SEO for Mobile – 4 Questions Marketers Ask

According to a study measuring the rank changes after Mobilegeddon, it impacted 21% of non-mobile friendly URLs. The impact was far more significant on tactical keywords than the trophy keywords, however, with Google’s stance on mobile becoming clearer, you can expect stronger updates in the future. We asked marketers about their biggest concerns around this change. Mentioned below are 4 questions asked by marketers across industries.

My site is responsive, should I still worry?

While making your site responsive (or, mobile friendly) is an important hygiene factor to rank on mobiles, this will not give you the edge. Also, remember that even if your site is not responsive, you need not be despondent. The update gives a mobile ranking boost for mobile searches on a page-by-page basis. So, if you have been caught unawares, make a list of your top organic traffic (from mobile) landing pages and convert them into responsive pages.

If you have a responsive site with heavy graphics and scripts, it will impact your load time, performance and eventually your rankings. While a lot of sites were designed keeping laptops and desktops in mind, it’s time to make user experience on mobile a part of your long term game (think more about what users will consider important on a mobile and integrate that with your offerings). Usually, this means, optimal load time, user focused and on-demand.

My pages have optimised titles and meta tags and my site ranks well on Mobile. Am I good to go?

It’s great that you have optimised the meta data on pages. Next step - microdata in your HTML code. Mobiles have small screens, which means rich snippets such as ratings, publication date are more likely to stand out on these devices than on desktops. This will not only help you become mobile friendly, but will also give additional helpful information to the user. And yes, search engines drool on these tags.

I have a mobile app – whats in it for me?

If you have a native app, implement app indexing for Android and/or iOS. App indexing enables mobile users who have your app installed, to be able to open content deep in your app directly from search results. Users without the app can view the content in SERPs and in place of being sent to a web landing page, are invited to install the app.

I have interstitials for conversions. What do I do?

Interstitials of the pop-up variety are bad. Try switching to full page HTMLs which are in line with the page content.

Two important tips to remember:

• If a user is trying to visit a desktop page from a mobile device, redirect them to the correct URL instead of serving them a 404.
• Ensure that you optimise your site for tablets and feature phones too.