Introduction:

We would like to thank Shawn Byrne of SEOPhoenix for this wonderful article on Optimizing Your Website for Mobile SEO. Shawn’s bio is at the end of the article.

To say the world has gone mobile is an understatement. Consider this: according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center last 2019, a staggering 81% of adults own a smartphone. And this is in the United States alone. The same study also revealed that around half of the U.S. adult population own tablets.

That said, it does not come as a surprise that mobile marketing has become a thing. With so many people now using their mobile devices to access the Internet, it only makes sense to prioritize mobile development, improve your mobile marketing game, and optimize your website for mobile SEO.

Optimizing your website for mobile SEO requires doing everything you can to ensure it looks great and functions properly on tablets, smartphones, and other mobile devices. Once your website is optimized for mobile SEO, visitors will have a good experience regardless of the device they use to visit your website.

Optimize Your Content

Regardless of the content you put on your website, it is important that it’s easy to skim through. For people on the go, they typically consume content by skimming through. Other ways you can optimize your content for mobile users include:

• Keeping your paragraphs at 2 to 3 sentences
• Keeping your titles and headings simple and succinct
• Using subheadings
• Using bullet points
• Optimizing your videos to ensure it is compatible with smart devices
• Using high-quality images
• Ensuring your buttons are easy to use
• Making your email address, and phone numbers clickable

Boost Your Page Loading Speed

It’s safe to assume most internet users are impatient nowadays. They expect web pages to load in three seconds (or less). When the information they are looking for does not load fast enough, you cannot expect users to stay on your page. They won’t think twice about abandoning your page in favor of faster-loading websites.

Ideally, you need to prioritize increasing your page loading speed if you want your visitors to stay on your site longer and eventually patronize the products or services you are offering. There’s no shortage of ways you can increase your page loading speed. For starters, you can switch to faster web hosting.

Other ways you can boost your page loading speed include minimizing (or eliminating) the use of custom fonts, optimizing the images you are using, minifying your code, and minimizing redirects. If you want to get some information or insight about your website’s page load time, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights.

Go Easy on the Pop-Ups

Pop-ups can be beneficial if you want to encourage more engagement from your visitors. Pop-ups are also a great way to entice visitors to download free content or sign up for your emails. However, when used too much, you can run the risk of annoying users regardless if they are using mobile phones or not.

If you use too many intrusive pop-ups that are ill-timed, visitors can abandon your website and can result in rising bouncing rates. Should you use a pop-up for your website, use them sparingly and give visitors ample time to explore your website before bombarding them with pop-ups.

Don’t Ignore Local SEO

According to Google, using the phrase “near me” in mobile searches that contain variants of phrases like “can I buy” or “to buy” has increased by a staggering 500% in the last few years. This means people searching for local businesses are growing and have not shown any signs of slowing down.

There are various ways you can improve your local SEO. Some of the most effective include:

• Creating a Google My Business account
• Targeting local keywords
• Optimizing for voice search
• Creating content with local color

Final Thoughts

There is no better time to optimize your website for mobile than now, with mobile use growing dramatically. If unsure what to do, the tips laid out above should get your efforts off to a superb start.

About the Author

Shawn Byrne is the founder and CEO of SEOPhoenix.net. Shawn started his career in I.T. troubleshooting workstations, servers and networks, then went on to doing SEO as a side project and quickly found success in ranking websites. It was easy for him to grasp not only the algorithms but also the technical side which most SEO strategists miss and neglect because of its complexities. SEO Phoenix then grew based on its own rankings and referrals.