Years ago you did not have users coming through mobile. Google used to take what it sees of your site as it is through a desktop computer.
When something pops up in a conversation and you need more details what will you do? Will you stop that conversation and rush to your system, open a browser and type in your query, read the results and continue with the conversation? Of course not. All you do is to take your phone and do a quick search. This is how a mobile device becomes convenient.
SEO is about ranking your website or web pages higher up Google’s search results. In the past SEO used to be easier because people Google using desktop computers or laptops. Now more than 50% of people are Google from their mobile phones. So it is important to optimise your website’s SEO for mobile.
Another reason why mobile is more important than ever is Google’s mobile first index. Google takes what it sees of your website as it is through a mobile device. Google then decides how your website should rank mostly based on this.
Strategies for you to optimise your website for mobile
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1
Create your website with responsive design
You used to develop a website only for desktop computers which doesn’t work anymore. Mobile devices have taken off in the last few years and people are using the web browsers from their phones. Many of these desktop friendly websites don’t work well on mobile web browsers. There will be issues with displaying the website properly on the small screen of the phones. So how to overcome this? To adapt to mobile, some businesses went a little far and created a whole new separate website for only mobile users. This approach leaves them with two websites: a mobile site and desktop site. This will create problems for maintenance and it’s not ideal at all.
With responsive design you always have one website. Your website will display normal on desktops web browsers. It will fit properly on a mobile web browser and the pages will automatically become narrower to fit the smaller screen. This will solve the problem of maintaining two different websites for one business.
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2
Your page must load fast
Make sure your website loads fast. Your web pages must load in seconds. Many sites these days still cannot load their pages in 4 seconds. For each additional second it takes to load a page, there are more people who leave your website before the page is loaded.
For desktop computers, websites that may take 6 seconds to load are not bad. In some cases where mobile Connections are not fast enough, it takes longer to load the page. The connection speed of the internet is not in your hand, but when you develop your website, ensure that it can load as fast as possible. For people that have more budget for IT Infrastructure Upgrade your web server then your website will load faster.
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3
Try using smaller images
Optimising this one can be easy, but still many don’t do it right. A larger image always takes time to load. So use images that are smaller whenever you can. Many home pages use a large image banner which is the second image that the page loads after the website logo. It looks really good to users but when it takes a long time it slows down the loading of the whole page. So the solution is to use a smaller header image whenever possible.
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4
Test how fast your website loads with tools
For better loading speed, always test it. You can also do it by taking the most important page that your website gets the most traffic. Test it on Google’s page speed tool or other third party speed test tools. There are many tools available. Run tests on your web pages and the tools will show you the problems and give you suggestions.
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5
Backlinks
Backlinks are still important. They are the votes or citations from other websites to your website. Backlinks indicate how important the website is through other websites. A much better use of backlink is people on other websites actually click through the backlink and arrive at your website. When your website’s visitors come through these backlinks, it indicates that there are good backlinks.
Mobile SEO is an essential part of growing your business online. If you want to help your business grow through SEO, you must fulfil the needs of your users that search for your business through mobile devices. Mobile search is no longer the future of SEO as it’s already here.
