Key Mobile SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid

Mobile SEO is more important than ever. Google has switched to 100% Mobile-First indexing. Mobile-first means that Google is crawling your mobile site – and is often only looking at your mobile site. Even if your desktop site is the best, if it doesn’t offer an excellent mobile experience, Google will not rank you well.

Here are some mobile SEO mistakes you should avoid to ensure you remain in the SERPs and drive more traffic to your site.

Slow Site Speed

It’s important for your site to be fast to load and interact. Page load speed is a ranking factor: two-thirds of Google’s Core Web Vitals update deal directly with site speed. Your site should be rendering every page in less than one second.

-Eliminate as many 301 redirects as possible, remove unnecessary elements from your page, optimize your HTML code, and minify anything that might slow site speed like CSS and JavaScript.

-Resize and compress images

-Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights as a quick and easy check of your website’s performance.

Interstitials

Intrusive Interstitials are interstitials – pop-up ads, newsletter sign-ups, and other banners – that interfere with the user accessing the content on your site. Any page that provides a poor user experience could rank lower in organic search. 

Please note there are some exceptions to this rule. Interstitial ads that are not adversely affected by the new ranking signal include:

-Legally necessary interstitials, including those for age verification and cookie usage.

-Login dialogues for unindexable content (e.g., private content like emails and content behind paywalls).

-Reasonably sized banners (e.g., the app install banners provided by Safari and Chrome). Generally, these take up no more than 20 per cent of a screen.

Unplayable Content

Before you include video or multimedia on your page, consider how it will affect your site speed and whether your video embedding is playable on all devices.

Also, include a transcript whenever possible. This will assist both Google (for indexing) and users who need closed captioning and they should be supported across all web browsers.

You should make sure any animations on your site achieve a good Cumulative Layout Shift threshold.

Bad Redirects

Faulty redirects constitute a significant issue in websites that haven’t been optimized for mobile. This is especially true on websites with separate desktop and mobile URLs.

If a mobile user mistakenly lands on the desktop version of your website, redirect them to the mobile version of the page they were seeking. They should not be redirected back to your mobile site’s homepage.

Mobile users who request dynamically generated URLs should be taken to an equivalent mobile URL that will properly display the information they’re seeking.

Mobile users across all devices should be served the same content.

Avoid mistakenly linking to desktop-optimized versions of your pages from your mobile URLs.

The easiest way to avoid these issues is to make your site responsive, rather than a separate domain.

Verify your mobile site with Google. This will help you isolate mapping issues and detect crawling errors that you can later correct in Google Search Console.

Poor Mobile Design

Lots of people get mixed up between “mobile-first” and “mobile-friendly.” Mobile-first means that Google is going to crawl your mobile site before it ever crawls your desktop site, and your mobile site is what it cares about. Mobile-friendly means your site is designed well for mobile devices.

You don’t have to be mobile-friendly to be mobile-first, but you have to be mobile-friendly to succeed in a mobile-first world.

So design for smartphones and tablets, not the desktop experience.

Avoid illegible fonts, small font sizes, and on-screen clutter.

Space the elements of your pages so that mobile users aren’t at risk of clicking the wrong link or button.

Not Specifying Mobile Viewport

Mobile screens come in all shapes and sizes, so if you don’t specify the correct viewports using the viewport meta tag, then your users may experience pages improperly fitted to their device.

However, this is a relatively easy problem to fix:

-Enable user scaling.

-Control your page’s basic dimensions and scaling using the meta viewport tag.

-Match the screen’s width in device-independent pixels with width=device-width.

-Include initial-scale=1. This ensures a 1:1 relationship between CSS pixels and device-independent pixels.

Conclusion: You can avoid all of these mistakes and have a team working to optimize your mobile SEO. Get to know your core offer and your audience intimately. Then you’ll be ready to build an amazing and optimized mobile website.

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