Semalt Warns About The Following 8 Things That Can Hurt Your Mobile Website's SEO
Making your website mobile-friendly is becoming increasingly important. More and more users are choosing to use their phones and you don't want to miss out on this growing audience.
However, just a responsive website is not enough. There is more to it if you want your website to be found, indexed and ranked by Google.
Make sure you keep an eye on the 8 points below to optimize the SEO of your responsive website.
Make the website mobile-friendly.
1. Responsive design
A responsive website is one of the easiest ways to make your website look good on mobile. There are many different responsive themes available for website builders that come pre-configured.
Always check the viewport tags of these themes. The viewport tag indicates at which screen size the design changes. Adjust this if necessary, so that your web design better matches the sizes of current phones and tablets.
If you don't work with a theme, make sure elements adapt automatically. Use percentages instead of fixed widths. For example, specify that a column is 50% wide instead of a fixed number of pixels. In this way, the width of the column automatically adjusts to the width of the screen.
2. Optimize the findability of information
A mobile screen is much smaller than a laptop or desktop. You can show less information, so make sure you optimize the findability of the most important information.
You can do this by hiding certain elements behind a menu. A hamburger menu is almost always used on a telephone. Also, use icons instead of text to save space.
Finally, you can choose to hide certain images on your mobile site. However, keep in mind that with its mobile-first indexing, Google only crawls the information from your mobile website. So don't omit important information.
3. UI/UX for responsive websites
Making your website mobile-friendly goes beyond responsive design. The user experience is simply different on a phone compared to a desktop. So think about the user interface (UI) and the user experience (UX) when you design a responsive website.
Topics related to UI/UX for mobile-friendly websites include:
- Hiding elements. You can hide elements on the mobile version. Consider, for example, the sidebar, which will appear on a telephone at the bottom of the page. A sidebar is typically used to expose people to information when they read the article. On the phone, however, this has no added value, because they only see the sidebar at the end of the content. So you better leave it out.
- Font size. Mobile visitors should be able to read the content on your website without having to zoom in. Use a legible font size of at least 14px.
- Removing popups. Pop-ups are extremely annoying on phone. They are often not designed to be easy to click away with touch functionalities. The cross is too small or it is not possible to click next to the pop-up. The same goes for ads that appear over the text. Leave them out for mobile-friendly websites.
- More white space. Provide more white space around buttons, links, and other clickable elements. A small mouse pointer on a large desktop screen can click on something much more precisely than a large finger on a small phone screen.
4. Crawling
Google increasingly values mobile-friendly websites. Its users are increasingly on mobile devices.
Google can only crawl, index and rank mobile sites if the mobile Google bots are allowed. Check your robots.txt file to make sure you didn't accidentally block the crawlers.
Also, make sure that internal links are always followed. A link with a no-index or no-follow tag will not be followed by crawlers. As a result, a large part of your website may not be found and indexed by the crawlers.
Not fully crawling will limit the information Google has from mobile sites. As a result, you can expect a lot lower scores with a lower ranking.
5. Core Web Vitals
The Core Web Vitals are used by Google to measure the user experience of a website.
The Core Web Vitals mainly indicate how long it takes before a web page is usable. For example, they measure how long it takes before the first content is loaded, when actions can be performed, and whether certain actions are difficult to perform.
It is even more important to optimize these points for mobile visitors. Phone users are less patient and want pages to load and work even faster.
6. Speed
Core Web Vitals are a good starting point for working on your mobile-friendly website speed. However, the Dedicated SEO Dashboard gives you even more information about your website speed.
This SEO tool designed by Semalt SEO Experts gives you an overview of how a page performs on mobile and desktop devices. The tool also provides suggestions on how to optimize the page.
7. Flash and Plugins
To make your responsive website mobile-friendly, you have to take into account the capabilities of phones. Their drivers and other hardware are often much less powerful than those of a desktop computer.
Certain plug-ins will not work on a mobile phone. A well-known example of this is Flash. Flash is a software from Adobe that was used to play animated images.
Adobe has stopped supporting this software since January 2021. It is therefore unlikely that you will have to deal with this, but you should always be aware of the limitations and constraints of mobile phones.
Try to avoid the use of plugins in general as much as possible. Plug-ins often offer many more options than you need. So a lot of unused code is added to your website, which slows down the site.
It is better to hire a web developer to add functionalities to your website. A developer only implements what you need with as few codes as possible.
8. Hosting
Hosting can play an important role in making mobile sites discoverable. It is your hosting that sets limits on the number of crawls that can be performed per week or month.
Certainly, cheaper hosting can set crawling limits for mobile websites. However, Google attaches much more value to the content on your mobile site. Mobile crawling is therefore more important and you want to have as few limits as possible.
Make sure your hosting doesn't restrict the number of mobile crawls. This way, you can be sure that Google is not limited in indexing and ranking your website.
Also, check how fast your hosting server responds. A slow response from your server results in a slower website. So you want to have as little delay as possible in this.
How do you test if your website is mobile-friendly?
You can easily test whether your website is mobile-friendly. Google offers various tools for this.
Google's Mobile Friendly test lets you manually test a page's mobile usability by entering its URL. It's a quick test that gives a short and sweet answer if your website is mobile-friendly.
The Dedicated SEO Dashboard is another tool that gives a little more depth. You can see exactly which pages of your website are causing problems for mobile users. The tool also indicates exactly what the problem is so that you can solve it immediately.
Google's mobile-friendly test
You can use Google's mobile-friendly test to test whether the mobile usability of a single page is optimized for mobile use. You simply enter the URL and the page will be scanned within minutes.
You will immediately see whether the page is suitable for mobile users. Click on 'HTTP Response' to view a little more information. You can grab a screenshot to see how the page looks on mobile.
Keep in mind that with Google's Mobile-friendly test, you only scan a page and not an entire website. To check your entire website you will have to scan all URLs one by one.
Fortunately, Google also offers the Google Search Console tool, which checks your entire website in one go.
Common mistakes on mobile websites
To make your website mobile friendly, you need to pay attention to two points. First of all, of course, to the user experience, so that mobile users can easily find all information on your website.
In addition, you also want Google to be able to index the website properly if you have invested time and energy in your mobile site.
However, several mistakes can easily be made when making your website mobile-friendly. We've listed them below for you so that you can avoid them.
Usability
Google attaches more and more importance to user-friendliness. A user-friendly responsive website is therefore a must if you want your website to rank in the mobile organic search results.
Keep in mind the common mistakes below to make your website mobile-friendly.
Popups. It can be difficult to click away pop-ups on mobile. Better remove them altogether for a mobile-friendly website. The same goes for ads that appear over the text.
Text. An average paragraph on a mobile screen quickly resembles a huge chunk of text. For mobile use, it is therefore even more important to keep your paragraphs short to improve readability. Make sure to use a well-readable font with a minimum size of 14px.
Buttons and links. Make sure there is enough space around buttons and links. Users can then simply click on them, without clicking on another link at the same time.
Auto-correct in forms. Auto-correct makes filling out forms tricky on mobile. Usually, users want to fill in something other than the way the auto-correct fills it in for them. Deactivate the auto-correct for forms to improve the user experience.
Google mobile crawlers
Google uses special mobile crawlers to crawl mobile websites. Responsive websites must be accessible to such crawlers.
To make sure that Google can properly crawl and index your mobile website, you can check it on the following points:
- Robots.txt file. Crawlers will first look for the robots.txt file. This file shows which pages on your website can be crawled and indexed. Make sure you don't block Google's mobile crawler in such a file.
- No-index and no-follow links. Your mobile website may automatically use no-index and no-follow tags for internal links. In this case, the Google crawler will not follow these links. This makes it very difficult for the crawler to index your entire website. A lot of information will be missing, which means that your website is considered to be of lower quality and therefore ranks lower.
- Hosting. Check that your hosting allows as many mobile crawls as desktop ones. Certainly, cheaper hosting companies often lag behind in this. It's even better to have more mobile crawls than desktop crawls.
Summarized
Users are increasingly conducting searches on their phones and are more likely to make purchases using them. Running a business is therefore almost impossible without a good mobile-friendly website.
Making your website mobile-friendly is best done with responsive web design. A website only needs to be designed once. Then only minor changes need to be made for different devices.
To make your mobile website findable on Google, it is important that you keep mobile SEO in mind. Google's mobile-first indexing makes SEO on your mobile website even more important than on the desktop version.
With SEO on your responsive website, it is of course also about the content you offer. Speed is also very important. Mobile users are impatient and a fast website is even more important in order not to lose customers.
Finally, check your hosting and see if the Google crawlers can reach all the information on your website. Hide any elements that are unnecessary on a mobile device, but don't omit important information.