A guide to mobile SEO
It’s a fact, to optimise your website for mobile SEO has been, and still is, one of your most important SEO tasks.
Smartphones are ubiquitous and in our pockets all the time. Gone are the days of waiting till you get back to the office, or home before doing that search.
It’s changed our lives: we go for coffee and converse, and the conversation is more often than not verified by Google. And then we need to arrange the rest of our lives (or that’s the way it seems) during the same conversation.
So, yes, you need to optimise your website for mobile SEO because that’s where the majority of searches are made these days.
The use of mobile for search has risen at an astonishing rate in the last five years.
Talking about mobile SEO, James Wardleworth from Fresh Egg says
“With 62% of all internet browsing now happening on mobile, tracking mobile SEO performance of your site is critical and should be given as much attention – if not more – than tracking your site engagement on any other device.”
And people are searching differently as well. Whereas in the past people searched in a more haphazard manner, in a more relaxed fashion, we’ve now got used to the speed of mobile, and our expectations have also sped up.
Searching on mobile can now be broken down into categories of searcher intent:
I want to know moments
When someone is just surfing and not necessarily looking for something specific.
I want to go moments
When someone is looking for a local business or is thinking about buying something.
I want to do moments
Someone needs help to do something – buy something, find something. The classic SEO question.
I want to buy moments
They’re ready to purchase and are looking for what to purchase and how to purchase it.
And that’s not all because Google search results have changed, and results have become more and more complex.
Google search results, known as SERPs (search engine results pages), now include a number of different styles of results, known as SERPS features, including:
As you can see the search landscape has changed dramatically for both desktop and mobile with a rich array of different search results available that all have to be optimised for.
But where the really big changes are is on mobile results, and they seem to have slightly slipped under the radar.
Search used to be a simple matter of trying to find a website to give you some information like “Greek restaurants in Ipswich” and results would be a simple list of websites.
Not anymore…
Google now give you answers as opposed to a list of websites: you’ll get opening times, contact info, names of restaurants, and much more. What you won’t get is a list of websites because Google now gives you the answers.
In our sped-up world searchers no longer click a website link and search again for the information, they expect to get the results they want with that first search action. And Google has responded by displaying mobile search results like those above – instant answers to instant questions.
Your website has to be optimised for mobile using a number of methods including:
AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is a Google technology that creates an identical set of web pages that are hosted on Googles servers and load virtually instantaneously.
Schema mark up is code that enables Google to show more varied SERPS results like rich snippets.
With over 60% of searches taking place on mobile, it’s imperative that businesses make every effort to maximise the search potential of their website.
To discuss how we can help you optimise your website/s for mobile SEO click here
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