Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 17/12/24

For most shoppers, it is quicker and more convenient to buy items using their smartphones these days.

Therefore, businesses must ensure that when shoppers are Googling to buy items online, the websites that are indexed are “responsive” and “mobile-ready”.

 

In a nutshell the website should offer:

– Be quick
– Offer a good U.X user experience
– Be responsive across different mobile operating systems, i.e. Android and Apple
This means that regardless of whether the shoppers got a Samsung mobile or iPhone, regardless of the operating system, the company website (mobile version) should know quickly and work as you expect all smartphones.
In short, this is being mobile-ready.
It often means web designers making the website responsive; we will explain what this means a bit more later.

 

Is your website optimised for mobile?

In this article, we will explain why it’s essential that your website is optimised for mobile.

In this article, our experts will cover the following:

• What exactly is mobile SEO?
• Why is an essential to have a responsive website for your business
• Why should check to see if your mobile website is optimised for smartphones (Google)
• Why you should use Google Insights to make website even faster
• Why it’s essential to invest in Responsive Design
• How to write content marketing so it improves the user experience on all smartphones
• Why it’s all about speed, and why your business website needs to now be supersonic
• We shall explain why mobile-friendliness is now a Google ranking factor
• Why have businesses need a responsive website or why they risk getting left behind by the competition

 

What is mobile SEO?

First things first, what exactly is mobile SEO?

Mobile search engine optimisation (SEO for short) is no different in terms of its purpose from other forms of SEO, such as organic SEO in general.

All of these forms of marketing are all about bringing as many organic visitors from Google as possible to a companies website.
So it doesn’t matter if you sell kitchen appliances or another product, search engine optimisation is all about attracting more shoppers to your company website.

However, mobile search engine optimisation is all about improving the user experience (U.X), making ranking factors (Google ranking factors) such as how fast your company website and improving these ranking factors.

The ultimate aim is for Google’s brain, that’s Google’s algorithm to say this business has the strongest the best ranking factors in this business sector, therefore that company should sit top of the pile, and occupy the first position on Google.

So, you want the website to rank high on desktop, and we also want it to rank higher on smartphones.

 

This balancing act is improving search engine optimisation for desktop and mobile devices.

The reason we say its difficult because, when you talk to any SEO expert, that’s worth their weight in salt, they will tell you that the best content marketing is long-form, evergreen content marketing with high Google E-EAT score.

Well-written blog posts could be more than 3000 words long, but if you put them on a mobile device, too much text might overwhelm the shopper.

No shopper looking to buy say a new washing machine, wants to read a lengthy 3,000 word product description.

The balancing act ensures the website ranks well on desktop and mobile. So you have to publish good quality content marketing.
It is also about improving the user experience, helping the customer find the right product or service, and making the new website as simple to use as possible.

 

Why is mobile optimisation important?

Why is mobile optimisation important?

So you might be at this stage where we get your website designed, and the website designers might have send across an SEO PDF quote to get the website built.

So the quote might be, lets say for example purposes £2000 for design the website and an extra 750 design the mobile version to make the website responsive.

As a small business owner, you might think we need the mobile website design immediately?
Well, we would say its important to get a responsive website designed from the start, here’s why.
Its because of something called Google mobile-first indexing. So, as any good search engine optimisation consultant will tell you, you need a mobile website designed at the same time as having the desktop version designed.

Roughly half of all traffic is now from mobile devices
It differs from the business sector to the business sector; yet it is widely considered around 50%, and on average, all visitors come via smartphone / tablet.

The need for a good user experience

So here’s the thing: if the company website is poorly designed, is a bit clunky, or is a bit difficult to use the menu, well happens is that the bounce rate goes to the roof.

If your website has a high bounce rate on mobile phones, this is a sign that shoppers are dissatisfied with the website- it could be indication its offering a poor U.X.

This could be due to design, a slow, sluggish website, or business-related factors such as too-high prices.

However, with a sky-high and sustained bounce rate, the website will start slowly but surely dropping down the Google’s organic ranks. So you do have to keep that bounce rate as low as possible.

So, by offering a good user experience, just as you walk into a restaurant, they make you feel welcome and provide good customer service.

You need to adopt a similar mindset when designing your website.

Is your website offering good customer service?

How can you offer the best customer advice? How can you make their website simple to use? How can you get the inner mechanics sorted, such as ensuring the website is fast, and all the functionality works as it should?

What does Google Mobile’s first indexing mean?

Let’s say you run a solicitors practice in the “magic circle”, and you upload a new blog post, as often as once a week, providing helpful advice.The articles include thousand words include infographics and embedded YouTube videos, with solicitors offering quality advice.
Well, it could be the best advice in the whole world, yet roughly 50% or organic visitors wont get to see it unless you have a mobile responsive website designed.

Mobile-first indexing means that Google will index that page before indexing the desktop version.
So, because of mobile-first indexing, it is more important than ever to ensure that you go to a responsive website designed.

So, for indexation reasons, and organic vistors from Google, this is why you need to have a responsive website designed.

Many SEO tools that can help you

So, there are a lot of quality SEO tools out there, Screaming Frog for example. We really approve of Moz Pro, which helps you fix any issues with mobile design. For example, these tools can often calculate the speed of the mobile version of the website, then suggest improvements, which you can improve to make the website a little bit faster.

 

Google Search Console

This brilliant tool, which offers so much functionality and that’s Google Search Console.

You can also use GSC, to create Google Search Console’s Page Experience report.
It basically takes into account “Core Web Vitals” and again this suggests ways to improve the user experience, mostly by making the website faster.

 

GooglePage Speed Insights (Another free tool, that’s Brillant)

Google Page Speed Insights is another excellent tool. It measures the website’s load speed, whether on smartphones or desktops. Again Google analyses, the businesses Core Web vitals, and again suggests ways to help speed up your website.

 

Responsive design

Responsive design, why its an absolute must

The good thing is that if you’ve got a WordPress website or a template website, it often comes with a mobile version that is sometimes responsive as standard (however you have to check this).

This is good news because it makes it affordable for small businesses to get a responsive website designed.

 

Why speed is important

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

So let’s not get too technical here; this is the ins and outs of what LCP, or largest Contentful Paint, actually means when it comes to search engine optimisation.

However, we do have to describe the outline, and why LCP matters. When describing things to our clients, you have to think of your website as a bit like your car and you are about to enter a race.

It would be best to have the core components of the work and a seat, the steering and the gearbox. At the same time, you have to have a quick and light car in any race.

So do use this concept when designing the website. Please ensure that this well-designed website offers a good user experience. It needs to be quick and agile.

If this is slow and bloated, the website will start to lag behind the competition and not rank high on Google.

 

Why high bounce rate is bad for your SEO

So with SEO, many businesses want o see the SEO metrics improve and to get to a high number.

So, for example, you want more quality backlinks, perhaps 10k, 20k or 30k of quality inbound links.

You might want more quality content marketing articles added, you may need over 100 drip fed, to get your business on page one of Google’s SERP’s.

But what you don’t wish to do at the same time is the bounce rate increase; you don’t want that to go up.

Bounce rates are therefore an SEO metric where you want the number to reduce.

The reason you don’t want a high bounce rate is because it shows dissatisfaction with the website.

So what we mean by that is the bounce rate is when a shopper visits your website, whether that’s a blog post, or perhaps to my page.
But for whatever reason, they don’t visit the second page, they don’t click on the internal link, and they don’t click on the main menu.

Therefore, they only visit one page, which is not what you want from a business point of view because they want to browse products and services and buy from you.

Sometimes, a bounce rate on specific pages is not alarming. For example, if you’ve written a piece of evergreen content marketing offering helpful advice, the customer might have found the answer they are looking for, and don’t need to click on another page.

However, if the bounce rate is on the product page, which means they have not been through the checkout processes or visited another page, then you have to ask where is there high bounce rate on the product pages?

What is the competition doing right?

You might hate your direct competitors, and for many business owners, this is pretty normal feeling.

However, if they rank right at the top of Google.co.uk., there is usually a good reason for this.

Therefore we need to keep an open mind and evaluate why the mobile version of their website ranks at the top of Google’s SERP’s.

Could it just be because of just excellent design?

It could be because they’ve invested heavily in supersonic fast hosting?

It could be because the content marketing they offer is to the point and helpful?

If that’s the case, evaluate your direct competitors, look at what they’re doing right, and integrate that into the design of your website. (obviously don’t copy, we are not suggesting that).

 

 

Mobile-friendly content marketing requires close collaboration with web designers, but the seo agency must also collaborate with web developers.

Now, what they need to design is a mobile-friendly website.

Also, content marketing needs to be able to switch a shopper into a customer.

Therefore, you must put yourself in the customer’s shoes and balance offering good search engine optimisation and offering quality advice.

The written work, whether it’s a blog post or main page should have a high Google E-EAT score

So, put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Are you offering sound advice as succinctly as possible?

Is the information you offer super helpful? Would you find it useful if you were buying the product or service from that website.

Nobody liked massive blocks of text unless you want very detailed information

So a blog post like this is a bit different because it is meant to be detailed; it offers a lot of helpful advice, all packed into one article.
So, what we’re talking about here are product pages. In those, pages you must offer helpful advice; but not too much text otherwise, you’ll overwhelm the shopper with that text.

So often, you have to use bullet points and design the page to offer a lot of information without overwhelming the shopper with say 3000 words.

Consider using an accordion, drop-down menus, and FAQs to try and get back text laid out neatly on the page.

 

Structured data (Schema)

Structured data, such as a schema, is really good for improving local and organic SEO; for example, you can tell the Googlebot plus Google’s algorithms precisely what that page is about. You can also use it to mark up the name, address, and phone number so the Google bot instantly knows exactly where your business is located.

 

In conclusion,

It’s all a balancing act

If you focus purely on the SEO, you will likely have a page that offers a poor user experience, because you soley focused your energy improving say yoru organic SEO. However you have to put real humans, shoppers first, then mould and improve the SEO around that.

Top SEO agencies don’t write say content marketing just to improve SEO ranking.

Instead, they think how can we offer the best advice, the most helpful advice to real shoppers.
Its only then that this content marketing ranks high on Google.

SEO is therefore a continuous process; you must improve the dwell time and reduce the bounce rates.
So, there is a balance between getting the technical SEO right and getting the user experience (U.X) right in content marketing. Take our word for it: This is not straightforward and we are a top SEO agency in Wales.

Quickfire, mobile SEO FAQs

Is SEO different for mobile vs desktop?

So, is the SEO approach different depending on whether it is a desktop or mobile we are optimising the website for?
When optimising the website, you need to carefully consider mobile SEO and make sure you are offering really useful and helpful advice.
It would be best to balance ensuring the website is fast and offers the best user experience that you can possible offer, such well written product information and descriptions. For example, in bullet points, you can choose a video with a presenter explaining the product’s benefits.

How does your SEO agency track mobile SEO performance?

So you could purchase an SEO tool, these usually need a monthly retainer to pay for them.

However, you can also use free tools, which, in our opinion, are some of the best as well, for example, you can use Google Analytics and

Search Console, which are just brilliant. Look at things like bounce rates and time on site.

How much experience do you have in mobile SEO?

Put this way, we are one of the most experienced, knowledgeable SEO agencies in the whole of Wales.

We have worked for e-commerce giants, and smaller businesses as well.

We have a growing number of clients and are taking on more business every month because we are simply experts at what we do.

Customers come to us mainly because we are straight-talking, and we never cut corners.

When it comes to SEO, there should never be anycorner-cutting.

That’s because if you do cut corners, the website will be penalised later on down the line, such as being slapped with a Google Panda or

Google Penguin penalty.

Therefore, if you want the best SEO methods applied to your website does need to come to us