5 Important Tips For Mobile SEO

It’s 2017 and currently mobile rules the world. Is your business in the best position to handle mobile traffic? Is it geared properly for search rankings on mobile? As a mobile application development company and web designer we get asked a lot of questions about how mobile and SEO should factor into business and we would like to share those answers with our 5 Important Tips for Mobile SEO.

Mobile isn’t a fad or something that can be overlooked in the business world. It is the primary method in which people are connecting with the internet and leads in a host of categories from global ad revenues to purchases made online.

Rather than sitting behind the times, focus on getting ahead of them.

5 Tips for Mobile SEO

• Be mobile accessible – First things first, your site needs to be mobile-optimized. Google bots are crawling sites and judging them based on mobile accessibility which directly affects your rankings. For sites that are not mobile ready there are a few options which include a responsive web design, serving dynamic content or creating a mobile website separate from your current site with a mobile specific URL. Of all these options Google prefers responsive, but all are acceptable for Google ranking signals.
• Increase load speed – When it comes to mobile speed is what you need! In fact Google will downgrade your rankings if your site does not meet baseline speed requirements (which you can check via Google’s mobile friendly tools). Plus mobile speed directly relates to customer satisfaction which is another factor Google considers. Ideally you want a 1 or 2 second load time.
• Design for big fingers – Fingers come in all shapes and sizes and Google considers that when they are talking about mobile access. To that end they want to see buttons, links and any other type of touch target large enough that even a big finger can press it and far enough apart that you won’t accidently press the wrong one. Aside from making perfect sense, this also helps limit any sort of bait-and-switch tactics people might try and employ to gain extra clicks on something that people don’t mean to click on in the first place.
• Check the font – Did you know that one of the factor’s Google uses for mobile SEO rankings is font size? It makes sense because they want people to be able to read the site that they have directed them to. The base font size they want to see is 16 and also to use a limited number of total fonts including not using those that are hard to read. This is one of those areas where the KISS philosophy should come into play. Use fonts carefully and you will be fine.
• Remove non-performers – There are a lot of things that simply do not perform well on the mobile platform that are better suited for desktop browsing, primarily due to screen size, code issues, and data limitations. Full-screen pop-ups, large ads, videos that won’t play on a particular device or anything that triggers an error are all the type of things you want to avoid. Rather than running across compatibility issues or customer irritation because their device doesn’t support Flash, just remove the issue from the equation from the start.

The bottom line is that mobile friendly means money friendly not only because of more opportunity from customers currently using your site, but also better rankings from Google that will help people find your site. These 5 important tips for mobile SEO should be considered by everyone because mobile internet is the present as well as the future.

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