A number of websites across the world are attributed to the use of mobile devices. Today, ensuring that your website is optimized for mobile devices has become more crucial than ever.
Let us help you understand the importance of GSC in ensuring the mobile-friendliness of your website.
What is Mobile SEO?
Mobile SEO is the process of optimizing the mobile version of the website to drive organic traffic from search engines. Mobile optimization is focused on delivering the best experience on mobile devices. In this context, technical aspects like utilizing a responsive design have an important role to play.
Importance of Mobile SEO Optimization
As per a study report, mobile devices are responsible for generating around 59 percent of mobile traffic across the world. It is not only users that effectively observe your site from a mobile device. A Googlebot also goes through the same.
In 2016, Google unveiled its concept of mobile-first indexing. Due to this, Google effectively crawls the internet through the Googlebot smartphone user agent. This implies that Google will leverage the mobile version of content by ranking and indexing.
Top Tips to Make Your Website Mobile-friendly
1. Make Use of Responsive Design
As far as selecting your approach to delivering content to different devices is concerned, here are some options you can choose:
Responsive Design: With the help of responsive design, you can deliver the same HTML file, irrespective of the device being used. Eventually, CSS will alter the page’s rendering to fit the dimensions of the viewport of the given device. This also implies that you make use of a singular URL for serving different versions of the content.
The use of responsive design ensures that you can intelligently load the same content targeted to suit your device.
Separate URL Structure or Domain (Not Recommended): It is an approach that was commonly used to serve different mobile versions of a particular page through a separate domain or URL structure. “m.” structure is a common example of the same.
In this case, when a user loads your page, the server is expected to analyze which device the user is using and direct the user to the right URL. However, this approach is not recommended. Using multiple URLs for a single page will lead to a complicated URL management scenario.
2. Optimize for Page Speed on Different Devices
In the domain of Core Web Vitals, you might think that impressive page speed performance is not sought-after by SEO experts. As a matter of fact, Google unveiled the concept of Core Web Vitals in 2021 as a crucial ranking factor. It focused predominantly on mobile performance.
Currently, Google is known to apply both desktop and mobile Core Web Vitals in the form of ranking signals to the desired search results. Therefore, for mobile-based search results, Google aims to focus on the performance of the Core Web Vitals metric out of mobile devices.
A useful way to observe how your site performs against Core Web Vitals is by heading to the detailed report in the GSC or Google Search Console section. You can traverse the report with the help of left-hand navigation in the Experience section. The best part about this report in Google Search Console is that the issue URLs are grouped together into teams of similar pages. This implies that you can maintain a list of important page templates that you are expected to work on.
3. Testing and Monitoring Your Website for Common Errors
It is a great practice to always test the website for common errors related to mobile usability. You can come across a number of tools to ensure the same. However, GSC or Google Search Console can serve to be a great place to start with. You can leverage the ‘Mobile Usability’ feature of the tool to check errors. You can come across the report in the Experience section.
Here, it is possible to maintain track of the URLs with issues related to mobile usability. GSC offers access to the 3-month velocity graph. This is useful for identifying increase in the overall errors, enabling you to correlate them with the development releases.
4. Ensure That Your Content is Mobile-friendly
Making sure that your website is optimized for mobile is not concerned with only technical foundation. You will want to make sure that your content is produced by keeping in mind mobile users as well. Most SEOs prefer that you use shorter paras and sentences. This will help in aligning your content effectively with the best mobile optimization practices.
This approach ensures that your content is readable on mobile devices. As a general rule, you should aim for a maximum of three sentences in every paragraph. If a paragraph naturally contains only one sentence, that is fine as well.
As you are proofing content drafts, it is recommended to break longer sentences into shorter sentences wherever possible. This rule applies to the introduction of the content as well. To effectively improve readability even more, you might consider breaking up your content by including different forms of media and elements. These can include the following:
- Images
- Bullet points
- Videos
- Quotes
- Numbered lists
5. Optimize for Mobile SERPs
Mobile SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages are known to vary between desktop and mobile versions. When you are browsing the SERPs for a given keyword, it is crucial to check both mobile and desktop results manually. SERP observation is important.
Conclusion
While mobile is a new and dominant experience, it is still crucial to pay attention to desktop experience as well. If you need more assistance with gaining more traffic, you can reach out to digital marketing experts at O+. Here, you will gain the expertise of industry specialists who specialize in delivering result-driven outcomes for your website.
