Mobiles enable people complete their tasks on the move and have therefore rendered lives so simple and easy. Increasing number of people are these days accessing the internet through their mobile phones. Estimates reveal that by 2018, over 65 percent of online activity will be done through mobile phones. This finding has an important message for the marketers as they need to effectively address this changing customer behavior and meet the needs of mobile internet users to be successful in their marketing campaign. Proven mobile SEO strategies are a sure way to do this. However, in this mission, you must ably tackle the five major mobile SEO challenges and here is how you can go about.
- Local SEO
Google says over 88 percent of customers use mobiles to search local businesses and 50 percent of them ended up making purchases within 24 hours. It is also found that the percentage sales brought through local searches is more than non-local search. The point here is that local SEO has become highly crucial to marketing. While most businesses are underutilizing the potentials of local SEO, you can tap on this door for an overwhelming success. However local SEOP is harder than the conventional SEO.
In the first place, understand that the three important factors that affect local SEO are relevance, distance and prominence. By providing a complete and detailed info on your business, you can get Google understand your business thoroughly letting it consider your business as relevant. Distance is something which you cannot control. Thirdly, Google will consider how popular your business is offline. For this, it will gather the information found about your business in links and articles. Fill out all the fields in Google My Business accurately. Include all the keywords about your business in your product or service. Get listed on top local directories like Yelp, Bing and Yahoo. Make use of the free listing services provided by the major search engines. Also know that customer review is a major factor to win the attention of Google. Therefore try to encourage your clients to leave reviews about your business.
- Slow Loading
If your site loads slowly, it can affect your ranking significantly thereby affecting the bounce rates and sales. People might not wait to move on to your competitor’s site if your site takes more than 10 seconds to load. Image size is an important factor that affects the loading speed of responsive websites. While the page weight need not be a major concern while viewing the site from a desktop, it is certainly an issue to consider while using a Smartphone. Use Pingdom Website Speed Test to find out if your site loads within seven seconds. Use a content delivery network or shift to a faster loading hosting service to increase loading speed. Keep the landing page free of images and use Online Image Optimizer or SuperGIF to resize the images. Go for Google AMP update to get your site load four times faster.
- Accuracy and Reliability
Improper redirects and mobile only errors can affect the user experience and affect mobile search ranking. Often faulty redirects result when websites have separate URL for mobile and desktop. Sometimes, the desktop site might lead the mobile users to the mobile homepage. Therefore ensure that the desktop pages redirect to the mobile optimized pages. If the content is not available in mobile friendly format, show them the desktop content.
- Mobile Friendliness
If your site fails the tests, then the best way out will be to create a separate mobile version of the site and host it on a sub-domain. Alternatively you can transport your site to a mobile friendly website by resorting to responsive designs.
- Keyword Consistency
Often mobile devices auto-complete the key-word queries with shorter tail phrases as mobile users are not interested in typing longer keywords. Therefore go for shorter keywords and shorten your page descriptions and Meta descriptions.