Search engine optimization (SEO), a specific type of marketing that focuses on enhancing a website’s visibility in organic search results, can provide remarkable results when done effectively. Since it improves a website’s ranking, it increases awareness in major search engines, and this, in turn, then drives more website traffic.
Assuming you’ve taken steps to optimize your website for regular searches from desktops and laptops, it may now be time to turn your attention to mobile optimization. While, of course, many of the SEO elements you have already used will benefit a mobile search for your website, there are a few other things you can do to improve discovery of your website via a mobile device.
Mobile optimization can help both online and offline businesses. National ranking might be more important for online businesses while local search is more important for offline, brick-and-mortar businesses.
It’s essential to understand what a huge role mobile search can play for brick-and-mortar businesses. For one thing, people are often walking on the street or riding in a car when they access their mobile phones because they are looking for a place to eat, a place to shop, or a place that offers a specific service they need at the moment. One case study of how effective local search can be comes from a Jersey City physical therapy center called EPTG, Exchange Place Therapy Group. This business doubled its client base by building a new website that used a highly targeted digital marketing campaign. Working with an SEO Hilton Head marketing firm in South Carolina, they achieved excellent results within 12 months. Specifically, their rate of weekly patients increased from twenty to forty-five, which represents a 120% increase.
3 Good Reasons to Focus On Mobile Optimization
Mobile optimization matters for the following three reasons:
First, more and more people are buying smartphone and tablets every year. You don’t want to miss out on this part of the market.
Second, many websites that look fine on a desktop or laptop aren’t designed to look good on smaller or different screen sizes. They also don’t account for the load times of mobile devices.
Third, mobile optimization is about making site design and structure, as well as page speed, more user-friendly. This way, you’re not accidentally turning away impatient mobile visitors away because they can’t read your website or it takes a painfully long time for it to load on their screen.
2 Mobile SEO Best Practices
Here are two things you can do to improve mobile optimization:
1. Tweak website design
Traditionally webmasters have used images, JavaScript, and CSS to improve the look and feel of a website. When mobile phones first came on the market, the new technology did not know how to deal with these elements; consequently, webmasters decided to block one or more of them to make a website more mobile-friendly. Now, things have changed for the better. Not only has the Smartphone GoogleBot adapted to all three elements, but they help it understand how to categorize a website better.
Another thing that you no longer have to worry about is making sure that your best content is “above the fold.” In a world where scrolling is almost a reflex action, it is no longer a meaningful distinction to make.
However, there are still some best practices that have not changed—avoiding flash and pop-ups. These still don’t work well on mobile devices and you should continue to avoid using them. If you really want flash, then substitute with HTML5. As for pop-ups, there is no workaround and continuing to use them will increase your bounce rates.
2. Enhance page speed
Page speed can be slowed down on a mobile device because of the different type of hardware used to get online and because of issues with connectivity.
Here are 4 steps you can take to improve page speed:
- Optimize images.
- Minimize code.
- Improve browser caching.
- Minimize redirects.
A few things that you can do to improve mobile optimization is to use brief titles, keep URLs short, and be concise, but still informative, with your meta-descriptions. In addition, think about adding rich snippets. These work very well on a limited screen site; and, in fact, they work even better than on a desktop or laptop. One way to do this is by deploying schema.org structured data.
Mobile marketing should be part of your marketing strategy because it provides the distinct advantage of allowing you to reach your targeted audience at a far lower cost than traditional advertising. With a few of these helpful tips and tweaks, your website should look great to everyone, no matter what device they’re using.
