In 2016, mobile finally surpassed
desktop to become the top device people use to access the Internet. It had been
a long time coming. As early as 2015, Google revealed that searches done on
mobile exceeded those done on other devices.
There’s no doubt that mobile-first
has arrived. Nonetheless, as much as mobile responsiveness has been around for
a long time, most sites tend not to do well when it comes to usability because
most business sites are still made for desktop and then adjusted downward to
fit the mobile platform. This will no longer be sustainable in the mobile-first
era we are entering.
Here, we look at how you can
optimize your website for mobile users.
What mobile users and Google want
A look at promotional material from
Google’s reveals three facts that attest to the significance of mobile
optimization:
- More Internet users today are performing online searches on mobile than desktop computers.
- Internet users are five times more likely to leave your website if it’s not optimized for mobile.
- More thanr 50 percent of Internet users using mobile phones will leave a website if the loading time exceeds three seconds.
Taking into account that many mobile
data networks are unreliable, it is clear that for your site to be successful,
it needs to be lean and adapted to mobile devices.
Mobile-first indexing
Seeing as more searches are being
done on mobile than on desktop, it’s no surprise that Google is moving toward
mobile-first indexing. It is, however, yet to be fully implemented, meaning
ranking is still mainly centered on your site’s desktop version.
Top firms such as cospringsseo.com
know that when it does happen, the primary drivers of your visibility on search
engines will be your mobile site content, speed, links, user experience, etc.
Desktop will still factor into your results but mobile elements will be the
most important.
This should come as good news for
businesses that invest time and effort into the mobile versions of their sites
because it’s an opportunity for them to gain an edge over their competitors. It
is, therefore, important that you work with your SEO firm to adapt your mobile
website accordingly.
Adopting a mobile-friendly approach
The first step to leveraging
mobile-first indexing is creating content that is mobile-friendly. There are
three approaches that you can employ in this regard: separate mobile site URLs,
dynamic content and responsive Web design.
Google recommends using responsive
website design to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. It has been in
use for a while now. Important to note is that there are still a number of
sites that have long adopted mobile responsiveness but still fail their users
when it comes to providing a good user experience. Responsive Web design,
therefore, plays a minimal role in making websites mobile-friendly.
Page Speed
Page speed is a significant factor
on both desktop and mobile devices, but it is especially significant on mobile
when Internet users are looking for answers to their questions online. Pages
take considerably less time to load on a Wi-Fi network than they do on mobile
data networks. And even with 4G, mobile data networks are not entirely
reliable.
There are a number of recommended
ways of improving page speed on mobile. Google’s PageSpeed insights tool helps
webmasters in this endeavor by making it possible for them to test the speed of
their pages and offering some tips on how to make improvements.
The following are some of the fixes
that are suggested by Google’s testmysite.withgoogle.com.
- Enable compression
- Optimize images
- Minify CSS
- Leverage browser caching
- Avoid landing page redirects
For WordPress sites, performing such
tasks is not too difficult because there are plugins that take care of most of
these issues without you having to spend a lot of resources. It is possible for
you to reduce page speed to Google’s recommended three seconds by implementing
the improvements suggested by the PageSpeed insights tools and using a faster
hosting service.
Source: - http://www.sitepronews.com/2017/07/26/seo-strategies-gaining-a-lead-on-your-competitors-through-mobile-optimization/
The point is that you can obtain
clear insights on page loading time for the purpose of determining what
improvements you need to make. You will definitely have to make some
adjustments to your content management system. However, in many cases, you’ll
find that 20 percent of the effort can get you 80 percent of the results.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) also
play an important role in mobile optimization. It is aimed at making sites that
are usually clunky and slow load nearly instant. The sooner you adopt AMP for
the appropriate pages on your site, the faster you can gain a lead on your
competitors.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that mobile search
is finally finding its way to the top of SEO, with more Internet users
performing searches on mobile than on desktop. To benefit from this shift in
the SEO world, have a qualified and experienced SEO firm help you build a
mobile site that will give you enviable rankings.
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