A short guide to mobile SEO

It's no surprise that about half of the world's online traffic originates from mobile search. After all, mobile phones have become indispensable to many of us.

With that in mind, it's vitally important you optimise your website to accommodate mobile users searching the web. That's where mobile SEO comes in.

Mobile optimisation though isn't new. Since 2018 Google has been on the case with its mobile first indexation philosophy. That means fully optimised mobile websites are preferred for mobile searches and ranked higher accordingly on mobile. In other words, there's a difference between mobile search results and desktop search results.

This short guide is for you to understand the fundamentals of mobile SEO so you can apply them to your website to drive traffic and increase conversions.

What is mobile SEO?

Mobile Search Engine Optimisation is all about making your website 'mobile friendly'. It's about ensuring better visibility in SERPs and improving the user experience for those accessing your website via a mobile or a tablet.

We've all been there. Visiting a website on our mobiles only to find skewed images and nothing really fitting properly. It's incredibly frustrating and is always a good excuse to bounce.

There are 3 types of mobile websites you can implement. Of course, each is dependent on your internal resources and how important mobile is to your business. The three are:

• Separate URLs: By detecting the user's device, the relevant mobile optimised URL is served. You’ll need to add some code to your website though. Add rel="alternate" tag on your desktop page to point to the mobile URL, and rel="canonical" tag on your mobile page to point to the desktop URL

• Dynamic serving: The URL stays the same but different versions of HTML/CSS are served for mobile and desktop

• Responsive design: This is the most common type. A responsive website serves the most relevant HTML and CSS based on the device it's being viewed on. If you try resizing your browser window while reading this article you'll see responsive design at work

If you want to increase mobile traffic, drive those conversions and offer a seamless experience on mobile devices, it's really important to have the best mobile optimised website you can possibly have. Consider the following:

• Try avoiding those annoying pop-ups

• Present the same content for desktop and mobile

• Optimise your page weight to speed things up

• Regularly perform a mobile technical SEO audit

• Optimise for voice search

• Consider Progressive Web Apps for more involved functionality

• Optimise SEO for local searches

Useful tools

You can easily check the mobile friendliness of your website with a variety of free tools such as:

• Google Mobile Friendly Test

• Google Mobile Usability Tool

• Semrush

Google Mobile Friendly Test

By pasting in your website’s URL into the Mobile Friendly Test, Google tells you whether your website is mobile-friendly. If it isn’t page loading issues are shown. Resolving them ensures you're on the right track to making your website a mobile king!

Google Mobile Usability Tool

This Google tool is located in Google Search Console (GSC). All you have to do is log into your GSC account, choose 'Mobile Usability' and check out the results to see whether your website is mobile friendly.

Semrush

Another tool you can use is Semrush. It gives you great insights on everything SEO, including mobile. Some of the useful features are available in a 'free' account. By choosing the ‘Mobile bot' setting in a site audit you'll be able to get all the useful insights you need to make your mobile website sing.

Working with Codehouse

At Codehouse we've been building ‘mobile-first’ digital experiences for over 10 years. Our award winning team is ready to discuss your next mobile optimised project. Get in touch with our experts to discuss how we can help, including help using tools such as SEMrush and Siteimprove.