As mobile usage continues to grow, it’s more important than ever to follow best practices in order to rank as high as possible in the SERPs. These mobile SEO best practices include several additional facets that probably aren’t part of the SEO procedures you’ve implemented for your desktop site, but will prove incredibly beneficial in the long run.
Targeted keywords
Targeted keywords are a critical piece of 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 manually type their search on a smaller device, which usually means they enter the shortest terms possible. Therefore, the keywords you use for mobile SEO should also be shorter.
This is also where location comes into play, as a large number of mobile users will be away from home when they search. If they are within a few towns of where they live and are looking for a birdcage, their search will be centered around that location, so your keywords must match.
Keep an eye on your competitors
Everyone is struggling to capture and convert a certain target audience, and this is even more true for mobile SEO because the factor of location comes into play. Users searching locally will receive fewer results because there are fewer options when the location parameter is added. That’s why it’s so important to keep a close eye on your competitors and the mobile SEO strategies they’re using.
Semrush offers a free service organic search tool which allows you to explore your competitors’ keyword rankings, where they appear in the SERPs, and how much organic traffic certain search terms bring. Since you’re all competing for the same viewers, having these additional metrics will help you customize your keywords and phrases to stay on par with the competition.
Consistent content
While desktop and mobile sites may look slightly different, having consistent content on both platforms is an important part of ranking well on Google. Let’s say a customer has done a search on their laptop, found your site, and read a blog post with a helpful recommendation. That same customer should then be able to easily find the same content on their phone a week later.
When Google introduced its approach to mobile, it emphasized that websites should provide an identical experience on both mobile and desktop. This includes details such as using the same headers and confirming that Google’s web crawlers can access the content and resources of mobile and desktop pages.
Use structured data
When search engines crawl sites for top results to suggest, they first need to know what your website is about. Structured data is a set of data that is organized in a certain way on a web page and provides a way to describe your site in terms that search engines understand. With mobile SEO, structured data is tagged 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 kind of language 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 display well on desktop computers can easily be too large for mobile devices, meaning you’ll need to resize images on your mobile site.
Also, while popups work well on desktop devices, they don’t translate well to smaller screen viewing, so skip including them on your mobile site.
Google helpfully provides 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, including BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG.
Optimize site speed
Optimizing the load speed of your mobile site is not the same process as optimizing the speed of your desktop site. People who are sitting tend to have a little more patience than those who are on the move and need an immediate response. According to Google, 53% of mobile site visitors will abandon a site if it takes too long to load. That’s a lot of potential sales that could be lost.
PageSpeed Insights is a great tool for analyzing your mobile page speed, including what users are experiencing and any performance issues. Once you have this information, you can take several steps to troubleshoot performance issues and optimize your mobile site speed, including:
Size images correctly Minimize unused JavaScript Minimize redirects Prioritize content at the top of each page Decrease server response time
Choose the correct tags and descriptions
Title tags provide the topic of a web page to both users and search engines, while meta descriptions describe the content of a page. Both are considered on-page SEO, which means 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 increase your rankings and get more clicks. Some best practices for writing title tags and meta descriptions are:
Keep title tags to 50-60 characters and meta descriptions to less than 120 characters Incorporate your main keywords Accurately relate titles and descriptions to your content Create unique, high-quality descriptions Include a call-to-action action
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