Not so long ago, visitors looking at different websites from their phones were forced to switch between classic and mobile views. In the beginning, consumer expectations for mobile-friendly website were far less critical than today, since mobile technology hadn’t yet grown past its infancy. Nearly a decade has passed since then and merely having an online presence is not good enough anymore. Today, almost 60% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices and the number of smartphone users is increasing every day, so if someone visits your website using their phone and their experience is less than smooth, your business will lose customers. Smartphones are the future of the internet, and unless your site is mobile-friendly, your business is in danger of being a thing of the past.
Where To Begin
First and foremost, start by making your page responsive. Imagine yourself browsing the internet on your mobile phone in a search for the site you need. Once you have found it, you enter just to find misaligned words and images scattered all around. So, what do you do then? You exit, of course, and look for a different site. If that kind of experience wasn’t good enough for you, then it certainly wouldn’t be good enough for other people. This is why in the process of optimizing your site for mobile phones, you need to start by creating designs that fit the mobile platform, no matter which phone they’re being viewed from, even if that involves some reprogramming and code changes.
Now that your site is responsive, it is time to work on your code and images. Computer sites are optimized for much larger screens than those on a mobile device. Correct your code by reducing image size and cutting out unnecessary HTML codes. There are a variety of minifying tools that can help you get through this task without much effort.
The next thing you need to do is build the capacity of your mobile website through HTML5. Since nowadays technology improves nearly every 3-6 months, you can’t go on constantly rewriting scripts to suit the new wave. That kind of chore takes a lot of time and work, while HTML5 will be accessible on any device that treads on your site with all the interactive elements intact.
Important Focus Areas to Improve SEO
Once you dive a little deeper into the SEO ranking game, your list of daily activities may get a little longer than you expected. To avoid being overwhelmed with daily tasks, you need to prioritize your list and conduct a cost-benefit analysis of various items in your checklist.
Attractive design
Your website should be a visual treat to your potential clients. Much like a small shop packed with mirrors, your site needs to create an illusion of affluence so that your visitors are inclined to stay and window shop as long as possible. There are a couple of things that need to be clearly outlined when deciding on mobile optimization plans for your website:
- Nature of your business
- Type of users
- Variety of devices people might use to visit your website
Make your users feel comfortable. Don’t fill your website with complex designs. Keep it simple, yet attractive, delicate, informative and smooth.
Balance your page speed
A study by Hubspot shows that even a second of delay in loading can reduce your conversions by 7%. Since improving your business is the main reason for optimizing your site in the first place, a finely balanced page speed goes a long way in keeping your customers and attracting new ones. While trying to balance the loading speed of your website, consider the following aspects:
- Set benchmarks to improve the loading speed. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insight or Pingdom to calculate the average rate of the loading speed. Once you know the average speed, set your target at 3 seconds or lower.
- Pick the right web hosting. This is the most important factor and it can greatly improve your loading speed.
- Improve architecture. You need to structure your website in such a manner that an average user can go through it.
Use Accelerated Mobile Pages
An Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) is an open-source feature provided by Google. It is developed with the purpose of creating mobile sites that are consistent and load faster. There are three key features of AMP that make it a pioneer in mobile optimization:
- AMP HTML – HTML tags with a modification that eases the implementation of certain components.
- AMP JS – It enables the rapid performance of AMP HTML blocking all elements from external resources that cannot blend in with the website. Thus, it provides smoother page rendering.
- AMP Cache – It loads documents, JS files, and images from the same http2 source. It has a built-in validation system that ensures that every page works properly without being dependent on an external source. There is a bundled form of validator on every page that gives you the effects of complex changes on your website.
Recently, Volkswagen, El Pais, creative company DDB and Google conducted research that showed that AMP-HTML ads increase conversions. These ads are an alternative to slow and disruptive ads. Using AMP-HTML makes ads light, fast and safe, so we may say that Google’s campaign for Accelerated Mobile Pages was very successful.
Mobile-first indexing
The most important thing in optimizing your site for mobile phones in terms of valuable content is easy navigation without compromising any useful information. It is not enough to simply create a mobile-friendly site. It needs to be fully optimized. Mobile sites are the primary source of information that Google uses for ranking. This is why companies with a mobile-first approach gain preference and rank higher, thus making better conversions from organic traffic.
Use tools for mobile optimization
There are many tools to help you analyze and evaluate the various indexes essential for mapping the progress of your SEO optimization and mobile-friendliness. But simply using random smart tools won’t get you very far. The important thing is to use them smartly. Here are some of the best tools to help you gauge the mobile optimization of your website:
- Google’s Test my Site – This tool gives you a detailed report on the status of your mobile website. It tests your site’s speed and allows you to see how you match against your competitors and which pages are slowing you down. It also estimates the possible gain that you could reap through further optimization.
- Mobile-Friendly Test – It analyses the friendliness of your site through analyzing it’s pages and giving you two outcomes – pass or fail. It also tells you which pages don’t load properly and are hard for users to understand, so you can work on them.
- Varvy’s Mobile SEO – This is the tool that checks for mobile-friendliness, mobile speed, Google access, and page redirects. It gives advanced information and suggestions on how to reach peak levels of optimization. Your website is fully optimized if it checks all four green boxes.
In this day and age, with technology in full bloom, the mobile phone becomes the first thing that people turn to when looking for solutions and information. So, mobile optimization is mandatory if you want to take your online business to the next level. Getting to the clients first has always been a business priority when devising a business strategy in our SEO agency in Chicago. The faster you adapt, the more capable your customers find you, the more your business will prosper. Enhance the mobile experience of your website, and your business will improve accordingly.
