Mobile-First SEO for Summer: Optimizing Your Website for On-the-Go Users

These days, approximately 60% of web usage is done through mobile devices. In other words, mobile web usage is the predominant form of web usage in existence today.

What this means is that, when trying to rank your website on search engines, you need to prioritize the mobile version of your website. This is referred to as mobile-first SEO.

Wondering what this entails? Wondering how website optimization services would facilitate this? Here’s everything you need to know.

Understanding the Concept of Mobile-First Indexing

First, we must discuss the concept of mobile-first indexing. When a search engine’s algorithm goes about ranking websites for specific keywords, it must first go through the websites and assess their characteristics. Websites whose characteristics meet the algorithm’s criteria the best end up ranking the highest.

In the case of mobile-first indexing, the search engine algorithm bases its indexing score on the website’s mobile version. As such, if a website has a poor mobile version, it stands no legitimate chance of ranking for a keyword on a search engine like Google.

Because most web usage now occurs on mobile devices, most search engine algorithms utilize mobile-first indexing. If your website isn’t currently optimized for mobile, you need to optimize it sooner rather than later.

Optimizing Your Website for Mobile SEO

Optimizing your website for mobile SEO involves using several strategies, all of which must be carried out on a consistent basis. These strategies include the following:

Ensuring Your Website Is Easy to Navigate on Mobile Screens

First and foremost, you need to ensure that your website is easy to navigate through on mobile screens. If you haven’t adjusted your computer-based web design to accommodate mobile, it’s not going to be easy to navigate through. Odds are, the design elements will appear far too small on a phone.

Computer screens are wider than they are tall. As such, they’re best suited to horizontal designs.

Phone screens, conversely, are taller than they are wide. They’re better suited for vertical designs.

Using a vertical design will ensure that all of your design elements appear easy to see on a phone. This will facilitate optimal navigation capabilities, thus enhancing the user experience and SEO.

Ensuring Your Website Loads Quickly on Mobile Devices

Not only is navigation important but load speed as well. If your website doesn’t load quickly on mobile devices, those visiting it are going to grow tired of it. As a result, they’re bound to leave it and find a website that loads faster.

All formats of your website should load quickly. However, there are separate challenges to combat when dealing with mobile load speed.

That said, how do you go about increasing the load speed on your mobile website? There are several things you should do.

Manipulating Website Data

First, you should use compressed images. These images are smaller in file size and won’t take as long to open. A website with many images will load much slower than one with few images, so keep the number of images to a minimum.

In addition, you should enable data caching on your website.

This makes it so that, when a person enters your website, their browser stores data from the website and doesn’t force it to load over and over again. The result is increased load speeds.

Minimize redirects within your website as well. Instead of redirecting, make entirely new pages.

Minifying code is imperative as well. This is the process of reducing code so that there’s as little of it as possible, all while still maintaining the functionality and integrity of the website.

Choosing a Speedy Host

Finally, you need to make sure you’re using good hosting. Using a dedicated server will allow for the quickest load speeds. Only use a shared hosting plan if you can’t afford a dedicated hosting plan.

Using Mobile-focused Keywords

When creating a website, you should optimize it so that it ranks on search engines. This entails using specific keywords in the headers and text of your website.

When it comes to mobile search, you should be using mobile-focused keywords, in particular. Now, what’s a mobile-focused keyword? These keywords tend to be short (consisting of 3 or fewer words) and easy to type, as typing on a phone is harder than typing on a keyboard.

Including Many Buttons

One of the troubles with mobile websites is that their navigation menus tend to be hidden. You generally have to click on a button to access the menu. You also typically have to scroll to the top of the screen to do so.

This is why, when creating a mobile website, you should use many buttons throughout the body of each page. This way, the user can click on different pages from said buttons and not have to navigate to the navigation menu first.

For instance, your website might have a call to action saying something like “Contact us now!”. Right under that phrase, you should have a button leading to your ‘Contact’ page.

This increases the chances of users going to your contact page. That increases the chances of them contacting you.

Engaging in Responsive Web Design

To ensure your website is easy to use on all mobile devices, you need to engage in responsive web design. This entails adding code to your website so its design elements respond intuitively to different screen sizes. This way, your website will show up as well on a tablet or computer as it would on a cell phone.

Need help with responsive web design? Call a web designer or digital marketing agency.

Need the Help of Professional Website Optimization Services?

Looking to optimize your website for mobile search? Need the help of website optimization services? Look no further than Optic Marketing Group.

We devise SEO strategies for businesses and know exactly how to optimize a website for mobile search. We’ll help you roll with SEO trends, giving your mobile website the best chance to rank for keywords in your area and industry.