You have your business set up, your website running, and have also managed to recreate a mobile version of your website that is compatible with smartphones and tablets. Now, more than ever, is when you have to focus on mobile site optimization. You need to have the mobile website designed to promote a user-friendly experience. Once designing and re-designing is tackled, you must then ensure that your mobile site is well optimized for search engines. With rise in mobile searches, it is vital that mobile visitors find your site when they need it.
Fortunately, if you want the best SEO results for your mobile site, there are only a few things to keep in mind when optimizing for mobile. Let’s get started:
- Check the speed of your site using Google Page Speed Insights Given hardware and connectivity issues, page speed is more important for mobile users than desktop users. Beyond optimizing images, you’ll want to minimize code, leverage browser caching, and reduce redirects. When performing mobile site optimization, check for any issues that could slow your page down by using Google Page Speed insights and then focus on the speed sub-section. Address the issues which are marked as “Should Fix,” and “Consider fixing;” sometimes when a user accesses desktop content on a smartphone, they get an error page on mobile. Make sure that you don’t let Javascript block your CSS and Image Files (render blocking). Also use this Pingdom tool!
- Content Visibility & Ease of Navigation – To provide a good experience to users, it’s always better that you use HTML 5 standards for animations. Use video-embedding for playing video on all devices. One thing to keep in mind is to supply transcripts of the video to make your website accessible to users who use assistive browsing technologies.
- Google Webmaster Tools – You’ll need to make sure that you utilize “Fetch as Google” in Google Webmaster tools to determine whether the Javascript, CSS and image files are crawled by Googlebot or not. You can also test the robots.txt of your site with Google Webmaster Tools.
- Mobile Friendly Test – Check your mobile page with the Mobile-Friendly Test to know whether the website is compatible with mobile devices or not. This test checks the URL of the mobile site and offers an analysis of how good it is.
Following these simple and effective steps will result in dynamic mobile site optimization and a user-friendly experience. After all, a positive end-user’s experience is the objective of every user-interface design. It does not only lead to a friendly customer experience, but also boosts the credibility of your enterprise.
