Mobile SEO Optimization: 7 Tips & Best Practices in 2024

With the development of internet users via mobile as well as mobile-first updates from Google, now all search engine optimization must also prioritize mobile-friendliness. Mobile accessibility has become an important factor in SEO if you hope for maximum results.

In this guide, we will introduce you more to Mobile SEO to dominate the market from all devices. Find insights, best practices, and tools you can use here.

What Is Mobile SEO?

Mobile SEO is a website optimization practice to ensure that your site performs well in mobile search. In other words, it is an optimization strategy with the aim of getting more traffic from mobile searches.

In recent years, the number of mobile device users has skyrocketed and may continue to increase in the future. To provide a good user experience, a website must keep mobile-friendly in mind.

However, many companies still don't realize the importance of mobile-friendly websites. Even though a website that is not responsive on mobile devices can drain the SEO quality and reputation of the business.

Therefore, it is important to optimize the website so that it runs well on mobile devices. Here we will describe the ranking factors in mobile SEO and how they differ from desktop.

Ranking Factors in Mobile SEO

In order to be able to determine a website optimization strategy in mobile search, you also need to understand what the mobile SEO ranking factors are. Here are some ranking factors divided into three aspects:

• Technical: since bandwidth and device screen size tends to be smaller, some technical aspects such as file size, website speed, use of flash elements, and percentage of keywords in the domain can affect the ranking in mobile search.
• User Experience: design and layout factors affect user experience on mobile search. There are several factors to consider such as font size, interactive elements, links, unordered lists, and images.
• Content: in the aspect of content, things that need to be considered are the number of words, keyword distribution, and readability that affect web page rankings.

Differences in Mobile and Desktop Ranking

Although Google applies mobile indexing first to desktop searches, the rankings in mobile and desktop search results are different. Some of you may be wondering what is the difference between mobile SEO and desktop SEO.

Here are some things that affect the difference in mobile and desktop rankings:

Search Location: One of the things that affect mobile search results is your current location. Therefore, mobile and desktop rankings may differ.

• Page Speed: websites that load quickly will perform well on both desktop and mobile searches.
• Mobile-Friendliness: in a mobile search, a mobile-friendly site is certainly superior, but in a desktop search it is no less important. Because mobile friendly is one of the user experience metrics that do affect web page rankings.
• Personalize Search Results: Google customizes search results based on user needs. This is what causes the difference in mobile and desktop rankings, because users may have different needs for mobile and desktop searches.
   

The Importance of Mobile SEO

Currently, the application of mobile SEO is important because most searches on the internet are carried out using mobile devices. Therefore, if your website manages to appear in mobile search results, more organic traffic will be obtained.

However, if you are only optimizing your website for desktop search, you may be missing out on the opportunity to get more traffic. In addition, the appearance of a website that is not mobile-friendly can also provide a bad experience for users.

In fact, user experience is one of the ranking factors prioritized by Google. Therefore, this kind of SEO is important to support website performance and help your website rank better in organic search.

Besides the above reasons, here are the reason why it is good for your business website:

• Google prioritizes crawling and indexing on mobile devices
• Most people use mobile devices to access the internet
• Mobile-friendly websites can increase conversions
• Internet users prefer mobile-friendly websites
• Mobile SEO affects local search results and voice search

Mobile SEO Best Practices

Before creating an effective SEO strategy, you need to know the user journey on both desktop and mobile devices. In addition, it is also important to ensure that your website is responsive on various screen resolutions.

You can contact a mobile SEO service provider to help implement the best practices on your website. If you want to optimize it yourself, you can follow these best practices to improve your website's performance in mobile search.

Make Sure the Site Can be Crawled by Googlebot Mobile

The first mobile SEO tip is to make sure your website can be crawled and indexed by Googlebot mobile. As we know, sites that are not indexed will not be shown in search results (SERP).

You can check the crawl status through Google Search Console. If your site is blocking Googlebot from indexing a certain URL, then you can check the robots.txt file again to see if that page URL has been excluded from crawling or not.

In addition, it is also important to use the same robots.txt file if you use different URL configurations for the mobile and desktop versions of web pages.

Content Display Must Stay The Same as Desktop Version

As mobile SEO affects rankings, you need to serve the best version of the content for web pages on mobile devices. Usually, mobile pages will limit the display of certain content from desktop pages to increase page speed. However, this is not a good idea as it can affect your potential ranking.

The next trick is to optimize the mobile page experience not only for search engines but also for users because many people access the internet using mobile devices.

The best practice is to serve the same visualization on the desktop and mobile versions. If you use separate URLs, make sure they are both responsive on different devices.

Keep in mind that Google will crawl all content elements from headings, structured data, meta titles, and meta descriptions to identify relevance between articles and search queries, and user search objectives.

Therefore, make sure your meta tags have a consistent appearance on the desktop and mobile versions.

Use Responsive Design

Google prefers responsively designed web pages because they can provide a good user experience. This is because responsive pages can be accessed from various resolutions of the user's device.

That way, users can be more flexible in conducting searches using the devices they have. An unresponsive web design can cause users to leave your site, even before it loads.

Separate Mobile and Desktop URLs

Another strategy is to create a parallel site that separates mobile and desktop URLs. To prevent confusion in accessing URLs, you can use the “m” subdomain for mobile sites, and don't forget to use rel="canonical" to avoid indications of plagiarism.

Increase Page Speed

Page speed or page load time is one of the metrics of user experience. If the website loads slowly, this can degrade the quality of the user experience and cause the bounce rate to increase.

Therefore, increasing page speed is one best strategies that you can do. Check your website speed using the Page Speed ​​Test tool from cmlabs and see if your web performance is good enough or still has room for improvement.

Optimize Local Search As The Strategy

Users tend to search for local businesses on mobile devices. Therefore, optimizing local SEO is uncompromising.

You need to complete your business information to make it easier for potential customers to find you online. Data that you must include such as business name, company address, telephone number, email address, website, and other information.

Also, optimize your local content to appear in mobile search results. You can research the most popular local keywords and create content that can answer user needs. This will help increase the visibility of your website on the internet.

Use AMP

Another tip is to implement AMP on your website. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a framework used to optimize web pages for faster access on mobile devices. As you know, Google puts mobile indexing first. Implementing AMP can help you improve web page rankings.

How to Check Mobile-Friendliness

After knowing the definition and how to optimize it, then you need to check whether your website has been implemented as mobile-friendly. Here are some tools you can use:

Mobile-Friendly Test

To check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not is a piece of cake. With the Mobile-Friendly Test tool from cmlabs, all you need to do is enter the URL address you want to check, then wait a while for the report to come out.

The report will display the status of the website, whether it is mobile-friendly or not. In addition, there is a preview of how the web page will look on mobile devices. If the reports show that your site is not yet mobile-friendly, then this is the right time for you to do some optimization.

Mobile Usability Report at GSC

In addition to using tools from cmlabs, you can also take advantage of the mobile usability reports provided by Google Search Console. How to use it is also very easy, add the URL or program code you want to check in the URL test field.

Wait a few moments until the test result report is displayed. You will see information on the mobile-friendly status of the website, crawl time, and any problems found on the web page when it was run on a mobile device.

That is a comprehensive discussion of mobile SEO starting from the definition, ranking factors, differences between mobile SEO and desktop SEO, to the best practices.

Apart from optimizing your website's performance in desktop search, you also need to implement mobile SEO best practices. Don't hesitate to get help from a mobile SEO service provider, if needed.

We hope that the above guide can help you optimize your website for mobile search. Of course, the optimization results can not be felt instantly. All you need to do is wait and be consistent in implementing SEO best practices.