Optimising for Mobile: Essential Tips for Better Rankings
Mobile SEO is a process of optimising your website and content to provide a seamless and engaging user experience for visitors on mobile devices.
Optimising for mobile is essential in today's advanced digital landscape, where mobile traffic has surpassed desktop traffic across most industries. Smart phones have become an integral part of our daily lives with most people using their mobile devices when accessing the internet.
Google has emphasised the importance of mobile optimisation for a few years now and in 2015, they announced that mobile usability is now a major ranking factor. Optimising for mobile ensures your website is visible to your mobile audience, boosting user experience and search engine rankings.
Google announced Mobile-first indexing that means Google crawlers use the mobile version of your website to index and rank your site before your desktop site. This means having a responsive website is essential to improve your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
There are some steps you can take to optimise your website for mobile focusing on better rankings:
A good user experience is imperative to your online success. Ensure your website is intuitive and provides easy navigation. Optimise the layout of content to improve readability on small screen sizes and avoid pop-ups where possible that can result in a negative user experience.
If you thought that a page loading time was important on a desktop computer, you can imagine how important it is on a mobile device with hardware and connectivity limitations. It is imperative that you minimise your images and code, avoid redirecting traffic and make use of browser caching to speed up your mobile site, helping to keep visitors engaged for longer.
Mobile devices change how websites are designed, which means most users prefer a simple website design. Adapt your design to align with mobile devices,using large fonts, and easy to click buttons, while content should be easy to read on small screens.
A responsive design is a great opportunity to reach your mobile and desktop users. These web designs automatically adjust based on the screen size and orientation of your website visitors device, ensuring a consistent user experience across any device.
When it comes to optimising for mobile, you want to ensure your users click through to your website. Be precise when creating meta descriptions, and URLs, using relevant keywords to boost visibility in search results.
If you offer local services then you should optimise your website for mobile without delay. When your mobile site is optimised for local searches, you reach your local audience that are searching for what you provide while on the move.
Google offers three tools that are very useful in analysing website performance on mobile devices. Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and Lighthouse are easy and free to use. These tools provide real time information on the performance of your website, along with opportunities for improvement.
If your website is not optimised for mobile, you may be left behind your competitors. Mobile SEO has become essential to your brand visibility and ranking in SERPs. When you create a mobile optimised website using SEO best practices, you improve your visibility and gain more organic traffic. If you have any questions or you need help to optimise your website for mobile, get in touch with the Genie Crawl team today. We are here to help.
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