HOW TO DO SEO FOR YOUR MOBILE WEBSITE 

What is mobile Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Mobile SEO is the process of improving the experience of visitors who access your website from mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This includes optimizing your website and making it mobile-friendly to ensure better visibility and performance in search engine result pages (SERPs).

Why is it absolutely necessary for your mobile website?

Nowadays, people spend more and more time on their mobile devices even if many websites aren’t still designed to account for different screen sizes and load times. However, approximately half of the web traffic worldwide comes via mobile searches.

As per the latest 2021 statistics depicted below, 54.37% of all searchers worldwide use their mobiles, while 43.15% searchers use desktops. The remaining 2.48% of people use tablets.

That being said, mobile optimization is a must to ensure you’re not inadvertently turning mobile visitors away.

WAYS TO DESIGN YOUR MOBILE WEBSITE 

If you don’t have a mobile version yet, you have to start with determining the goals for your mobile website: What do your visitors want to do? What do you want them to be able to do? First, figure out what you want and need to happen to reach your goals. Then, determine how much time and resources you can put into it. The goal is to make everything mobile and user-friendly.

So, here are three ways you can do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your mobile website and make it more friendly:

Option #1: Separate URLs

Along with the desktop version, there is also a mobile version of your website, known as the mobile or “m” configuration. This works on the principle of first detecting the user’s device and then serving the optimized URL for that device. If you choose this option, keep the URL structure paralleled with the desktop version of the site.

As Google will not automatically distinguish the mobile page as a version of the desktop page, you will have to use these annotations to manage separate URLs:

• Add a rel=” alternate” tag on your desktop page to point to the corresponding mobile URL.
• Add a rel=”canonical“tag on your mobile page to point to the corresponding desktop URL.

Having two separate sites gives you the opportunity to create a more defined mobile experience, but it leaves more room for technical issues. This option is rigorous and difficult since you have to implement separate URLs for each page. This is definitely not the optimal one.

Option #2: Create Dynamic Serving  

This option gives you the opportunity to differentiate versions of your website. It offers a more custom experience while targeting different audiences. Dynamic serving does not require a full site redesign but does increase the workload of maintenance and updating.

The dynamic serving configuration of a mobile website allows you to detect user-agent and serve different HTML code based on whether the user is on mobile or desktop. In other words, the URL doesn’t change for different devices, but different versions of HTML/CSS are served for mobile and desktop.

Here are Google’s guidelines for implementing a dynamic serving website.

Option #3: Create Responsive Design

This option doesn’t require much in terms of developer time and resources since you don’t need to change your current code. In the responsive web design setup, the same HTML code is served on the same URL, irrespective of user’s device.

Some benefits of implementing responsive design:

• The crawling of your website becomes highly efficient; it improves the overall SEO of the site.
• There is no redirection for users on different devices; your website’s load time is improved.
• There are fewer chances of mistakes in terms of device detection, URL redirection, and displaying content; the user experience on your websites is enhanced.

Keeping the above points in mind, most websites are now configured using the responsive design setup.

CONCLUSION

To put in a nutshell, websites that are fully optimized for mobile searches are being preferred. Consequently, if you haven’t acted upon that yet, it is high time you do so!

Sources:

• Himanshu Rauthan (Aug 11, 2020). Beginner’s Guide: 9 Things You Should Know if You Are New to Mobile SEO. Retrieved 11/09/2021 from https://www.semrush.com/blog/beginners-guide-mobile-seo/
• Author Unknown. How to make your site mobile friendly. Retrieved 11/09/2021 from https://www.woorank.com/en/edu/seo-guides/mobile-friendliness
• Expert commentator (Feb 23, 2015). An introduction to Mobile SEO. Retrieved 11/09/2021 from https://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/mobile-seo/mobile-seo/
• Retrieved 11/10/2021 from https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/worldwide/