The smartphone is the new computer, and the trend doesn’t seem to be changing soon. The necessity for Mobile compatibility is on an inclined plane, as the masses are more likely to view your website for the first time on their mobile phones. You want your target audience to be impressed, not dissatisfied by a subpar mobile site.

Mobile optimisation is becoming increasingly important; no one likes a slow website on their mobiles, especially one that is not optimised. Your viewers will be quick to categorise your site as outdated, and will quickly look for alternatives. This will, in turn, increase bounce rates and hamper your firm’s reputation.

An efficient mobile website is quite easy to navigate. It doesn’t take long for visitors to get frustrated with the slowness of the site if they do not find what they are looking for. You should always strive for a mobile site that is clean, convenient, and engaging.

It’s been almost a year and a half since Google started prioritising websites that are mobile friendly in search results. Since then, countless websites have faced the wrath of Google in what has since been termed as “Mobilegeddon”.

According to Google’s Mobile Playbook, 57% of users won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. There were expected to be as many as 8.2 billion devices in circulation by 2018.

The Concept of Mobile-First Indexing

Google is now using a mobile-first index based on how devices actually crawl the web. It’s a radical change from the old desktop-centric approach.

This change has major ramifications for SEO. Mobile use has boomed in the past couple of decades, from just over a half-billion users globally in 2010 to almost 3 billion today. According to Alexis Sanders, technical SEO account manager at Merkle, Google is following the trend “Everywhere in the world, information is becoming more portable”.

What is Mobile-First?

As per Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, Mobile-First indexing means that Google will use the mobile version of the pages for the purpose of indexing and ranking, to help their primary mobile users find what they are looking for.

SEO & Mobile-First

It is important to make your site better suited for mobile users by streamlining the layout, and the content to boost clarity and decrease clutter. The benefits of good SEO far outweighs the time required to create it. The majority of the different elements of efficient SEO boil down to the user experience.

Surefire Techniques to Boost Mobile Rankings

Content Optimisation for Mobile

“Dwell Time” is the length of time visitors spend on your site, and it can certainly have a huge impact on search rankings. When you come up with useful and engaging content, visitors tend to stay longer on your website to consume the information, and therefore, increase the dwell time.

According to research, content with word count ranging from 2000-2500 words seems to rank the highest in search engine results.

BuzzFeed is a news company known for its viral content and popular quizzes. The company is well aware that a lot of their visitors are visiting their site on mobile, so they have taken great care to create a smooth mobile experience.

When you arrive at BuzzFeed’s mobile site, you will see some of the most popular pieces of content displayed in a simple, collage-like layout using large images that can be easily tapped with your finger.

Interactivity

On typical desktops, interactivity buttons can be small, since users rely heavily on a mouse to click. On the contrary, these buttons are larger and easier to click with a finger on mobile. So your features should be designed such that they can be easily be used with the finger-based touch. The interaction of the business with its clients is significant for the well-being of the entity.

Below is an example of the mobile version of Sophie and Trey’s homepage:

It features an aesthetically pleasing, interactive swipe-able banner along with a pop-up that allows you to add the website to your mobile’s home screen for better accessibility. It is also noteworthy how the “close” option for this is nice and big, making it easy for the visitor to choose to close it if they do not wish to add the site to their home screen.

Also, their CTA “Shop Parties & Events” is prominent and easily clickable without being too loud and in-your-face.

Loading Time

Page loading is vital not just for your user’s experience but for your ranking as well. Mobile devices normally have slower loading capabilities than desktops, so even a fraction of a second delay on a traditional device can turn out to be a multi-second delay on mobile.

This can be rectified by reducing the amount of content on your pages, or the deployment of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page Protocol).

Typeform is a Barcelona-based tech company. Their website is designed with a beautiful greeting, high quality videos, relevant animations, and other engaging elements that help build trust. But for mobile users, they recognized that complex design components could substantially affect page load time.

That’s why they removed many of them, which simplified the overall mobile experience. The mobile website is basically a simpler and lighter version of their desktop website.

Effective Use of CTA (Call-to-Action)

A call-to-action, or CTA, prompts users to carry out a certain action or visit a specific page. They have quickly become one of the most looked after things in the current set up of digital marketing. When used wisely and effectively, a CTA enhances a site and improves business. It plays a pivotal role in improving website performance often results in increasing conversion rates.

SAP is an enterprise software firm that manages business operations and customer relations. The business enhances its mobile experience by condensing and optimising relevant information.

The firm has put a lot of emphasis on CTAs; their entire homepage is full of them. They also combine some of their call-to-action into sliders, whereas their desktop website has the same CTAs horizontally. This has helped them to keep things simple so that mobile users aren’t overwhelmed with the barrage of information at once, and it also ensures none of the CTAs are too small to read.

Quick Recap

With the latest developments in mobile connectivity, the number of people using mobile phones is increasing every day.

Mobile optimisation is the process of making adjustments to your website content to ensure that your website visitors accessing the site from phones have an experience optimised for their devices. It is time you realise the importance of optimising for mobiles and voice search so that you can rank better and provide your users with a better experience.

Author Bio:

Jenny Harrison is a passionate marketing and business blogger. She loves to engage with readers who are seeking B2B and B2C marketing related information on the internet. She is a featured blogger at various high authority blogs and magazines in which she shared her research and experience with the vast online community. Currently, she is associated with PNC Digital, an Orlando based E-Commerce Development Company specializes in OpenCart, Magento, Shopify Web Development.

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