Top 10 Mobile SEO Tips to Know for Small Businesses

Do you want to create a more mobile-friendly website? Hoping to find the best mobile SEO tips? 

If you want to improve your website and get more visitors, it’s important that you prioritize your mobile marketing strategy. Boosting mobile SEO is essential for your small business and can have a big effect on your digital marketing results.

In this article, we’ll list the top 10 mobile SEO tips that small businesses need to know.

Understanding the Importance of Mobile SEO

Mobile search engine optimization (SEO) is a method of improving a website to boost its ranking in search engine results pages. 

While standard SEO tactics exist for improving site performance on both desktop and mobile versions, mobile SEO techniques specifically work to optimize a site for mobile devices. By using these techniques, it will be more likely that you’ll get more visitors to your site who are using smartphones or tablets. 

Mobile devices and tablets use different input methods and have different screen sizes than computers do. A website that works well and looks great on a desktop, won’t necessarily be the same on a phone or tablet.  Ideally, your website should work well for all types of devices that access it.

However, keep in mind that Google prioritizes mobile devices in search results these days. This means that if you want your site to get lots of visitors, then first-of-all, you’ll want to ensure that your site is optimized for mobile devices.

By using mobile SEO techniques, you’ll give your website a boost. As a result, your website will have higher search rankings and you’ll end up getting more mobile visitors to your site.

How to Boost Search Rankings With Mobile SEO

Improving your mobile SEO consists of a variety of different things. Here are a few of the ways you can improve the performance of your site on mobile devices and improve mobile SEO.

1. Improve Website Speed and Performance

One of the biggest parts of improving mobile SEO is ensuring that your site has great speed and performance. You should use an online tool such as Google PageSpeed Insights to check the speed of your site and see how quickly or slowly your pages load. 

Slow page speed will prevent your website from being shown as often in search engine results, so you need to do everything you can to improve it.

Improving speed may include upgrading your web hosting, enabling browser caching, minifying code, or compressing images on your site. Whatever you can do to improve site speed is well worth it for improving your SEO on mobile devices.

2. Use Responsive Web Design

One of the best things you can do to improve mobile SEO is to start using mobile responsive web design. 

With responsive web design, the content and layout of your website will automatically resize itself based on the type of device that is being used to access it. This allows mobile users to have the best experience possible when accessing your site and will also encourage Google to show your site to visitors more often. 

By utilizing responsive design, you’ll improve your mobile SEO significantly and will improve the user experience as well.

3. Prioritize a Great User Experience

To effectively start improving mobile SEO, you need to make the user experience a key part of your strategy. Using a responsive design and optimizing site speed can both help in improving the user experience, but there are other things you can do as well. 

Ensuring that users have an easy time navigating your site and reading fonts on your pages can help.

You should be sure that you use a simple and easy navigation menu that can be clicked on easily, even on a small device. You should also reduce the need for a user to pan or zoom to read content or access parts of your site.

4. Consider Mobile Search Behavior and Keywords

Another thing that you can do to improve your site’s mobile design and get more search traction is to put more focus on keywords that are likely to be searched for on mobile devices. To do this, you’ll need to think about the intent of a search engine user carefully.

For example, many mobile searchers are looking for goods or services quickly. They may be searching for a term such as “restaurants near me” to find a place to eat. Additionally, mobile searchers tend to use very short phrases and queries when searching on mobile devices when compared to using desktop devices.

Be sure to keep the specifics of mobile search behavior in mind. Try to incorporate some keywords that take the intent of mobile searches into consideration.

5. Avoid Common Site Errors

When optimizing your website for mobile devices, you should keep an eye out for any major errors that can affect mobile usage.

By using website analysis tools, you can find out about any problems that your website has that could be causing it to have poor performance. 404 errors, JavaScript and CSS errors, and unreadable images can all harm mobile SEO.

On top of this, remember that you should also avoid using pop-ups or flash content in your mobile site design since they can negatively affect mobile usability.

6. Optimize Content For Mobile Devices

To make the most of mobile users, you need to optimize your content with mobile devices in mind.

To help with this, you should ensure that all headers and titles are as short as possible. You should also divide content into smaller paragraphs to improve readability.

You should also be sure that you’re using videos that will work well on mobile devices and optimizing images. Highlighting important information in content can also be helpful for improving mobile readability and ensuring that your SEO will improve.

7. Make Use of Local SEO Techniques

Since many mobile users are looking for information about local goods and services, it’s important to optimize your website for local search as well. If you have a local small business, you’ll want to combine local SEO tactics with mobile strategies to get the best results.

For example, optimizing local SEO will include using more keywords that include “near me” or your city name. It will also include claiming your Google My Business (GMB) page and verifying business information across social media platforms and online directories.

It’s also important to build more trust with Google. Be sure to check out http://seojet.net/blog/homepage-seo/ to learn how.

8. Build a Social Media Presence

Another great way to improve mobile SEO is to make better use of social media. 

Be sure your business has social media pages and that you’re sharing any content that you create on your profiles. You should also be sure that all mobile content has sharing buttons on it. This will make your content easier for site visitors to share on their favorite social media sites. 

The more your content is shared on social media, the more likely it will be that Google will recognize the importance of your content and start showing it to more web searchers.

9. Don’t Forget Voice Searchers

When optimizing your site for mobile devices, you should also be optimizing it for voice search as well. Many voice searches will be performed on a mobile device, so make sure that you’re taking this into consideration.

One of the best ways to make use of this information is to reconsider how you create and optimize content. When using voice search, many users will phrase their searches as a question.

Because of this, it’s a good idea to add more questions and answers to your website content and to add more FAQ sections. You can also target keywords in ways that people will be more likely to search for with their voices.

10. Track Mobile SEO Results

If you want to be the most effective at mobile SEO, then you need to be sure that you’re tracking your results and monitoring the performance of your site.

There are many premium SEO tools online that you can use to help with this, but there are also some great free ones as well. Simply using Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help you to track your mobile SEO efforts.

Be sure that you’re paying attention to the tweaks and changes you’ve made. If you notice that a particular page is getting a lot of traction, be sure that you understand why and try to replicate it on other pages as well.

Improving Your Website With These Mobile SEO Tips

If you want your small business to get better results online, you need to prioritize mobile SEO. Be sure to make use of these mobile SEO tips if you want to get more website visitors.

In search of more SEO and digital marketing tips? Browse through our blog now to discover more useful SEO and marketing articles.

SEO and Web Design Synergy is the Secret for Online Success

It is undeniable that content is king because you need high-quality content to rank well in search results and gain high visibility for your brand and business. However, content alone cannot perform well unless backed by an equally good web design, which provides the platform for SEO to blossom. No matter how good your content is, you need to prop it up with some good web design that can catapult it to the higher echelons of search rankings. If you look at Internet Systems by Sunbowl, it will be easy to understand the truth of the statement. You must understand what constitutes good web design that strikes the perfect balance between aesthetics and functionality by creating user-friendly and SEO-friendly websites. The key is SEO and web design synergy.

No matter how good your content is, you need to prop it up with some good web design that can catapult it to the higher echelons of search rankings. If you look at Internet Systems by Sunbowl, it will be easy to understand the truth of the statement.

You must understand what constitutes good web design that strikes the perfect balance between aesthetics and functionality by creating user-friendly and SEO-friendly websites.

Web design helps to create SEO-friendly websites

The importance of web design for SEO reflects in the WordPress websites that design websites by inserting the necessary marketing smarts into it to make it SEO-friendly so that anyone can launch the SEO campaign right from the start.

This approach underlines the importance of web design and SEO moving alongside throughout the design process instead of creating a website first and then applying SEO on it like a band-aid, which is a flawed approach.

SEO-friendly websites allow search engines to access the website, crawl the pages, and index it, thereby increasing ranking possibilities. Proper web design ensures easy crawling of the web pages by the search spiders, which is the first step towards ranking. If search engines cannot crawl the website efficiently due to design deficiencies, it will affect indexing and affect the ranking.  

In this article, we will discuss how to ensure perfect harmony between web design and SEO that improves the prospects of ranking and generates revenue for a business. But it is crucial to understand the elements where web design and SEO converge, and the collaboration begins. Here are some ways in which SEO and web design work together.

 Mobile-friendly websites

The fast-evolving mobile technology has now made it almost mandatory to create not only SEO-friendly websites but also ensure that these are mobile-friendly too. Since the number of mobile users has long ago overtaken desktop users, it needs no further explanation about the need to create mobile-friendly websites that provide the most expansive reach to the most extensive audience section.

If you are yet not having a mobile-friendly website, you are a few years behind your competitors. Moreover, since 2015 mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor for Google, which in a way, compels every website owner to follow the diktat to make their business survive online.

Add to this Google’s stand on mobile-first indexing introduced in 2017, which further underscores the importance of mobile-friendly websites. Without a mobile-friendly website, you are losing almost half of your web traffic originating from mobile devices.

The design must be easy to read

It seems obvious to spend more time improving content for improving SEO performance. Too much emphasis on content tends to camouflage the importance of web design, which can severely damage SEO prospects if not up to the mark.

Poor web design is a turn-off for visitors who fail to read what they want on the website and will not hesitate to abandon it.  The website layout aids content visibility and makes it easy to find information, and the use of minimal hyperlinks ensures that visitors can concentrate on the content without any distractions.

Failing to locate the content quickly will leave visitors frustrated as they cannot get the information they seek. Web designers know how to create highly user-friendly websites that create good engagement.

Website speed

You cannot compromise with your website speed and must take every step possible to improve it so that visitors feel happy. Besides keeping visitors happy, speedy websites make Google happy too, and so much important it is for them that in 2015 it declared that website speed was one of the ranking factors.

Most websites are deficient in this aspect, and poor website speed is often the reason for low ranking. Monitor your website speed closely with a focus on individual pages to identify the areas that need improvement so that you can ensure that the page opens under 3 seconds, which is the maximum permissible limit.

The farther you are away from the target, the more traffic you are losing because half of the visitors will turn their back to the website if it takes more than 3 seconds to open.

Do not neglect sitemaps

Sitemaps might seem so much innocuous that some people often do not give it the importance it deserves. However, sitemaps are crucial elements of web design because they help search engines crawl your website smartly, leading to better indexing.

Sitemaps are like a guide for search engines that show the way to all pages on the website in a sequential manner so that search engines can understand which pages are essential for your website. In particular, large websites must be extra attentive to sitemaps or else search bots, and visitors would lose their way on the website and defeat the purpose of SEO.

Gain the trust of users

The most challenging aspect of a marketer’s SEO journey is to gauge the trust level of the audience on the brand and business. Although it is critical to gain users’ trust, being an intangible factor, it is tough to fathom how much confidence your brand or business enjoys.

Since people can form opinions almost instantly and stay firm, it can be challenging to change their minds. Providing users with a clean web design that is easy to navigate and finding information is easy should help express your intention to keep users happy and gain their trust. 

Create the most impacting impression the first time someone visits your website and reap the benefits in the long run as the memory remains deeply entrenched in their minds for years. 

Check Out These On-Page Ranking Factors

If you want to know which specific on-page ranking factors will help increase your search traffic read on.  In this article I am going to share with you the five most important ranking factors:

Website Design

If you didn’t know Google launched the mobile-first index – this basically means that your site needs to LOOK GOOD and LOAD QUICKLY on mobile devices.  A good-looking, fast website makes navigating that website much more convenient for your potential customers and will more likely result in more time spent on a page or site which in turn results in sales.  Luckily there is a Google mobile-friendly test tool to check.  If you fail this test, you’ve got some serious work ahead of you…

Failing the test means that you need to update your website’s design or theme to something that is mobile responsive

Website Speed

Pay attention to your site’s speed as this is another confirmed ranking factor from Google and it is very important for quality user experience as pages that take a while to load have higher bounce rates.   You can run some tests with a Google Page Speed tool.   The ideal website should load in 2 to 5 seconds, but ideally, it should be quicker than.  

Also, be sure to run your pages for a web page test to see how they load in the real world and aim for a load time of fewer than 30 seconds.

Title Tags

Now your website looks good and is loading quickly, next you should look at the title tags of your pages.  A title tag is the HTML element used to specify the webpage’s title, so it tells a visitor what the web page is all about. 

These are displayed on search engine results pages and are really important.  Make sure your title tag is accurate and provides a concise description of the page’s content preferably including the target keyword as close to the beginning of the title as possible.  You must do this without sacrificing readability.   

Remember this is the first thing a potential customer will see so it is important you get this right!  You can use Title tags to display your business or brand name which will again lead to more traffic.

Internal Linking

A good internal linking structure will not only increase your search traffic but will also increase conversions as well.  You can use internal links to control a flow of search engine Authority across your site. Google reviews websites by reviewing your website, so when Google bot arrives at your homepage, it follows the first link and so on which then assists it in working out how the pages, blogs, posts, and other content relates to each other. 

So you can link a blog post that references SEO services or is about SEO services by putting a link in the content where it says SEO services and point to your SEO services page.  The more links to a post mean the more value your website will be as Google deems that a page with a lot of valuable links is important.

Content

The content on your website must be readable and relevant to your business.   Consider the length of your content, when you add words to your pages, you will start to rank for a variety of other keywords so go through all the pages on your site that you want to increase the rankings for and update the content now.    Google prefers updated content so it is wise to review your content on a regular basis to keep it relevant.

If you’re wondering how many words to write or even what to write about just Google your target keyword and open the top 5 results as this will give you some ideas, then you can write a list of pros and a list of cons for each result.

To guide your writing process you also want to make sure that your content is formatted nicely with headings and bullet points and images.  Finally, make it easy to read.

 So there you have it the five most important SEO ranking factors are mobile responsiveness, site speed, and keywords in your title tags, internal linking, and length of content. Here at Gn digital, we use these ranking factors along with some other ranking factors.