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seo for mobile

Know Mobile SEO

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?

mobile seoWhile 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.

seo for mobile

6 Ways To Ignite Mobile SEO

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Supercharge Your Mobile SEO Strategy

mobile_300x201The number one focus of mobile SEO is to start with speed. Investigate all actions of mobile engagement and find ways to make things happen faster. Focus on speed to get the lead, speed to get the order, or speed to submit an email or form. Understand where people are in the process and how to get them to the next step in that process as quickly as possible. When you find an obstacle that slows that process down, remove the roadblocks!

6 Mobile SEO Tactics To Help ROI

1. Know where the mobile user is coming from. All referrers are not created equal, many don’t end up triggering your business goals. If you know where the mobile user referral started, you can better understand their motivations and where to direct them. For example, many mobile referrals from social may not be interested in direct sales or lead actions, they be more interested in a service function.

2. Recognize the engagement funnel. Next step in mobile SEO includes some basic mobile analytics. A great tool to use here is a mobile engagement funnel to highlight where mobile users start and where they are trying to go. Mobile visitor actions are key. Follow their actions.  What steps do they take and when do they take them?

3. Success rides on simple navigation. Get rid of useless scrolling, large imagery, multiple steps and excessive navigational options. If there are multiple steps in the process, clearly state that upfront. Limit your links, make it easy.

4. Know the device, know the platform. Simple, align the experience to the devices and platforms. Period. Done.

5. Speed up task completions. If you use a check out or lead intake form for mobile, consider simplifying the form. Ask for additional information to complete the transaction on a confirmation email. People are typing on a smartphone, give them the opportunity to use a larger keyboard for detailed information.

6. Clickable Call-to-Action. Click to call is where the speed is, allow the user to view the CTA without having to scroll down. Increasing impressions on your call to action will only benefit your business. Highlight your CTA visually and significantly increase your mobile engagements.

These are a few simple ways to improve your mobile SEO strategy. Mobile search is a much different landscape than desktop or laptop. Mobile visitors have different objectives and motivations, and they all focus around action.  90% of mobile search results in an action taken (call, form submit, directions), with more than 70% of those actions completed in less than 1 hour. Respect your mobile audience and your mobile visitors to get more accomplished quickly. Focus your mobile SEO tactics on speed to win more business.

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seo for mobile

Mobile SEO Strategy

Do you need a dedicated mobile SEO strategy?

The most common answer will be yes, but is that the best answer? A deeper dive into online user behaviors may suggest otherwise. The line between desktop and mobile has become blurred, as more and more online visitors rarely see a clear distinction between mobile and desktop and their internet devices. To most internet users, mobile is simply an extension of online connectivity.

Most of your audience will not stop to think about searching from different devices, to them it’s about simple quick access to the Internet.  How that “always on” access happens includes:

  • Device agnostic as long as the information is the same
  • Personalized across secured platforms
  • Quick, responsive and relevant

Desktops, notebooks, tablets and phone are trending towards a seamless hand-off from one device to another or one platform to another.  Laptops now incorporate touch screens, apps and ins ton on features similar to mobile and tablets, while mobile products improve internal performance and keyboard accessibility.

mobile_300x201There is no “line” on the Internet
If your audience doesn’t stop to think about mobile as a separate thing and if most of your brand proposition and information is “out there” online and access is increasingly blurred across devices, then the question becomes do you really need a mobile only strategy? What if you decide that a single focused mobile SEO strategy is best?

Consider that, a single strategy, mobile focused.  Let’s make every digital strategy a mobile strategy. Consider the outcomes of this simple approach, what would this look like for your business?  This omnipresent approach needs to mirror your audience behavior across multiple platforms and devices to maximize value delivery to them.

Omni-channel marketing includes mobile

The distinction of “mobile only” is lost as far as the average person is concerned. Which means your online strategy will have to work double and triple duty to play nicely with this ubiquity. Your mobile focused strategy needs to support how people fundamentally engage with their devices:

  • for communicating with other people or peoples
  • for consuming their favorite media (text, images, video)
  • for seeking answers

As a business owner or professional service provider, you can see the branding and marketing opportunities by providing user value in any of the use cases listed above.  To further provide an awesome experience for your audience consider these things as well:

  • The platform – what can your website / blog do in the new web environment?
  • The content – the strategy, the schedule, the development, and the tactical deployment
  • The audience – where are they and how can you best reach them? What do you want them to do next?

Most importantly for your mobile focused strategy, how will you define success? What are the quantifiable KPIs that you will use to measure and monitor performance? How will these key performance indicators help you refine your mobile focused strategy going forward?

Simple, right? Maybe, but then again maybe not. Adopting a single mobile focused strategy sounds easy enough at first pass, but execution of this strategy is something different altogether. You will succeed as long as every step of your mobile marketing strategy includes a focus on mobile and a focus on how your audience engages with your brand message on their mobile devices.

Related: 6 Ways To Ignite Mobile SEO, Know Mobile SEO, Know Mobile User Behavior, 10 Mobile SEO Tactics