Google Mobile SEO Best Practices For Mobile-First Indexing In 2021As the completion of rolling out of the ‘Mobile-first indexing’ algorithm update is ending in March 2021, the whisper about mobile SEO is getting louder. Although many businesses have mobile-friendly version of their websites, the majority of business mobile websites are not optimized for a competitive ranking in ‘Mobile-first indexing’ search results. Here comes the role of mobile SEO services.
What Is Mobile SEO? Why Do You Need Mobile SEO?
Mobile SEO is a set of SEO optimization practices to improve the surfing experience of mobiles and tablet users. Mobile SEO ensures that each element of the website is accessed by the search engine spiders. The numbers of mobile searches are on a spike. According to a report by Hitwise, 50.81 % of global web traffic was generated through mobiles in the 3rd qtr of 2020. Almost 61 % of total Google searches were initiated through mobile devices (Statista). There are the numbers of statistical reports that certify the growing importance of mobile SEO for every size business.
If the traffic over your business website is dropping or you are feeling a drop in leads generation, it is time to have a mobile-friendly website optimized for competitive Mobile-first indexing. Is your business website ready to capture the sales potential generated through mobiles?
Just go through this short mobile SEO checklist, if your mobile responsive business website-
- Delivers required UX over the devices that the target buyers use
- Has functional internal links and necessary redirects
- Loads quickly as per standard
- Doesn’t hide the content or functional buttons on mobile screens
- Loads resources over all the devices
What Are The Options To Have Mobile Version Of A Business Website?
You have three mobile website development options to rank your business in Mobile-first indexing:
1. Responsive Web Design: Use of Meta name="viewport" tag helps the browser to identify the website and to adjust the content display settings according to particular screen size.
2. Separate URLs: The use of different URLs displays the size-optimized web content according to specific mobile devices.
3. Dynamic Serving: Use of ‘Vary HTTP header’ changes the signal according to page requests of user-agent.
What Should Be Your Mobile SEO Strategy For 2021? Nine Mobile SEO Tips
Should you invest in Google mobile SEO? Should you worry about Google’s Mobile-first indexing? According to a statistical report released by Statcounter GlobalStats, Google shared 95.23% of total mobile searches worldwide. Following nine techniques/tips will help you for mobile SEO optimization:
1. Optimize for Page speed. Google's PageSpeed Insights is the best tool to evaluate the web page loading speed based on data-driven reports of CrUX, FCP, and DCL. Avoid lazy-loading because more than 1-2 seconds rendering period can drift the visitors.
2. Let Google to crawl all the web pages. Explore ‘Google Search Console’ reports to find out the errors in the robots.txt file that directs the Googlebot what to crawl and what not to crawl. Don’t block JavaScript and CSS files.
3. Optimize mobile site design. Optimize mobile site designs for fat fingers. Eliminate the pop-ups as these often lead to a higher bounce rate because of poor UX.
4. Optimize the headings and heading tags to be traced by Google; and keep these the same for mobile site and desktop version.
5. Optimize the quality of videos. Encode the videos to work on mobile devices also. You may opt for MP4 file or HTTP live streaming according to the nature of the video. Alt text and VideoObject structured data should be same as that of the desktop web version.
6. Optimize images for optimum speed. Optimize titles, captions, text, filenames etc for competitive ranking in Mobile-first indexing. URL inspection tool in the Search Console will help you test the quality of loaded images.
7. Keep the easy to read web page content the same in both versions. It supports the visitors to act in similar fashion irrespective to devices they use.
8. Use “Viewport Content” tag. It makes the content adaptive to different mobile devices.
9. Use Schema structured data; it empowers your mobile website to stand out in Mobile-first indexing.
The other three simple but often ignored hacks for smart mobile SEO are – use small header images, use more ‘Negative Space’, and use ‘Social Buttons’ in a bar.
Concluding Note:
Mobile-first index algorithm means that mobile UX signal will get more weight as a ranking signal. If the bounce rate at your website is found high, the website is sure to suffer in the ranking. To check the deliverance of mobile SEO services and the quality mobile website, it is better to compare the bounce rate of the desktop version and mobile version periodically.
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