Your mobile SEO checklist: seven ways to get your site more mobile love

SEO / March 29, 2018

In the wake of Google’s announcement that they will are shifting their index to mobile first, mobile SEO has become more than a buzzword… it has become a priority. In addition to adapting your website to be mobile friendly by making it responsive, setting up dynamic serving, or building a mobile version of your site, there are a ton of other mobile SEO and usability tweaks that will give you the Google love that we all crave.

We’ve come our own handy mobile SEO checklist. Do these things and your mobile site will perform better for users, and in the organic search results.

1. Read Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines

Start your mobile SEO journey by reading Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. Not exactly a quick read, this document is used by the engine’s search quality raters to determine the quality of a search result. There are thousands of useful nuggets of information to be gleaned from this report, if you have the patience to go through it.

2. Increase your page speed

How quickly your website loads is one of the criteria Google uses to rank pages. Needless to say, a mobile site that loads quickly also has higher engagement and better conversion. Take the time to compress your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files, minimize page redirects, optimize your images, and implement other tweaks that dramatically reduce load time.

3. Adjust your content for mobile

The content on your mobile site should still be long and rich enough to indicate that you are an authoritative source on whatever topics or products you promote. If at some point you shortened the content on the mobile version of your site to keep things efficient, now is the time to beef it up again.

4. Stop it with the Flash already

Mobile hates Flash. Remove any Flash content from your site, now. If you are attached to using visuals, create them using HTML instead.

5. Fix mobile errors

If you haven’t configured your Google Search Console account, do it now. Under Site Traffic, check the Mobile Usability report for any errors that may affect your search ranking. Hopefully we don’t have to remind you here that it’s a priority to fix these errors.

6. Optimize for local

Unless your business lives in the ether and you truly have no local presence, take the time to optimize your site for local search queries. Incorporate your city name and other relevant local information into your page content, meta title and description. If you have a walk-in location, Integrate “Visit-In-Person Queries” into your site content; these are the keywords mobile users would search on to find you locally (such as “nearest sushi restaurant”).

7. Use AMP

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project was developed to improve users’ mobile experience by enabling content to load almost instantaneously. By using AMP, developers can create a very lightweight page, without many of the elements that would cause it to load slowly. While AMP is not yet a ranking signal, Google is giving pages built with AMP more visibility in their mobile search results. Expect more Google love in the near future.

2018 will be the year we get very serious about our mobile experience. Sure, you’ve gone mobile, but now the race is on to be better, smarter and faster at delivering mobile content. Make sure you’re ready. Read the first post in our three-part series on mobile SEO here.