Why is Mobile optimisation important? Because it’s your online shop window. Imagine if you walked into a real life shop. And then imagine any of these happening:

• all of the products were splayed out in a mess across the shelves and floor
• no or incorrect shop signs or accessibility to different floors, so you couldn’t navigate your way around easily, or at all
• the queue was really long
• there was a problem with the payment method at the till

That’s a pretty terrible shopping experience. And it’s no different online. If your site isn’t optimised for the basic mobile experience, you could be seriously losing business, just like a shop. Let’s look at where to start with Mobile Optimisation.

• What is mobile optimisation?
• Why is mobile optimisation important?
• How do you check to see if your site is optimised for mobile?
• What about mobile optimisation that affects site speed?
• Extra top tips for mobile optimisation

What is mobile optimisation?

Mobile optimisation is the process of adapting your website to make sure that anyone who lands on it using a mobile device has an online experience that’s designed for their device. To state the obvious, mobiles have smaller screens that a desktop or tablet.

But that means you have to check: are any Call To Action buttons in the right place? Do they jump around as the page loads? Are they easy enough to click or are they too small? Are they sized appropriately for mobile? Is your text an appropriate size to read or do people have to pinch the screen and zoom in?

Why is mobile optimisation important?

Mobile optimisation is vital for giving real people an easy, smooth shopping experience, just like the example at the beginning. With over 50% of all website traffic being mobile, not desktop, or tablet, we can’t emphasise the importance of a site functioning on mobile enough.

The statistics speak for themselves, but more and more people are not only spending time on their mobiles, but they’re actively using them to buy stuff.

So, it’s all well and good getting your pages to rank on page 1. But if people click your website on a mobile device and buttons adjust slightly when they go to click it, or they have to wait over 3 seconds for the page to load, they’ll be unhappy – and they’re much more likely to bounce back to the Google listings.

Don’t believe us? Well, Google themselves report that when a page’s load time takes from 1 second to 5 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 90%. And that finding was from 2017, so it’s undoubtedly more so today.

Check out these stats from Google:

• Over 62% of smartphone users are more likely to buy from a business whose app or site “that gives them relevant products“
• 50% of smartphone users are more likely to shop on a mobile website “because they don’t want to download the app”
• “30% of smartphone users” are more likely to use a mobile site on a phone for a one-off buy

How do you check to see if your site is optimised for mobile?

Step 1: Put your domain, or any of your specific pages into Google’s mobile friendly testing tool. It looks like this:

Step 2: Check your results. If you get this, your site should be running smoothly according to Google for mobile performance.

But if you see any of these, for example, it’s worth checking and investigating.

There are other red flags that Google might raise, but that is where you need to look to check for the issues. Google does provide lots of information around what the problems are, what may be causing them, and suggestions to fix them. But it can get quite technical. So, our SEO specialist has worked with our developer to break it all down for you.

CLS

Cumulative Layout Shift, or CLS, refers to where there are elements on a page that move about due to other elements loading. So you go to tap a button but it shifts down just as you are about to tap because an image above it has just loaded and pushed the button down the page. So you end up tapping the wrong element. That’s annoying for people using your site!

Responsive layouts

Even in 2021, we still find that there are sites that have not been built to be viewed on a mobile screen. That then means endless pinching and scrolling to view the content. So that’s not good, when people want quick, easy and effortless navigation.

AMP

Websites with news sections and blogs can really benefit from AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages. When Google released the concept of AMP HTML, Search Engine Watch alerted us to the news. Google says that a page with the AMP HTML can be up to 85% faster loading than a non-AMP version of that page.

If you use AMP, you can even get the recognition mark if you appear in the SERPs, which looks like this under your meta title.

Reduce demanding scripts

Mobile phones do not have processors that are as quick as their desktop counterparts. That means javascript will take longer to process.

What about mobile optimisation that affects site speed?

Image optimisation

• Compress them
• Make sure they’re responsive
• Use modern formats like SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic)

Fast responding server

Make sure your website is delivered to a mobile device in a timely manner, so your user doesn’t start wondering if it’s a wifi/4g/5g issue! Use progressive ideally so something basic appears on screen quickly then the detail is filled in shortly after.

Use a Content Delivery Network

A Content Delivery Network, or a CDN, is a group of servers that mean pages can load with a reduced time because the actual distance between server and user is shortened.

Gzip transport

This is used by servers and is a way of compressing content as it gets transmitted on the internet. It’s used by code and text files, and it can help to reduce the size of JS, CSS and HTML files, by up to 90%.

Cache headers for assets

The best way to get your head around caching is to imagine you’re in a restaurant. And each time you want to order some food, the person serving you has to make a trip to where you are and send the order back to the kitchen. It’s the same for a site. When you ‘request’ something, like clicking on a button or a different page, the browser has to make a trip from where you are, to the server and back again.

Caching is the web’s way of remembering your order. So, it stores a log so that next time you click something and make a request, the browser can access its own log, instead of waiting around for the server. That means the page loads faster for people.

Extra top tips for mobile optimisation

• Avoid chunky long paragraphs – use snappy, digestible bullets
• Optimise your videos for mobile search
• Ensure images are shrunk to fit on mobile, but stay crisp quality

That should get you started on the basics of mobile optimisation

Remember that your mobile optimisation checklist is just one part of ensuring you’re optimised for organic search. You can’t just make sure your mobile text appears correctly, and not give keywords a second thought. There are lots of other ranking factors you need to implement if you want all of the cogs in the wheel to work properly.

Here are some useful guides from our digital marketing blog to help you understand and optimise for the important ranking factors in SEO.

• • What is keyword research in SEO?
  • How to choose keywords in SEO
  • Top link building myths
  • How does domain authority work?

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The post How To Do Mobile Optimisation For Better Conversions appeared first on Kaweb.