How to improve your mobile SEO?

The SEO best practices adopted on desktop must be applied, but also adapted to mobile, because searches are performed differently. Browsing on mobile is not the same: screens are smaller, the mobile user is often on the move, and their reading, attention, and availability can be very different from their behavior on desktop, where they are more comfortably settled.

You need to adapt your offering and your site to the specifics of the often on-the-go browsing associated with mobile. You have to respond faster, with a precise and localized message.

Design, content, keywords, voice search, local, and security are all points to take carefully into account to optimize your organic SEO on mobile, which we will explore in this article.

Why improve your SEO on mobile?

In 2018, 33.7 million French internet users connected via their mobile, far surpassing the number of internet users on desktop (22 million). Globally, mobile connections account for roughly 50% of connections, with mobile constantly growing. It is expected to overtake desktop in number of connections as early as 2020.

Google is the number one search engine, in a near-monopoly position, with more than 90% of the volume of searches worldwide. Meeting Google’s requirements is therefore obviously essential to ensure good rankings and thus a good position on the SERP. Algorithm updates, policy changes, the rollout of RankBrain — Google’s new features come one after another and regularly change the rules of SEO.

Always attentive to internet users’ new habits, Google is putting the emphasis on mobile and, at the end of 2017, rolled out the Mobile First Index.

Truly operational in 2018, it changes search results. It is now the mobile version of sites that determines the ordering of Google’s results pages.

Sites that are not mobile-friendly will therefore rank worse and risk no longer appearing in the top search results. This is dramatic when you know that tomorrow — or even today — the top 3 search results are the target to reach, in order to ensure your visibility and, therefore, your longevity. Working on your mobile SEO is thus essential if you want to increase traffic, conversions, and sales from your site.

Before getting started, free tools can help you test how your site behaves on mobile: Google Search Console, or the Google Mobile-friendly test. Try it at the following address: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

How to optimize your site for mobile?

Adapting your site’s design to its future use on mobile, offering smooth and pleasant navigation, and taking care of the user experience to retain the mobile user are essential to ensure good rankings.

Here are several points to work on.

Adapting to the device

• Offering a responsive version of your site — that is, a design that automatically adapts to the screen resolution — is the best-performing solution in terms of SEO. Far more effective than offering 2 versions, one mobile and one desktop. The URL stays the same, and the metadata, backlinks, and content are identical. This optimizes load time and simplifies Googlebot’s crawling and indexing work.
• Avoid Flash and Java plugins, which are not supported by mobile devices
• Embed mobile-compatible videos (HTML5).
• Avoid pop-ups and pop-ins, and interstitials in general, which have a negative impact on the user experience, particularly on mobile.

Making reading smoother

• Offer an airy layout and a larger font size to make reading more pleasant
• Work on your menu and your homepage.

To free up the home screen, you can, for example, choose between a hamburger menu, a tab bar, or a hybrid solution like the one offered by Facebook, which places the main information in a bar at the bottom and a hamburger menu to access the more occasional features.

• Use floating action buttons (like the one Gmail offers) to highlight a positive action for the user (write, search, etc.). To avoid cluttering the screen and losing the mobile user, only 1 floating button is recommended.
• Offer full-screen navigation, for example, when the user’s choice is not required.

Leveraging the strengths

• Take advantage of the possibilities of touch. Interaction with the user can indeed offer many options that are impossible on desktop. Using these features intelligently can help deliver a richer experience to the user.
• Following a new Google update in 2019, the width of the Title tag is now 600 pixels. The number of characters will therefore vary depending on the size of the chosen letter (an “l” taking up less space than a “K”). However, the advantage goes to mobile. The allotted width is the same as on desktop, but because it is displayed over 2 lines, the number of characters can be greater. This makes it possible to slip in a few extra keywords, and thus boost your SEO.

How to work on your content for mobile?

Offering relevant content to internet users is one of the keys to SEO. This is obviously still true on mobile, but you need to remember to adapt this content for users on the move, and to choose your keywords with this very specific mobile browsing in mind.

Think mobile

Clearly indicate a clickable email address and phone numbers, which will be easy to use on mobile.

Local SEO

Think local SEO. The opportunities offered by good local SEO are significant: according to a SEMrush study, 46% of Google searches on mobile in 2018 were local, and 18% of these searches lead to a sale. A potential ROI not to be overlooked, for all local services and businesses. Keywords such as “nearby,” “around me,” etc., should be carefully taken into account.

Voice search

Adapt to voice search, which is one of the revolutions of mobile search and a challenge for tomorrow.

Up more than 2,500% in 10 years, voice searches already account for 20% of mobile queries and are expected to represent 50% by 2020. Since paid search is not yet operational for voice, adopting a few rules now to benefit from good SEO is a sound investment for the future. Using long-tail keywords, or offering content that answers questions — Who, How, Which, When, etc. — are important ways to optimize your content for mobile.

Take care of your content, which mobile users increasingly expect to be precise and well illustrated. Offering quality content is a win/win solution: shares and backlinks will be greater, automatically leading to better organic rankings.

The classic SEO tips, already known for desktop, obviously remain true for mobile. Frequently refreshing your content, using synonyms rather than repeating words, or using content optimization tools like SEMJI are all avenues to explore.

How to improve load speed?

The site must be designed and optimized to offer the best experience to mobile users, whose patience and attention are shrinking dangerously — even more so than on a computer.

3 seconds to load a page, and you have already lost half of your visitors. Load speed is therefore a variable to watch closely.

As we saw above, offering a responsive version helps avoid redirects, which slow down loading on mobile.

But there are other solutions already available to designers to improve this load time:

AMP pages: Accelerated Mobile Page

Launched in 2015, Accelerated Mobile Pages are a lightweight, open-source page format with the goal of near-instant display, up to 90% faster than the standard version.

What are the main characteristics of these AMP pages?:

• The pages are coded in AMP HTML, which is a simplified HTML that speeds up loading by removing extraneous code elements.
• Use of AMP JS, a simplified JavaScript. Third-party scripts are not allowed.
• The pages are cached on Google’s servers (Cloud CDN)
• AMP pages are mainly used for content pages, homepages, landing pages, product sheets, etc.
• The layout is customizable and can include images and videos.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

Popularized by Google in 2015, the Progressive Web Application is a hybrid solution, halfway between a native application and a website.

What are the main characteristics of PWAs?:

• Offer a more complete experience to the user by integrating geolocation and push notifications.
• Accessible directly from all mobile browsers, across all operating systems
• Content accessibility offline.
• Use of HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript technologies.
• Downloading of new content as the user connects (hence progressive).

How to test load speed?

To take stock of your pages’ speed, several tools exist. Like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix , these free tools analyze your site, detect its weak points, and suggest optimization avenues.

How can your site’s security impact your mobile SEO?

New expectations are emerging from internet users, for whom the web should no longer be an unregulated space where neither their security nor their privacy is guaranteed. Providing more security to users, ensuring the confidentiality of their data, and protecting them against cyberattacks are features that must no longer be neglected in what your site offers. True on desktop, these principles are even more so on mobile. Indeed, users’ trust on mobile is lower; even though the number of m-buyers is increasing, they still accounted for only 22% of e-buyers in 2018, according to the study by the Fevad.

Secure site: https is becoming the norm

Google works to provide relevant answers to internet users, and increasingly ensures it offers them reliable and secure content.

Since July 2018, non-https:// sites have been clearly identified by Google, and users are alerted by a “not secure” warning message.

The various cases related to personal data breaches (Facebook, Gmail, etc.) and hacking have increased mobile users’ distrust, and the bounce rate following this warning message could rise sharply and, in the long run, penalize the SEO of the sites concerned.

It is therefore crucial, especially for sites offering e-commerce, to adopt the https protocol and to make sure they use a valid SSL certificate. The tool https://www.ssllabs.com lets you check the validity of the certificate.

Don’t forget the GDPR

Introduced in Europe in May 2018, the GDPR aims to best protect internet users’ privacy and to limit the exploitation of their data.

Fined a record amount by the CNIL in January 2019 for non-compliance with the law, Google could nonetheless, in the long run, favor sites that comply with this law and whose consent pop-ups have been properly configured so as not to degrade the user experience.

If we are to believe the discussions underway across the Atlantic or in China to adapt the GDPR to their local requirements, Google will have to take these security criteria into account if it wants to remain the leading search engine — or the leading answer engine tomorrow.

Conclusion

Internet users’ new browsing and search habits — mobile, local, voice — combined with the rise of AI such as RankBrain, which tries to guess search intent (informational, navigational, or transactional), are profoundly changing SERP results. Your site’s content will need to be revised to answer users’ ever more precise questions (remember to take PAA into account, for example).

These new rules require you to rethink your SEO strategy. Our agency offers to support you through these changes.