With over 60% of all online searches now happening on mobile phones, it’s quite simple; if you’re not optimising your website and content for mobile, then you’re going to lag behind.
We have extensive experience on building websites that are fully responsive for mobile, offering web build packages that will essentially provide you with two versions of the same site, in the ideal form for the platform on which they will be engaged with. This will set you apart from those who don’t have it.
With this in mind, we thought we'd lift the lid on a few of our key principles for effective Mobile SEO.
Mobile SEO principles
The best principles for effective Mobile SEO include:
- Prioritise Your Content: The way the content is arranged and displayed on mobile is different to a computer screen, from where the eye is drawn to how easy things are to engage with on a much smaller screen. It’s worth thinking through exactly what a user will encounter as they scroll through each page.
- Make it Easy to Convert: Whether you’re trying to sell a product, get a client to enlist you for a service, contact you for more details or simply to follow you on social media, each page needs to be thought through in terms of converting on its aims. If it takes more than a couple of finger taps, most won’t bother.
- Keep Your Layout Simple: By all means, make your site as visually engaging and deep with quality content as possible, but don’t over complicate the mobile user experience. It’s one thing to engage a complicated site when sat at a laptop, but many phone users will first encounter your site while walking down the road or standing on a crowded train, so it needs to deliver the goods within seconds of their arrival.
- Designed for Fingers & Thumbs: Navigating a site with your fingers and thumbs is a different experience to using a mouse and screen. You’ll need to design your site with this in mind, as well as thinking about the fact that mobile users will need a site that displays well, both in portrait and in landscape.
- Features Unique to Mobile: There are certain features which work much more seamlessly on mobile, from links to apps, through to features such as offering a QR reader through the phone camera, there are all sorts of additional facets you can employ for the mobile version of your site, and maybe some you cut.
- Speed Optimisation: You’ll need to make sure that you’ve optimised your site’s performance so that the mobile-version can render swift results for the users who are navigating it and the search engines who will be analysing it. Slower load speeds can lead to a much higher bounce rate, as users navigate away from a slow page even quicker when using mobile as they’re usually on the move.
- Intelligent URLs: You’ll also want to ensure all of your mobile URLs are viewable on mobile, as Google won’t show them in their results unless they’re compatible with the relevant mobile mark-up standards.
If you'd like to talk to us in more detail about a new website design, or optimising your current website design for mobile, get in touch with our team today by calling 0151 321 2320 or emailing us via one of the contact forms here on our site.
