Go out, and you will see 90% of people (excluding the kids under 13) own a smartphone. And this is not because they get to make calls on the go, but only because the smartphones provide them with various facilities on the swipe of their finger, other than just making calls. And the biggest use of the smartphone, that keeps the users hooked up to the device, is the easy access to the internet. Whether you are a student or the owner of a multinational company, having access to the internet is your priority and smartphones are there to fulfil that requirement.
This way, it has become necessary for every website owner to build a website not only compatible with the various browsers on the desktop but also for the various devices including the smartphones. You have got a great website but your users can only access it through a laptop or desktop. Do you expect them to visit your website regularly? Not at all. They will find an alternative for the website, and you are forgotten. First, you need to make your website run on every device possible so that you don’t lose your customers easily.
But building a mobile website is not enough to sustain in the ongoing tough competition. Here you need to focus on the SEO of your mobile website as well. Yes, the mobile website also needs to be optimized separately to rank better in the searches. For that, you need to put some extra efforts. But sometimes, you have got the SEO game on too, and some mistakes we make ruin it all. So there is nothing better you can do but avoid making them. Here are some of the mobile SEO mistakes, that you might be making and causing your website damage:
Not Making Your Website Responsive: In the past few years, smartphones have become the major source of traffic for every website existing. When you are out of your home, or office, it is obvious that in an emergency or otherwise, you grab your smartphone for a query on Google, booking a cab or some other purpose. Also with the app development being so common today, people are more apt to use a smartphone rather any other device. So it has become important that every site owner builds a website that fits the mobile screen such that the end-user can conveniently access it. With maximum traffic coming from mobiles, you can’t risk losing the visitors by not having a responsive design for the website. You are never sure about the size of the device your end-user is using. So it is an intelligent decision to get your website a responsive design.
Not Focusing on a Certain Audience: While developing your website or at the time of the planning, you must specify the type of the audience, you would be targetting through your website. This way, you will get your content done specifically to your specified audience only, saving your time and efforts. By focusing on a generalised audience, you cannot plan the promotions well. After defining a particular group of people, you need to categories them based on their education, financial status, their needs and a few other things, such that you can provide what they want and can attract the right traffic to your website.
Not Optimizing the Page Load Speed: Slow page loading is a complete no-no, whether the user is accessing your website on the desktop or their smartphone. In fact, while using a smartphone to access a website, considering the small size of the device, the user expects it to load even faster. So having a slow load speed is a turn-off and puts a negative impact on them. A website with 5 seconds or less load speed gets high ad viewability as well as longer than average sessions. High load speed makes the visitors leave the website and move to other option really fast. The slow loading speed not only affects the user traffic but also gets your website even lower in the SERPs ranking. So it is quite disheartening to see the users go back just because of the loading speed when you have got everything on your website that can help them with their needs.
No Mobile Optimization: Today, there are three times more users using the internet on their smartphone than a desktop or laptop. So not optimizing your website for the mobile is the biggest mistake you will ever do. In fact, Google has mentioned many times that you can’t neglect mobile optimization when you want to rank your website higher in the SERPs. Mobile optimization is nothing but adjusting your website content in a way that they are easily accessible and provide the best user experience. To optimize the website for mobile, you need to make sure the content is visible on the screen of a mobile device and can be scrolled through. The images on the website must be high quality, the fonts must be readable, every button should be clickable, and the videos used on the website must get a compatible player. As said earlier, make sure the template you are using is responsive and make use of the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), to provide the users with a faster experience.
Blocked Files: Every SEO expert is working to get each content on their website to be seen and crawled by Google. But sometimes there are files like a javascript or a CSS file, that are blocked, and Google is not able to crawl it. According to Google, the websites, having blocked files, will ultimately get lower ranking in the SERPs. So keeping such files is only a risk, that no SEO expert would want to take. If you are struggling with the ranking of your mobile website, you must check for the blocked files on robot.txt file of the website. To do so, you need to go to the Google Search Console and test the Robot.txt file. To make sure you don’t have any indexing issues in future, use the Fetch by Google feature.
Poor Use of Interstitials: Having interstitials on the entire screen of your website and a hidden close button, is one big mistake that you can make with your website. The user is always annoyed with unwanted ads and over that you annoy them more with a few popups one after another. This leads to nothing but the visitor leaving the website asap. Since these can also be your most compelling CTA, you cannot entirely stop letting these interstitials on your webpages. But as suggested by Google, you should make sure that these occupy a specific area on the screen, and do not prevent the users from accessing the content of the website. If your site fails to do that, Google may punish you with poor site ranking.
Unresolved 404 Errors: Though a 404 error may be due to the wrong URL a user typed, sometimes it is due to the broken links that your website might be holding. These can also be of the webpages that webmaster did not create a mobile copy of. To avoid having the 404 error on the mobile devices, you need to make sure that the users get to see the exact content on the mobile site as they can see on the desktop. Having broken links is really bad for your website ranking, so try to eliminate the 404 pages as much as you can.
SEO is the most important process for every website, and when it comes to the mobile website, you need to take extra care and optimize the website well.
Xornor Technologies is a leading website development company in India with vast experience in SEO and digital marketing. If you want to get SEO or digital marketing services for your website, feel free to contact us.