When Is The Best Time To Start Mobile SEO?

It’s a little too late already to just begin mobile SEO, Google’s recent mobile algorithm update has already changed the landscape for many businesses, so no more delays, let’s get started with your mobile optimization today. If you have not started monitoring your mobile channel, then you are missing the chance to future proof your business. Start providing your mobile visitors a superior mobile experience and your business will benefit. Even if you are late to the mobile game, don’t let that stop you from taking action right now to rectify the situation. Step number 1, jump into analysis of user behavior before taking any other action like mobile optimization improvements or task oriented responsive design.

A Little Mobile Analysis Anyone?

When you want to make the best business decision regarding mobile, let your reporting platform provide you with the insights surrounding the characteristics of mobile activities on your domain. Use the data as a catalyst for change starting with:

• The volume of mobile traffic, is it increasing?
• What are the top 3-4 mobile devices that engage with your site?
• What are the top 2-3 mobile OS that visitors use?
• What is the most popular screen size for your mobile users?
• What are the top 5 pages that attract organic mobile traffic?
• What is the most common action that the mobile user takes next?

Is your website mobile friendly?

While it’s critical that you understand how your audience interacts with your mobile website, and that all starts with how your site is rendered on mobile devices. Is your design a mobile template or is it a responsive design? To see what the site looks like I recommended that you find out how your site appears in Google’s mobile search results (Google Mobile Friendly Tool), and also look at how it actually appears on mobile devices. There are great mobile emulator resources here too, a favorite is Mobile Test Me . This tool allows you to check mobile rendering across multiple different platforms. Other popular mobile emulators include Opera Mobile Emulator or Screenfly, use these mobile tools to check how your pages are displayed in Google’s mobile search results.

Mobile friendly is the easy thing to check, and while there are many tools online to review your mobile site, start with Google’s own Mobile Friendly Test found here [https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/]. If you pass with the lovely green message, then you have more time to enhance your mobile presence, if you fail, well then there’s more work to do.

While you are using the Mobile Friendly Test tool, pay attention to the number of blocked URLS from robots.txt. If the number is too high, or you need additional insights into what are the actual blocked URLS, look for the details in Webmaster tools under robots.txt. There’s even a handy robots.txt tester to validate any changes you may make to the robots.txt file.

Understand Your Mobile Visitors Now

After you have checked how your organic mobile audience views your mobile website, it’s time to get a better understanding of how they engage with it. This is where your analytics package becomes the tool to provide data on mobile performance. The metrics that follow can all be found on Google Analytics. Google analytics provides an excellent platform for mobile performance data. For those people that use Google Analytics to do this analysis here are a few quick tips to get you started building an advanced segment to quickly identify your mobile visitors:

A few of the key metrics to review include:

1. Total Mobile Traffic. Take a look at the difference between the Mobile Organic Traffic, All Organic Traffic and All Visits volume and include time on site, page views and goals. This strongly emphasizes the behavioral differences for each of these sources.
2. Keywords driving mobile. Go to Traffic Sources \> Sources \> Search \> Organic with the Mobile Organic segment selected. This helps you to see keywords that your mobile visitors used to get to your site from a mobile device.
3. Most Popular Mobile Device. This information is vital for you to make mobile enhancements that best represent your audience. Start by identifying the most popular devices used by your organic mobile audience. Discover these important dimensions such as operating system and screen resolution by going to Audience \> Mobile \> Devices.
4. Mobile Engagement. For more advanced data analysis, look at User Flow for mobile organic traffic. This creates a visual representation of the pathways used by mobile visitors. Do these pathways mirror your mobile design. Better still, do these pathways align with your business goals? When the design supports your business objectives and visitors intent, your mobile site adds the greatest value to you and your audience.

Mobile SEO: Tactical Basics 
As the mobile search environment evolves and grows, your brand needs to understand how to use your value proposition to grab attention and engage mobile users. Remember that for most major search engines, their objective is to deliver your mobile website in the best version possible and most importantly, as quickly as possible. Speed wins on mobile.

Sourcing SERP results from their mobile web indexed pages, here are a few mobile SEO tips that will help deliver a superior mobile experience for your audience:

1. Simple URL Structure. A single URL strategy is the best approach, whenever possible use short concise URLs.
2. Don’t Block The Bots. Allow the same access for all crawlers to both desktop and mobile websites, make it easy to understand navigational structure. Uniform crawler access improves search signal consolidation.
3. Remove Crawlability Obstacles. Clean code keeps the website free from challenging crawl obstacles such as Flash, excessive tracking code and disproportionate JavaScript.
4. Page Load Speed> Quick page load speeds drive performance since page load speed dramatically improves the mobile user experience. If you what to learn more, check out Google PageSpeed Insights tool [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/]
5. Remarkable User Experience. Make it super easy for your visitors to find the information they are looking for and interact with one finger touches. Don’t forget the all important “Click-to-Call” action.

Mobile SEO Benefits

To truly maximize your mobile SEO benefits, you must clearly start with understanding exactly how your mobile website appears to your mobile website visitors. Beginning with a consistent design that represents your brand in both your mobile and desktop interface, make it easy for your visitors to browse your site on any platform they choose. After you review how your organic mobile audience is already visiting your site, from their preferred mobile devices and platforms, you can continue to refine your mobile SEO strategy and online business requirements.

Professor SEO

A seasoned digital marketing professional with over 20 years of expertise in digital marketing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, brand development, conversion optimization, lead generation, web development and data analytics. He is a strategic digital marketing thought leader in a multitude of business verticals including automotive, education, financial services, legal marketing and professional services.