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Time to Get Mobile: The Top Mobile SEO Tips for Beginners

Hoping to make a mobile-friendly website or optimize an existing one for mobile users?

If you ask anyone in digital marketing what’s the best way to rank high on search engines, they’ll more often than not say that mobile SEO is the way to go. They’ll think of this because it’s what most statistics show nowadays. For example, over 50% of people use their mobile devices to go online.

With that data alone, it should be clear that you should start with mobile SEO to stay relevant. How does mobile SEO work though? Today, we’re going to give you some mobile SEO tips to help you answer that question.

Read what we have below to know everything you need to know about search engine optimization for mobile devices. We’ll also give additional tips to make your website compatible with mobile devices.

Dive right in and start learning!

1. Use a Responsive Web Design

When it comes to anything concerned with mobile devices, responsive design should be your go-to choice. There is a reason why many web designers recommend using responsive web design. For one, it helps increase your mobile traffic.

There are many other advantages of using responsive web design, but this is the only aspect that you should concern yourself with. Increasing your traffic is essential if you want to tap into the new demographic of mobile users.

Responsive web design has resolution presets that fit the common screen sizes of mobile devices. So, right off the bat, it focuses more on catering to mobile audiences. This is also accompanied by the fact that search engines now give priority to websites that are coded for mobile with responsive design.

Converting your web page is easy to do. This is because most content management systems have a template that lets you convert your adaptive design into a responsive one with relative ease.

2. Optimize Your Website’s Pages

It’s important for SEO that you optimize your web pages. How to do optimization? It’s simple, all you need to do is clear out the clutter.

Most of the time, optimizing a website means making it run faster. This helps your SEO because Google realized that people tend to leave websites if it takes a while to load a page. So, their algorithm checks your average load time and bases your score on speed.

This also helps you with your mobile audiences. This is because being on a mobile device means less processing power than desktops. So, what may load fast for a PC may slow down once a mobile user enters the site.

To avoid this, you would want to perform some checks. There are some websites and tools available online that allow you to see if your website is compatible and optimized for the average processing power of common mobile devices. If you pass, then you have nothing to worry about.

If you fail the check, then you should consider fixing your website. Most of the time, this is because of images found on your website. Often, they take up a lot of processing power to load. So, you should either remove that image or replace it with a more compressed one. The compressed images have the same quality, but they are smaller in processing terms. The compressed photos are also more SEO-compatible, so you can raise your score further by using them.

3. Fill out Your Google My Business Listing

This is one of the most common mistakes people make when it comes to mobile SEO. Your Google My Business listing will help you appear in the search results when someone looks for your type of business along with other similar business in the area. This increases your local SEO.

Google My Business used to post the top 7 search results. Following the trend of catering to mobile audiences though, they shortened the list to 3. This is because 3 is the max number of businesses that a mobile screen can display at a time.

The top 3 results are always shuffled to give other businesses a chance. So, if you don’t appear in the first 3 results, don’t worry. It does help your chances if you fill their listing with the correct information though.

Google will ask you to fill out some things about your business. Your location, phone number, and business name are a few of these requests. Being as complete as you can be will increase your odds of appearing on the top 3 results time and time again.

The info you fill out will also help mobile users contact you even if you aren’t on the top 3. The new top 3 system works by showing other related businesses at the side if they select one of the top 3. When they check out your business from there, all the info you have input before will be on display.

4. Use Social Media to Your Advantage

It’s a known fact that people go online to check out their social media accounts. You can use this to your advantage by linking your website through various social media. This allows people to see your business while they’re scrolling down their feed.

For ensured success, you may want to consider linking to more than one social media account. Going for only 1 social media platform means that you’re missing out on other users of other platforms.

You can also use social media to your advantage by making and verifying a profile for your business. This helps Google’s algorithm find you on social platforms, increasing your SEO. It also allows mobile users to find you easier, increasing online visibility.

Being verified also helps because it makes people trust your profile. It also means that when you do post something, they know it’s coming from a legitimate source of information.

Doing this is also a great way for you to gain email leads. Linking with social media profiles of your clients and customers give you access to their email info. This allows you to send them emails anytime for updates.

5. Pay Attention to Your Title and Meta Description

You should remember that making your business optimized for mobile searches requires fine-tuning. Things like your title should become updated to fit the mobile audience. This is because mobile devices often have a smaller screen resolution.

So, your title and description may not become displayed as they should be. When this happens, you may lose potential visitor engagement. This then leads to them moving on and looking for other sites instead.

To avoid this, you may want to consider condensing your title and description. For example, out of the 160 characters you can write in your meta description, you may want to condense it to 2 lines. This is the max number of lines Google tends to display on their search results.

You may also want to consider cutting down your title. At most, mobile devices only display around 12 words. So, try to put as many keywords as you can.

6. Use Keywords Well

Speaking of keywords, you should know when and where to use them for mobile devices. Keywords generate some SEO whenever you type them anywhere in your site.

These often come in 2 variants. Long-tail keywords are those that consist of around 5-7 words. They’re longer and thus are more specific, making them great for niche topics.

Meanwhile, short tail keywords are the opposite of that. They consist of only 3-5 words and are often used in general topics. This makes them high-quality but competitive keywords.

These kinds of keywords are important if you’re talking about mobile SEO. This is because people often choose to type less when it comes to a mobile keyboard. So, short tail keywords are the key to mobile audiences.

You can use a keyword tool like Google Keyword Planner to research the best words to use. High-quality keywords often change every month or two. So, you need to keep yourself updated if you want to stay competitive.

That said, you shouldn’t stuff your website with keywords. This will lead to your SEO decreasing instead of increasing.

7. Opt for Ads Made for Mobile Users

Nothing annoys mobile users the most than having to deal with ads made for desktop users. This makes them scroll around the length of the ad to find the exit button. Most of the time, they don’t bother and leave the site.

So, to keep them in your website longer, try going for pop-up ads for mobile devices. These fit the sizes of their screens, making it easy to navigate. This also increases your SEO score again because of mobile catering. Pop-up ads cater more to mobile audiences now when using Chrome.

Check out These Mobile SEO Tips Today

Use one of these mobile SEO tips today. The mobile market is hot right now, so you should start learning everything you need to know. Optimize your website for mobile audiences now!

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