What is mobile SEO?

Date: 25/11/2024
Written by: Ryan Walsh

Table of contents:

 

• What does “Mobile SEO” actually mean?
• What does the U.S. mean when it comes to mobile SEO?
• Why can a business rank in different keyword positions depending on whether it’s a desktop or a mobile website?
• How can you improve a website’s mobile SEO?

 

Many of us work on desktops and laptops while busy at work. However, when buying goods or services outside of work, we often use smartphones because they are more convenient. Whether we are sitting on the sofa, watching Eastenders, or just finished a run in the park and want to buy an item, often it’s our smartphones that we turn to find a business on Google.

So, when you consider that data, saying that around 60% of all searches begin on a smartphone, you can start to see why it’s so important to consider not just your business’s SEO in general but also how well-optimised your mobile SEO is.

For example, consider this: Someone could be searching for “garden room companies,” yet different results can be generated depending on whether they search on a smartphone or a desktop.

 

 

Is your website currently invisible on smartphones/tablets?

If you haven’t designed a mobile version of your website, it will be invisible on smartphones and tablets. As mentioned earlier, roughly 60% of website visitors now use smartphones, which could result in a lot of lost business.

So, businesses today must have a mobile version of the company, and then, often, larger businesses use “split testing” to constantly refine and improve the design.

 

What exactly does mobile optimisation mean?

Mobile optimisation is an inclusive term. It can mean anything from making sure that the smartphone version of the website works to regularly using split testing to improve the UX.

 

What does user experience mean?

This term will crop up regularly on blog posts on SEO agencies’ websites: “U.X.”

U.X stands for user experience. What it means is, have you made the website super simple to use? Have you considered the shopper at every stage of the buying journey? Have you offered helpful advice? Have you helped the customer as much as you can?

 

 

When you go into a department store to look at buying, say, a television. You can have a pleasant buying experience, in terms of receiving helpful advice from a sales representative, plus, you might like the shop, in terms of how the products are shown on the shop floor.

This is the same with online shopping because it offers helpful and valuable advice and can rank higher on Google’s organic results. Even since the Google helpful content update and the Google E-EAT update, businesses that offer useful and valuable advice regarding products or services that they sell can rank higher in Google’s results.

Online businesses today must focus on offering a good user experience (U.X)

 

Simple to use

In today’s world, many people are time-poor, meaning they are impatient. So, many people today get frustrated when waiting in queues or traffic jams or don’t want to wait too long for the delivery of goods.

Now, this must be considered when designing a website: Today’s website must be quick. But it is not just fast; it must be super simple. The website must have good navigation, and regardless of whether you sell ten products or 10,000 product lines, the website navigation needs to take the shopper to the right product as quickly as possible.

So, businesses need to carefully consider the design of the mobile and desktop versions of the website. Large companies, such as your PLC companies, will often have teams of UX designers and split testing staff constantly looking to improve a business’s web design and user experience.

Therefore, small businesses also need to consider offering a good UX, which means ensuring the website is simple and fast.

 

What does “bounce rate” mean?

So, businesses must consider the bounce rate on smartphones and desktops. One of the many reasons why a company’s bounce rate could be high is that the website takes too long to load. For instance, a study by Google found that 53% of visitors to a website would leave if it took more than 3 seconds to load.

This is why your SEO company needs to use SEO tools such as GT Metrix and Google Speed Insight Tools, both of which have a free version, to monitor the speed of your company website.

Just poor design

This happens often, especially with small businesses that opt for a low-cost website design.

The website often looks basic and can sometimes be very slow. As we mentioned earlier, to offer a good UX—that’s user experience—the website must be fast. So, pay more for fast website hosting.

 

Conversion rates

You could have one million visitors to a website, yet if the website design is poor, the bounce rate will be very high, and the conversion rate will be low.

So, the conversion rate is how many of those shoppers you get to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or request a callback.
This is why many businesses have calls to action across their company websites, such as “Why not sign up for our newsletter” or “Why not follow us on Instagram”—these are all designed to improve a business’s conversion rate.

Businesses know that SEO involves much work to get a shopper onto a company website on the first page. For example, getting any company onto page one of Google involves much work. Getting any business onto page one of Google consists of hard work, such as building backlinks, etc.

So, even if a shopper doesn’t buy a product, you will still want to increase your conversion rate by keeping the shopper interested in your business. For example, you could ask them to sign up for a monthly MailChimp newsletter or use bright icons to get the shopper to follow your business on social media.

This can help readvertise your products or services to the customer at a later date.

How do you improve a business’s mobile SEO?

Design

Website design is crucial; whether it’s the mobile version of the website or the desktop version, it must be well designed. Whether you’re starting a big or small business, ensure enough money is spent on having your website well-designed. We say that because there is fierce competition in practically every industry today. Whether you’re a plumber or run an e-commerce store selling luxurious whiskey online, it doesn’t matter what business you run; the competition will likely be high.

So, you can’t scrimp and save when it comes to having a website designed. You shouldn’t pay over the odds, yet the website must be well-designed. It must be simple to use, fast, and well-designed.

If it’s not, you’ll soon find in your Google Analytics account that the bounce rate is high, the dwell time is low, and shoppers might only be visiting one product page and not looking at multiple products. This could be because of poor website design.
We have all done it: looked to buy an item and then instantly left a website because it was difficult to use. For example, finding the item we want might take too long.

So, what you have to do is partner with a really good web designer. Now, this doesn’t mean choosing the most expensive web design agency you find; sometimes, a freelancer working in a spare bedroom can design an amazing website for a business. What it does mean is that you need a well-designed website, so make sure that you are allocating enough of your marketing spend on getting a really good website designed for your business.

 

Work on reducing the load time.

 

Use Google Page Speed Insights and Core Web Vitals to determine which elements of your company website are slow. You want to think of your company website as a Formula One car, just a Formula One race team constantly looking to improve the design to make it faster; you have to think the same with your company website. How can you lower the bounce rate? At the same time, it is essential to make sure that the company website is faster. How can you make that homepage, for example, a fraction quicker?

 

Reduce the page load time.

We recommend working with web developers and designers and using Gt Metrix and Google Web Vitals to work out ways to reduce page load time. In short, it’s better to make the website as fast as you possibly can. Yet, with that said, this can’t come at the cost of compromising the quality of the content marketing; in terms of the website, it still needs to offer helpful advice to the customer; it can’t just be about designing a fast website.

For example, you can have a website designed called an AMP website, which stands for accelerated mobile pages. Basically, the whole page is designed for speed, to be fast on smartphones. However, this does come at the cost of the website design’s appearance because it can look fundamental.

If the design is very basic, then this could be off-putting to a shopper. Often, shoppers want a good design, so you have to balance offering valuable and well-written content marketing with good design while making sure that the company website is still fast.

This is a balancing act, yet online businesses have to work at improving sales. As we mentioned earlier, businesses often use split testing, also known as A/B testing, to constantly improve the design.

 

We hope this guide has helped you.

 

Would you like to partner with us?

Improved organic search engine optimisation requires a lot of work over a very long period of time. Therefore, whichever SEO agency you hire requires a long-term commitment. However, we are quite different from some other agencies in that we don’t ask our clients for a 12-month commitment.

We can take care of all of your business’s organic and local SEO work. This ranges from keyword research to improving the business’s technical SEO. If you want to partner with us, please ring us.