How Can I Improve My Mobile SEO?

Mobile SEO optimises your website for users accessing it on their handheld devices such as their smartphones and tablets. Mobile optimisation includes making the resources on your website accessible to search engine spiders. 

• Mobile SEO is essential: With over 58% of users searching via mobile, optimising your site for handheld devices is no longer optional.
• Google rewards mobile-friendly sites: The Mobile-First Index prioritises responsive websites that offer a smooth mobile experience.
• Website speed matters: A delay of even a few seconds can drastically increase bounce rates and hurt rankings.
• Responsive design is a must: Your site must adapt to all screen sizes, with easy navigation and minimal pop-ups.
• Optimised content drives retention: Write short, skimmable paragraphs with clear headlines and use white space effectively.
• Professional help is available: SEO experts like TopRankings can audit and optimise your mobile SEO for long-term success.

Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. What is Mobile SEO?
3. Why Mobile SEO Matters
4. Understanding Google’s Mobile-Friendly Update
5. Tips to Improve Your Mobile SEO
   • Improve Your Website’s Speed
   • Design a Mobile Responsive Website
   • Optimise Content for Mobile
6. Who Can Help with Mobile SEO?
7. Frequently Asked Questions

Here’s why: 58% of users use their mobile devices to perform searches on Google.

Want more reason on why you need to improve your mobile SEO?

If yes, here you go:  Google reported that around 27.8 billion more searches were performed on Google using mobile than desktop. 

If you are on board with us, there’s just one thing left to do— you need to improve your mobile SEO.

You need to optimise your website for Google searches. With Google recognising this trend mobile search trend among users, the search engine gives priority to websites optimised for Google. And it all started with Google’s Mobile-friendly update.

Google announced that its mobile-friendly update would boost the rankings of mobile-friendly websites on online searches via phone. The mobile-friendly update will allow users to easily discover relevant and high-quality results.

Mobile-friendly websites are websites with readable text without the need to tap or zoom, correctly spaced targets, and no need for horizontal scrolling and unplayable content. If your website isn’t optimised for mobile, Google will penalise it. 

Their “Mobile-First” algorithm has ushered in a new era where websites battle to stay on top, and for that, they need mobile SEO!

You don’t have to worry about Google’s mobile-first index too much if you have already optimised your website for SEO. 

You’re good if your website:

• Loads resources across a wide range of devices
• Loads quickly and meets the expectations of mobile users
• Doesn’t hide content on mobile versions of your website
• Boasts a UX optimised for a wide range of devices
• Features working internal links and redirects 

If one or more of the following doesn’t check out, your website is in need of major improvements in the SEO department. If you’re not sure, having an SEO audit performed on your website can let you know where you lack in terms of mobile SEO.

For now, let’s talk about improvements.

Here is how you can improve your website for mobile SEO:

The 2018 Google speed update made speed a major contender for ranking on Google. If your website’s pages load slowly, Google will leave your website out from its search engine. You’ll be there, but you’ll not be ranking, and your competitors will be ahead of you in the ranks.

However, we have some good news. If your website has relevant content despite it being slow, there’s still a chance that your website may show up in the ranks.

Does this mean you should leave out speed and focus on relevant content only?

No, not at all! Even though your slow loading website has relevant content, users are less likely to have the patience for your website to load to view. Instead, they would go to the next website. Poor speed increases bounce rates.

Let’s see how:

• 1 to 3 seconds increases the bounce rate by 32%.
• 1 to 5 seconds increases the bounce rate by 90%.
• 1 to 6 seconds increases the bounce rate by 106%.
• 1 to 10 seconds increases the bounce rate by 123%.

Let’s increase it!

Compress and optimise images.

• Larger pictures increase loading time. Use JPEG format, not PNG format.

Minimise HTTP requests.

• The requests include images, scripts, and style sheets. 

Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.

• They increase the number of requests when users visit your website. Remove unnecessary formatting, code, and white space to increase loading speed.

Upgrade web hosting

• More visitors and content can decrease loading speed, and upgrading web hosting can increase it.

Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files.

• This allows certain files to load at the same time and in return, speeds up your website.

Allow browser caching.

• Store static files such as HTML documents, media files, images, CSS, and JavaScript files, so they can become easily accessible. The database won’t have to retrieve them each time you receive a new request.

Allow Gzip compression.

• It compresses the files on the website into a zip file. This reduces the file size and boosts website speed.

Remove unnecessary plugins.

• Delete or deactivate any plugins that you no longer use, as too many of them can reduce loading speed and cause crashes and security issues.

Responsive website design can change your website depending on the device the user used to access it. Have you seen how your website looks on a tablet, desktop, or mobile? If you haven’t, it can because you have yet to make your website’s design mobile responsive. 

If you have, view your website on different devices to see the transformation. Your website will change based on content or text. A responsive website design will eliminate text or enlarge text depending on the type of device you’re viewing it from. 

Why Google wants you to have a responsive design? Let’s see what Google says:

• Makes it easier for your website users to link and share your website using one URL
• Makes it easier for algorithms to assign index properties to your website
• Makes it easier to maintain several pages if they have the same content
• Reduces common mistakes and errors affecting mobile websites
• Prevents your users from redirection and decreases errors during loading times that negatively affect the user experience
• Saves sources when bots crawl your website. The bots crawl on your website to retrieve every content version of your website. Crawling helps the search engine index more of the content on your website and keep it fresh.

Here’s how you can optimise your website for responsiveness:

• Scale images for mobile devices. Even if you have a responsive website design, you need to scale your images as without doing so, you can cover the entire screen leaving no space on the website for a call-to-action. 
• Have an easy-to-view navigation menu. Provide your users with an easy-to-access navigation menu to explore your website.
• Avoid pop-ups that take up the entire screen. Pop-up images need to leave space for users to view the content.
• Ensure your call-to-action is visible. Users shouldn’t have to look around too much to find your call-to-action.
• Shorten the content. Excessive text on a website can overwhelm and distract users.

We are social animals except we’re social from behind the screens of our devices. We bet you’re reading this blog on your mobile phone. By optimising the content for mobile, you’re ensuring users stay on your website longer. You don’t want users to squint to read the content or zoom in to view the pictures on it. 

Here’s how to optimise the content for mobile:

• Have a mobile-first mindset. Create content that is digestible and easy to navigate on the phone.
• Create concise sentences and paragraphs short. Have easier to read paragraphs and sentences for users to quickly skim the content if they want to.
• Write attention-grabbing and short headlines. Create relevant headlines that evoke emotions and have a hook.
• Optimise your meta description for SEO.  Create a short meta description with relevant keywords. 
• Break up your content into chunks. Use white space to separate paragraphs to ensure your content is easier to read. Use H1 tags, bullet points, or images.
• Use keywords to optimise your content and integrate visual and video content into your website.

If you are looking to improve your mobile SEO, TopRankings is who you need to lookup. Contact us today for a quote. Don’t waste time because the more you delay, the lower you fall behind in the rankings.

What is mobile SEO and why is it important?

Mobile SEO is the process of optimising your website so it performs well on smartphones and tablets. It’s crucial because more than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, and Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it evaluates the mobile version of your site first.

What is Google’s Mobile-First Index?

Google’s Mobile-First Index means the search engine prioritises mobile versions of websites when determining rankings. If your mobile site is slow, hard to navigate, or hides content, your SEO performance will suffer.

How can I test if my site is mobile-friendly?

You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to check if your website meets mobile usability standards. It will highlight issues like text that’s too small, elements that are too close together, or content wider than the screen.

Does site speed affect mobile SEO?

Absolutely. Page speed is a confirmed ranking factor, especially on mobile. A site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load can experience a bounce rate increase of over 30%, causing both user frustration and poor SEO performance.

Can I just create a separate mobile site?

While that used to be an option, responsive design is now the recommended best practice. It ensures consistency across devices, simplifies maintenance, and improves SEO by keeping all signals (like backlinks) unified under one URL.

Should I use the same content for mobile and desktop?

Yes, but ensure it’s formatted correctly for mobile. This means breaking it into shorter paragraphs, using bullet points, adding headings, and incorporating images or videos that scale properly on small screens.