Why Important Mobile SEO In 2021-2022
Mobile devices have changed our way of life without our being fully aware of it. We carry them with us everywhere and they are our main tool to communicate and search for information. Due to its ease of use and cheaper mobile internet rates, more and more users access the Internet through mobile devices and this figure continues to grow every year.
If you are not convinced, check your website data in Google Analytics. It is very likely that most of the users who visit your website do so from a mobile device. This makes the optimization of mobile web design essential so that the different pages of our website are functional on these devices.
This information has not gone unnoticed by Google, which from 2011 to the present has been adapting its algorithm to benefit all the websites that have good SEO for mobile phones. The frequency of these changes to the benefit of this type of device has increased exponentially with the passage of time. To this day, we cannot conceive of doing a good SEO, without considering this powerful source of traffic.
Having a mobile optimized website has become an essential requirement of an online presence. Image by Niekverlaan from Pixabay.
Without going any further, in mid-February of this year, the Google Search Console platform communicated to all users who had active webmaster accounts that Mobile-first indexing enabled was coming into force, an update of its platform that focuses exclusively on SEO optimization for mobile devices.
Through this update:
- Mobile-centric indexing was enabled, where Google robots (Google Bot) will index and classify your site based on its mobile version.
- Increase the tracking frequency of Google bots for smartphones.
- Give more relevance to snippets of Google Search results that will be generated from the mobile version of your content.
- It includes new features to Search Console to check if our landing sites are well optimized for mobile phones.
In summary, our website ranks first in mobile, making the experience of mobile users one of the very important ranking factors. So pay attention to the different actions that you should consider to optimize your website for mobile, so as not to lose visibility in search results:
5 Mobile SEO Actions to optimize your website
1. Responsive web design, dynamic publication or independent URL?
We can optimize our mobile website in different ways, depending on our website, our audience and the advantages and disadvantages of each of the following alternatives.
- Customizable or responsive design. This alternative is the most widely used, due to its advantages and ease of implementation. It consists of having a mobile version and a computer version at the same URL. We simply adapt the content to the screen format of the device. It has the advantage that Google gives all authority to a single page, a single version of the web code is maintained, only one page has to be indexed.
- Dynamic publication: in this version, the type of device the user is accessing is detected and the corresponding version is displayed. We only have one URL, with a different HTML code for the mobile version. The advantage is we can customize the content shown in the mobile version, as much as we want.
- Independent URL: With this alternative, we create two independent URLs so we will have two different versions of our landing. The convenient thing is that we are positioning two different URLs for each version and google can detect them as duplicate content if we do not correctly label the canonical tag, on the other hand it is more laborious than the rest of the alternatives since we must create a landing for each version.
2. Design adapted to the device (responsive web design)
One of the most common mistakes, when doing mobile SEO, is having content with a screen width greater than that of the devices, which makes the user have to enlarge the screen many times to be able to see our content. This discomfort makes users end up leaving our website. We must check that the different elements of our page fit perfectly in the resolution of a mobile screen.
In addition, in the versions optimized for mobile phones, it is necessary that the texts can be read easily. Don’t forget to check that the images look correctly and are the right size.
3. Buttons and links
In the mobile version of our website, the buttons and links must be easy to use. Check that the buttons and links are large and visible enough so that the user can see and click them without problems. Don’t forget to include call to action in the buttons to encourage customers to buy, register or request information. Include bold colors in these items to draw the user’s attention.
Check that the clickable elements are not too close together, as that can make it difficult for the user to click the correct elements.
4. Web speed
40% of users abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, and this percentage increases if it is for mobile devices. Work on your mobile SEO to improve loading speed, minimizing HTML, CSS and javascript codes as much as possible, specify browser cache and reduce server response time… these are some of the actions that will allow you to improve web speed.
And don’t forget to optimize the images!
When it comes to optimizing the loading speed of a website, we must be very careful with the size and weight of the images that we upload to our website. If we upload an image that is too large and heavy, it will slow down the page loading process, harming us both at the seo level and in usability, since users do not have patience in these cases, and quickly leave our website, causing bounce statistics on our site are high.
On the other hand, to position your landing for mobile phones, it is recommended to create two versions of your website, where the images are appropriate for this type of device or even deleting certain images if necessary.
5. Minimize redirects
In case it is necessary to implement redirects on your website, try to make all of them point directly to the destination URL. A redirect increases the load time by about 0.6 seconds, so having unnecessary redirected pages will slow down the page load, hurting users and search engines.
CONCLUSIONS:
If you want to check if your website is optimized for mobiles, you can use the following Google resource. Just enter the URL of your website and Google will analyze your website to see if users can easily use your page on a mobile device.
If you still do not have a mobile optimized website, we recommend that you make it one of the priority web development tasks for 2021. Implement these actions on your website and do not allow your competitors to take away organic traffic for not having one well positioned website for mobile devices and lose conversions because the user has poor mobile usability.
If you want us to help you optimize your mobile web do not hesitate to contact us.
