Master Mobile SEO: Practical Guide for 2020

By jack123 | SEO | 0 Comments

Master Mobile SEO: Practical Guide for 2020

Mobile is becoming an ever more important medium for business and leisure. Since the release of the first smartphone, mobile usage keeps on rising constantly. At the moment, more people are using a phone to browse the internet rather than a PC as before. As business trends go mobile, your SEO strategy should change accordingly. 

If you haven’t updated your website’s SEO lately, you might be lagging. Google keeps on emphasizing the importance of having a mobile-friendly website. If your website is not optimized for mobile devices you can miss out on a lot of potential traffic, about half of it.

This trend is not going to stop here. More and more searches will go mobile in 2020 and beyond. If you don’t want to be disadvantaged by Google you need to master mobile SEO as soon as possible. We’ll highlight in this article a few things that you should implement today if you want to save your organic rankings. 

Have a Mobile Responsive Website

Mobile responsive is starting to become a “buzz word” in website development but it’s not as hard as it sounds. At its base, a responsive website is one that adapts its form factor based on the size of the devices used to access it. There’s no difference in terms of the content displayed between a responsive and a non-responsive website. Your audience won’t miss anything but they will get a better experience on smaller screens. 

Google has started to approach the mobile responsiveness of your website as a ranking factor. Thus, you might start losing rankings both because of direct penalties from Google but also because of the poor user experience provided by non-responsive sites. You might risk experiencing a higher bounce rate and fewer page views if you don’t master mobile SEO in 2020. These negative signals can surely impact your rankings. 

The best part is that making your website responsive is not as hard as it sounds. You can use a variety of tools and themes that will automatically make your website mobile responsive. Moreover, most modern WordPress themes are mobile responsive by design, saving you the hassle of tweaking your website manually. If you’re using an older theme you might want to update your website’s design. 

Avoid using Flash

Flash is an outdated technology that slows down your website and provides a poor experience to your users. This is a huge red flag when it comes to SEO so you should avoid it by all means. Moreover, flash is not even working on certain devices or browsers, making your website completely unusable. 

Android and iOS devices don’t support Flash so its utilization will keep most mobile users away from your site. Thus, you should completely stop using Flash and instead try to go for a website design or theme that doesn’t require it. 

Make Buttons Larger

The size of your website’s buttons is not as important on a desktop computer as you can always use a mouse to click them. However, tapping a poorly designed button with your finger on a phone can become very frustrating very quickly. That difficulty can make users flock your site and that is especially bad if you’re trying to sell products. 

There’s only one way to fix this issue – make your website’s buttons bigger and easily “clickable” on mobile. You should always test the usability of your website whenever you add a new button. See if you can click it on different screen sizes. Most modern themes come with an option to view your website in a mobile format. Try it out and check the functionality of your buttons. Don’t hesitate to make a live test by using an actual mobile device to access the site. 

Use Larger Fonts

The readability of your text will play an important role in mobile traffic. As desktop users enjoy the luxury of having a larger screen, mobile ones might struggle when reading a text that has a smaller font size. To fix this make sure you use a size of at least 16px. However, you’ll still have to test out its looks as you might need to adjust the size according to your website’s design. 

The actual font of your choices will also play a part in the overall experience. Some fonts are harder to read than others, especially on certain background colors. You should stick to basic and popular fonts. Also, try to avoid fonts that your browser needs to download as it will always slow down your site. 

Speed up your site

The loading speed of your website is one of the most important ranking factors for mobile searches. Whilst desktop users often have faster internet speeds and the ability to do other activities while pages load, mobile ones don’t. If your site takes too long to load, a big portion of users will just leave. 

You can adjust the load speed of your site in several ways. Using AMP pages and considering the search intent of your users will give you a solid boost. However, the best way to have a faster load speed is to invest in a reliable host. Depending on the success of your website you may or may not want to do this. Make sure to try different methods of optimization and test out the results with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. 

Conclusion

Mobile searches are becoming more important for the world of online business each day. More and more users pick up a smartphone over a desktop device each year. This trend is not going to stop anytime soon which makes it highly important to master mobile SEO in the following years. 

You can treat the surge in mobile traffic as a threat or a huge opportunity to make your site future-proof. The few tactics mentioned in the above guide represent a solid foundation. However, SEO is a living and breathing thing so make sure to keep an eye out for changes and adjust your strategy accordingly.