Right from the “mobilegeddon” to the mobile-first indexing, Google has always been conveying one unswerving message that in order to get your desired SERP rankings and to effectively boost your business you must necessarily require being mobile-first. As Bing and Google’s algorithms keep evolving and continue to incorporate new technologies, we are constantly fine-tuning our SEO strategies.
We need to optimize our web content for desktop visitors, voice search, social media followers, and mobile users. The task could feel quite challenging, overwhelming, and almost impossible to achieve.
However, here are a few grave mobile SEO mistakes that you must avoid for earning better SERP rankings, driving more and more traffic to your own mobile site and keeping your mobile target audience or visitors happy.
5 Mobile SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid Like a Plague
1. Very Slow Site Speed
Page loading speed seems to be a crucial Google ranking factor. Site speed is an important issue for all those people who are visiting your site. As per Google research reports, about 53 percent of the total individuals visiting a site, would be immediately abandoning a site if it takes more than 3 seconds for loading. You must make sure that every mobile page loads under 3 seconds. Here are a few fast fixes for helping you in effectively speeding up your mobile website. You may consider minimizing redirects and requests and keep the pages simple and clean. Slow site loading speed is one of major mobile SEO mistakes you shouldn’t be committing as a web developer or business owner.
Get rid of 301 redirects to the maximum extent possible, consider optimizing your HTML code, and you must transform your JavaScript and CSS which might be adversely affecting your load times. You need to consider resizing and compressing images for speeding up your site’s load speed. You may create AMP optimized pages that would be loading four times faster as compared to the regular mobile pages. Always browse online for latest news in the SEO world. Rectify your errors to stay abreast with the latest in the industry.
2. Mobile-Specific 404s
All content on your website should be accessible to users from all devices and in optimized form. Some instances do arise when mobile users get broken links or 404 errors for content that desktop users might be able to access. The soft 404s and other 404s need to be nipped early so that they don’t become a mainstay in your site’s ecosystem. This would certainly give you a boost in SERP rankings. Website auditing tools will help you fix broken links easily.
3. Using Unplayable Content
Before incorporating multimedia or video on your page, you must consider how it would be affecting your overall site speed. You must check if the video-embedding is playing perfectly or not on all devices. You must consider including a transcript whenever necessary. You must use HTML5 for adding animated content, as per Google directive.
4. Poor Mobile Design
Your design requires being truly mobile-friendly. You must design specifically for tablets and smartphones, instead of the desktop. You must eliminate small font sizes, illegible fonts, and necessarily avoid on-screen clutter.
5. Rich Snippets Missing
Google has always preferred accurate and instant answers to search queries. If you use schema.org for providing these answers, you will certainly have the upper hand. People who are not using Structured Data or Schema markup to categorize content are certainly missing out on what will be seen as one of the top organic CTR boost factors. Both Google’s users and its algorithms tend to respond favorably to rich snippets. You can use the Structured Data Testing Tool to audit the condition of the data on your site’s desktop and mobile versions with ease.
Conclusion
The key to a successful SEO campaign is a perfect understanding of your specific target audience. If you are clear about how the consumers would be behaving online, you would be able to impress your audience. Now that you are aware of these popular mobile seo mistakes, steer clear of them.
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