Search Engine Optimisation In Essex: The Importance Of Mobile SEO
If we’re honest with ourselves, most of us spend far too long on our mobile phones every day. And hey, that’s no judgment, I’m as guilty of it as any of us! The point is, however, that our mobile devices have increasingly become the main way in which we consume media and content. Whether that’s shopping online, watching videos, or listening to music; these small rectangular pieces of plastic, glass and, what I can only assume is dark magic, have become indispensable parts of our lives.
As a business, then, you should be using it to your advantage. How? By making sure your website is best-optimised for mobile SEO. What’s that? Well, the team here at VerriBerri, a firm offering search engine optimisation in Essex, is going to explain for you!
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Let’s first start by explaining what Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is more generally; before then moving onto mobile devices, in particular. As the term suggests, this is the process whereby you optimise your website so it better ranks on the major search engines. This most often tends to be Google, though many of the same principles apply to other search engines, such as Bing, as well.
The Importance Of SEO
The importance of good website SEO value cannot be overstated, is well-documented and is, frankly, fairly obvious. If your business, for example, ranks down at 8th for a keyword whilst your top competitor ranks 1st on Google for that same keyword, it doesn’t take long to work out which the punter is going to opt for, nine times out of ten. A search engine’s ultimate goal is to provide the most straightforward and on-the-money answer to a user query.
Writing regular content that’s going to answer those sorts of query, carrying out regular maintenance on-site work (in the form of compressing image files, creating meta tags, etc.) and accruing quality backlinks which back through to your website are all ways in which you ‘say’ to Google that your site is the one that’s going to best answer those user queries. By securing top spot on Google, by getting that monopoly, as it were, you drive more website traffic. Traffic in turn leads to conversions. Conversions lead to? Well, conversions lead to one happy business owner!
The art of SEO is ever-changing which is why we constantly review the latest guidelines and algorithms as part of our search engine optimisation services, in Essex.
Mobile SEO
So, now we get onto the topic of mobile SEO. This is arguably as important as regular SEO, if not more so, given that usage we talked about in the introduction. In fact, mobile internet usage has now overtaken desktops, in terms of the overall share of traffic. The advent of 5G is surely only going to increase that percentage in the coming years, therefore getting on top of your mobile SEO has never been as important. It’s also worth pointing out that even if your business doesn’t consider smartphone users an important target demographic (which in all honesty is unlikely in today’s world) poor mobile optimisation can also lead to poorer overall SEO-value, as well. So, it’s really in your business’ best interest to have all bases covered, from an SEO perspective.
Factors That Most Affect Mobile SEO Value
Page Speed
Page speed is undoubtedly one of the leading factors in determining a website’s mobile SEO value. Google offers a pretty nifty tool to check a website’s page speed, in the form of its PageSpeed Insights. Why is page speed so important? Well, it comes back to the idea of user experience. If your website is offering up slow page load times, then you can’t reasonably expect people to put up with that. This is something that Google has recognised, and so websites with poor page speeds rank more poorly than those with quick load times. In fact, according to research carried out by Google’s own ‘webmasters’, slow load speeds accounted for 46% of what people disliked most whilst browsing on mobile devices.
User Design
Whilst the way your website might be well-optimised for desktops and laptops, that doesn’t always necessarily translate into a correspondingly well thought out mobile set-up, in terms of user experience. There are countless little things that you may never even have considered that, if not optimised for mobile, can demonstrably damage your website’s overall SEO value. Text which is too small, for instance, might seem like an obvious thing to tweak, but many people don’t! Similarly, buttons which are too small or close to one another – that don’t consider the user’s thumb or finger – will cause your website to suffer.
Tips To Improve Your Mobile SEO
The easiest ways to improve your site’s mobile SEO-value, then, are as follows:
- Improve your page loading speeds (if they’re slow, Google will usually show you where specific improvements can be made).
- Use a mobile-friendly CMS (Content Management System). Platforms such as WordPress have a whole bunch of plugins to help with mobile optimisation. Not only that, but they offer responsive themes as well, which are specifically geared with mobile devices in mind (as well as desktops, of course).
- Use the right headers and titles. An appropriate usage of headers is important for any website, but especially so when you’re structuring with mobile devices in mind.
Contact VerriBerri
If you feel that SEO isn’t for you, then let us take care of it for you! We offer monthly reporting, regular weekly maintenance and strategy creation to get your business ranking where it deserves to! Whether you want to take a deep dive into your SEO, or simply carry out some maintenance work little and often, every little really does help! So, if you’d like to find out more about our search engine optimisation services, in Essex, then get in touch! Contact VerriBerri today on 01376 386 850 or click here.