SEO is one of the essential parts of many businesses’ marketing strategies. Mobile optimization is a must part of SEO and has a significant weightage in total SEO results.
Mobile SEO needs various optimizations, and sometimes people make some mistakes during the optimizations, which keep them from achieving the potential SEO results.
Let’s know about the mobile SEO mistakes, so you can avoid them and have efficient results from SEO marketing strategy.
1. Slow Site Speed
It’s the most common mistake people make in their mobile SEO. They overlook the site speed on mobiles, which is a ranking factor. Site speed is one of the page experience signals and has a major influence on rankings. Most people fasten up their desktop version but don’t bother about the site speed on mobiles.
Google recently launched a new rankings factor, i.e., core web vitals, which also promotes the fast loading of the website. So, it’s crucial you improve your site loading speed on mobiles to see the best SEO results.
2. Missing Content
Sometimes people make the mobile version of their site significantly different from the desktop version. It’s common that you may find missing content between the desktop and mobile versions of your site. If you somehow blocked the crawlers from crawling the JavaScript, CSS, or image files, then it will affect your rankings negatively. You may check your robots.txt file to see if there is any blocked content from crawling and indexing. You may also use Fetch by Google and Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to find the mobile-specific issues and resolve them. Always find the difference between mobile and desktop versions, and optimize the missing content issue.
3. No Mobile-Friendly Keyword Optimization
Generally, when people search for something on the phone, they are more likely to make typos, write shorter queries, and use voice search. Businesses overlook this difference and focus on keyword optimization based on desktop user behavior. It’s a fine line, and you need to understand it to upgrade your keyword optimization according to mobiles. You have to address both short queries, and long voice commands in your content to get the rankings in mobile searches. Voice search commands have natural language instead of the standard keywords, and you have to incorporate that natural tone in your content to have favorable results. This mistake is so subtle that people don’t even notice it and face poor mobile rankings.
4. Abusive Interstitial
Google has a strict policy against abusive interstitials. You may use the pops or interstitials, but these shouldn’t keep users from accessing the content. If your pop-ups force users to take action to access the content, then it’s unethical. Mobile devices have small screens as compared to computers, and pop-ups can cover the whole screen, which can be frustrating for the users. It also increases the bounce rate of your web pages. So, it’s better you use these wisely; otherwise, you’ll see a drop in rankings for sure. Make sure users can access the content without any interruption of pop-ups. Moreover, there should be a clear close button as well to make the user experience smooth.
5. Broken Links
Broken links are the non-functioning links that take the user to nowhere on click. Usually, people encounter the 4XX when they hit a broken link. The reasons for broken links are misspelled URL, moved/deleted webpage, uncrawled webpage, etc. Safari SEO Melbourne suggests that broken links can also exhaust your crawl budget which means that important, high-value pages are being missed in Google’s regular website crawls.
Broken links not only frustrate the user but spoil your site’s health and affect the SEO results. So, it’s better you audit your site regularly and optimize the broken links on your site to give the best user experience on mobiles and desktops.
6. Tiny Font Size
Mostly, people consider desktops while designing the website and don’t ponder the mobile experience. This may result in the tiny font on the mobiles, which makes your content inaccessible and destroys the user experience. All webmasters should prioritize the mobile experience because mobile uses are much higher than any other device.
Search engines also consider mobile experience as a ranking factor. So, if you want to do good in organic results, then you must make sure your website looks and works perfectly on mobiles.
7. Hard to Find CTAs
When people are on desktops, it’s easy to move through the page and have a better view of the whole webpage. Hence, they can easily find the CTAs on your page. But when people are on mobiles, the viewport is small, and page components appear in a different way than the computers. So, if you have used the limited CTAs or have subtle CTAs, then it can be hard for mobile audiences to interact with your CTAs and make the relative actions.
This can affect your conversion rate and keep your marketing strategy from achieving better results. People have to swipe many times to reach a specific section of the page. So, it’s recommended to freeze CTAs on mobile screens or use CTAs after every or few sections to make the user interaction easy and hassle-free.
8. Poor Content Formatting
As per https://marketingforyou.ca, when you don’t format your content for mobiles, then your content fails to engage mobile users no matter how good your content is. Your content will look like a wall of text on mobiles, which will overwhelm the users and make them leave your site. Hence, the bounce rate will be increased, and rankings will fall down.
So, ensure the best readability on mobiles to engage your customers and convert them. You may use headings to break the content into sections. Moreover, you should write in small paragraphs and use ample line breaks to make the content easy on the eyes and readable.
9. No Mobile Viewports
Mobiles come in various sizes, and it’s important that your website looks and works perfectly on all mobile sizes. Viewport meta tag is used to define correct viewports according to the screen sizes. When you don’t specify the correct viewports, your pages appear improperly on some devices, which can spoil the user experience. Mostly, people use fixed-width viewports, which are optimized for certain devices only. You may enable user scaling, match the screen’s width in device-independent pixels, and include initial scale=1 to make the CSS pixels and device-independent pixels 1:1.
The bad experience affects your rankings and conversions, so it’s important you optimize the viewport meta tag correctly to perform better on all screen sizes and have the best user experience.
10. No Structured Data
Search engines always try to quickly answer the user’s query through rich snippets and knowledge panels. Structured data or schema markups help the search engines better understand your content and fetch as featured snippets in search results. When you appear as a featured snippet, people are most likely to visit your site for a detailed answer to their query. If you don’t optimize for it, then someone else will and have the traffic that you would have received. So, consider the schema markup across the site, and use Google’s Structured Data tool to test and maintain the properly structured data on your site.
11. Irrelevant Cross-Linking and Redirection
This happens with sites that have a separate mobile version. Sometimes people include some links on mobile sites pointing to desktop pages. Moreover, if a mobile user lands on a desktop page, he has redirected to the mobile-version home page instead of the respective mobile page. So, this kind of interlinking and redirection can spoil the mobile user experience and degrade your marketing results. You may consider responsive web design to deter this problem.
12. Poor Mobile Design
Some website owners go overboard with website design and incorporate next-level creativity to stand out from the crowd, but they forget about the mobiles. Some designs don’t look good on mobiles, and all your design efforts become fruitless on mobiles. Hence, it is vital you choose a mobile-friendly design to perform well on mobiles.
Google’s mobile-first indexing algorithm considers your site’s mobile-version for indexing, so you must work on a mobile-compatible website design to have easy indexing and perform better in search results.
13. Improper Responsive Strategies
When it comes to mobile performance, a comparison of desktop and mobile versions comes by default. You always have to find the gaps between these two and optimize accordingly to stimulate a seamless experience on all devices. You may use a different site auditing tool to find the scope of your improvement and implement. Moreover, the multiple tools will help you find the information that you might miss if you stick to a single tool. This way, you will be able to have complete data to make the roadmap for your mobile optimization and online marketing success.
These are some harmful mobile SEO mistakes that can affect your marketing results. You may avoid and resolve these mistakes to achieve the potential efficiency of your marketing strategy.
If you want to create an exceptional marketing strategy for your business then, avoid these mistakes and follow best practices to have fantastic results from your online marketing.