5 Ways For Mobile Ux Optimization And Google Ranking Improvement On The Same Front
It's still half past 2017, and it has already shown that it is going to be the year of mobile optimization. Ask any webmaster and he will tell how Google is gradually taking us all to the era of the mobile oriented online world. Today, whether you are selling or the internet, or into content marketing, if your website is not mobile-friendly, you lose in both the CRO and SEO front of the competition battle. Today in this article I am going to tell you about 5 surefire mobile optimization strategies that will not only improve your SEO but would also boost your CRO with UX optimization.
1. Wrong redirection of URLs Google and all other search engines out there are always damn serious about the URLs. I am not talking about the SEO friendly URLs here. They too have a crucial role in SEO, but here I am concerned about the URL redirection. Out of the 302 and 301 redirections, we often use the 301 (permanent) redirection for various purposes and it is quite useful. For a well-coded website, if any mobile user lands on the desktop version of the site, it directs him to the mobile site. However, the situation gets tensed for those webmasters who chose to take a shortcut and redirect every other page
to the mobile version of the website homepage. Worse is when your website allows redirect for only some of the mobile devices but not others. For example, you might have set the redirect for taking the mobile users to the mobile site on Android devices but you are still directing iPhone and Windows phone users to the desktop site.
Image source: developers.google.com You must avoid such faulty URL redirection as they don't only kill the user experience of your site, but also signal Google for an SEO penalty. Google itself asks webmasters to avoid using the faulty redirects.
What should you do? Always redirect mobile users landing on your desktop page to the corresponding mobile version of the same.
If there is no mobile version of
the page, keep redirecting on the desktop version itself until you have the mobile version page.
Image source: developers.google.com If you are severing a content to the desktop users for an URL, then serve the corresponding content for the corresponding mobile URL as well. Some sites choose to show a 404 error page to the mobile users accessing the desktop sites, which is not at all recommended.
Image source: developers.google.com Use Google search console tool to detect all the faulty redirects on your site. Just enter your URL to receive an email from Google, listing out every page with fault redirects on your site. 2.
Optimize for the shorter frame of Mobile loading speed
Ideal loading time on mobile devices is even shorter than the desktop pages. If we take the stats for top 10 fastest mobile sites today, their average loading time is not more than 1.1 seconds. You can guess the rush among the websites to serve as fast as possible from this low difference that average loading time for top 30 websites is just 1.17 seconds. So, if want to optimize your mobile site for best user experience and also
register a definite positive signal for Google SEO, then gone are the days when 3 seconds was your finish line. Trust me, no user is going to wait for 3 seconds on your page when they can find a similar alternative even faster somewhere else.
What should you do? Start considering the mobile speed requirement as different from that of desktop speed requirement. However, keep the aim to reduce the load time as much as possible on both for a better Google SEO. Recently, Google has updated it’s “Test My Site" tool. Use this tool. Now it gives a deeper insight to your mobile speed and also tells how much you are behind on the scale from your competitors in terms of mobile speed. Moreover, it also gives the optimization suggestions that you can adopt to reduce your mobile loading speed. Read in detail about the tool in “New update for Google Mobile Test My Site Tool- What’s new in it?”
You can also use the Google’s “PageSpeed Insights” tool to identify the image and scripting issues on your site. This insight will help you optimize the loading speed for both the desktop and mobile site. Not only it catches the errors but also gives the detailed optimization and fixes for those errors.
3. Optimize for Local SEO Google search results pages have changed a lot over the past few years. The inclusion of Google local business in the SERP is yet another advancement that mobile users are especially leveraging to get their desired product or service. Google Local business section on it's SERPs is dedicated to the local search results that have been further optimized with some additional details like, the location of the business, operation hours, location on Google Maps etc. Users seeking a product or service from the local area generally place a more refined search request with the additional keywords that identify the local search results. A user looking to eat pizza will place a local search request something like this: “Pizza near me” or ”Pizza restaurant near me” or ”Pizzeria in ‘XYZ city or area’ ”
What should you do? Though your website is full of keywords pointing you as Pizzeria in XYZ city, it will not come in the local search results unless some optimizations are done. Register your business with the Google My Business.
Provide all the necessary information like your address, contact information, website address, business category, and operation hours. So that next time when someone searches for "Pizza in YXZ", he/she will find you in the local search results.
4. Avoid Overlays and Interstitials Users landing on your website, visit for a purpose- Make a purchase, browse some content etc. It's really silly on the UX part if you hide the desired product or content behind an overlay or anything that makes the users sit through before they are allowed to proceed. Such interference with the regular UX of your website is definitely a and axe on your own legs. Just imagine if mobile users don’t even wait for 3 seconds to get a page loaded, how can you expect them to wait even longer because on an Interstitial on the page. Generally, website's use pop-ups to show the additional contents (Interstitials) to the users. Please note that all the pop-ups are not bad Interstitials or overlays. However, some websites use the pop-ups to over promote something at a cost of overlaying the main content of the page. That's where the problem arises.
However, the correct method of using such Interstitials, as recommended by Google is something like this:
Image source: seroundtable.com Google says that all the Interstitials are not bad. If you are not overlaying the main content of the page with your pop-up, there is no need to fear. Something like “Good� one in the image above. So if you are, by any chance, committing this mistake with your pop-ups, read this article to know how can you adhere to the Google’s mobile pop-up penalty. Fix your Interstitials before Google comes at you with its penalty.
5. Design for touch and tap Mobile devices receive the user inputs through a touch1-driven interface. That is, there is not any precise cursor as in the desktops. You have to carefully design your mobile pages, taking the above and following things into consideration: If you overload the page with so much of clickable elements, it will just diminish whitespaces that are required to successfully tap on an element without any mistake.
Especially when you are putting the elements like drop-downs, checkboxes, radio buttons etc on the page, you will need to provide them enough space so that they do not come out so tiny that it's impossible to tap without a mistake. Use the Google’s minimum tap target recommendation. For Android, the minimum
recommended
tap
size
is
48
x
48
Pixels.
While
iOS
recommendations are at 44 x 44 pixels. A/B test your page design to make sure you have a strong converting mobile page that does not kill your Conversion optimization on the whole. Moreover, if your users will like your mobile UX, it's a sure thing that mobile SEO will automatically improve. So, use the MockingFish Free A/B testing tool, and test as much pages as you can. (How to setup an A/B testing experiment on MockingFish?) Recommended reading: Read this article about mobile landing pages, I am certain that tips given here will help you get some deeper mobile insights and design tips.