Since Google is focusing more on mobile content, so they will crawl and index mobile content as a primary source to its search algorithm. However, in November, Google was Splitting its Search Index and confusing many web developers as they were going to keep one single index of websites and apps.
For some people it is clear that the privileged one would be a mobile index and the second would be a desktop index.
However, it is clear now that many experiments will take place, and some of them may also include separate indexing, but the single index is here to stay.
Basic Mobile SEO Tips for your website:
- Conduct a mobile-friendly test
First of all, you need to know how mobile friendly your site is. To figure out the answer, you should test each page of your site separately. Test all of your pages as your score can differ between each. I know that it takes time, but it is much better to figure out pages that are pulling your SEO results down ahead.
- Is your mobile version indexed correctly?
Second stage is to knowing whether your mobile version of your website is indexed properly. Open your browser on your smartphone and type in site:yourdomain.com. Let’s see whether you get the result or not. The result shows that everything is correct, but you need to question your work if it doesn’t show any result.
Moreover, your mobile results may not have been indexed correctly, if your desktop and mobile site has different URLs. To solve this problem, you can add a sitemap to your mobile site and also tag all your mobile URLs with canonical and alternate tags. Then submit a mobile sitemap to Google Search Console, and add it to your robot.txt file.
If the above method cannot solve the problem, check that you aren’t blocking the robots from crawling.
- Check Google Search Console
Another basic tip is to go to the Google Search Console dashboard then → Search Traffic and → Mobile Usability. Through this way, you will know about “mobile usability issues affecting your site.”
It will show you a graph of your mobile usability status vs. time. Below you will find a report with the total number of mobile issues, information about each and a list of pages that indicate the specific problems.
Issues can refer to:
- Viewport not set
- Clickable elements too close together
- Content that’s wider than the screen
- Text too small to read
There is also another section in Google Search Console you should be using to check for mobile-friendliness. From Google Search Console go to → Crawl and then → Crawl Errors, which is the first tab.
Moreover, you can see all the crawl errors within your website on desktop and mobile devices. Check errors that occurred only when your mobile site was crawled by Googlebot because these errors don’t appear on the desktop.
To clean up all the reports about the number of crawling error, you can install correct redirects on all the error pages.
- Optimize Your Site Speed
Many sites have assumed that Google AMP is the Future of Mobile Content and this is still very much the case. We strongly advise you to make your mobile and desktop site as fast as the AMP is, since we don’t recommend you convert your website to AMP. Run this page speed test, and see if any one of your pages will have any issues with the load time.
- Optimize for Mobile Keywords
Nowadays, voice search is also one of the ways to optimize your searches. This makes the style of queries is slightly different compared to the desktop. Moreover, people become more personal to express their queries in a conversational manner.
You can view your mobile queries to your business, go into your Google Search Console → Search Traffic → Search Analytics → and see the report for queries, clicks, positions and comparison between devices mobile to the desktop:
You can also see and compare how many desktop vs. mobile impressions have been collected for each phrase.
- Take Care of Your Local SEO
Recently, mobile SEO is focusing more on local search. In fact, 80% of the majority of mobile queries relate to things which are in the direct neighborhood of the searcher. They are Google My Business, Local reviews, Consistent NAP, and Schema Markup.