions and that mobile websites will be seen as the primary version of an organization’s web presence.

This development means that, to achieve higher page rankings for Google searches, focusing on mobile SEO is critical.

Strategies for Improving Mobile SEO

When you work with Overdrive, our SEO team will guide you through all the mobile SEO steps required to improve your rankings on mobile search. We may include recommendations to:

• Improve site speed. Mobile devices tend to load more slowly. But 30% of mobile visitors expect pages to load it one second or less, and 45% of visitors won’t return to a site if it performs poorly. That means pages that don’t load quickly won’t do well in search engine results. Techniques for improving mobile site speed include compressing images, using a CDN or caching technology to make pages load faster, and combining or minifying JavaScript and CSS code.
• Load above-the-fold content first. By coding webpages to send above-the-full content to servers first, you can render a visible page for users more quickly.
• Optimize content for mobile devices. People interact with content on smaller mobile screens differently than on larger screens. To improve mobile SEO, use shorter headlines, sentences, and paragraphs as well as the appropriate font size, making copy easier to read on small screens. Use multiple subheads to make your site easier to scan. Make navigation and interaction easier by ensuring that buttons, especially CTAs, are the right size for people’s fingers. Using clean lines, bold shapes, bright colors, and lots of white space helps to make a mobile site more visually appealing, keeping visitors on the site longer.
• Optimize for voice search. People are increasingly using voice search, especially with mobile devices. For mobile SEO, that means using structured data markup, incorporating more conversational/longtail keywords, and optimizing on terms that start with “what”, “where”, “when”, and “how”.
• Adopt responsive design. While there are several ways to maintain a mobile website, adopting a responsive design for your mobile site will go a long way toward increasing mobile SEO performance. A website with responsive design means you’ll have a single URL for pages on all devices (instead of a mobile URL and a desktop URL), making it easier for users to link to your content. You’ll reduce the load time of your website and increase the crawling efficiency of Google bots. And you’ll ensure that your webpages will deliver an excellent user experience across all devices and screen sizes.
• Be cautious with interstitials. While using pop-ups can help with conversion optimization, pop-ups that completely cover a webpage on a mobile device or that can’t be closed easily will result in poor UX mobile devices, leading to a high bounce rate.
• Get local. Mobile search is often related to local businesses and products, making local SEO critical to improving page ranking.
• Test everything. As mobile SEO transforms your approach to creating and optimizing content, testing becomes more important than ever to make sure the changes you are implementing are working to improve performance.