5 Catastrophic Mobile SEO Pitfalls to Avoid
The word is finally out in the open and its mobile SEO that gets the cake— quite easily. It all started with Mobilegeddon, back in 2015 and was followed by the concept of mobile-first ‘indexing’ by the end of 2016. Since then, mobile-centric audience has gone up— making mobile SEO more important than ever.
However, most companies are still goofing up and making mistakes when it comes to mobile SEO. In this post, we will be talking about five such pitfalls which need to be avoided if you are looking to drive in traffic and push up the existing SERP figures. It must be understood that a good mobile-centric website is all about keeping the visitors engaged and happy.
So, let’s get started with the pertinent mobile SEO blunders:
#1. Slow Site Loading Speed
Needless to say, site loading speed is an important metric for climbing up the Google rankings but it is equally important for keeping visitors interested. According to a recently concluded survey, almost 53 percent of potential visitors abandon a site if it fails to load within 3 seconds. As a fair metric, every site must look to set the renders at somewhere around the one second mark.
Even if you, as an online business, are finding it hard to reduce the site loading time— the following optimization hacks are expected to work perfectly.
- The idea here is to minimize the number of redirects. Keeping a tap on the 301 requests cuts the clutter and optimizes the HTML codework of the page. In addition to that, site pages should be kept clean and anything complex should be minified— including the likes of JavaScript and CSS.
- Compressing images is another handy technique of amplifying the site loading speed. While WordPress automatically shrinks images for the user, there are certain tools available for doing the same— manually.
- Getting hold of a reliable hosting platform is essentially important. You cannot expect a cheap service provider to offer blazing page speeds— especially when you are looking to handle higher traffic levels. This actually holds true for an ecommerce platform.
- Lastly, businesses need to check the progress, via insights— analyzing the overall website performance.
As a tip, businesses can opt for ‘AMP optimized’ pages which actually load faster— precisely four times— as compared to the regular pages, drafted for the mobile audience. The reason, however, is stripped and simplified HTML codes which are easier to understand and inculcate within the existing content hierarchy.
#2. Blocked Files
Here is a catch. Every website indexed over Google has the Googlebot crawling the same. This includes running through CSS, JavaScript, image files and a host of other entities— concerning the website. Restricting access to any or all of these can negatively impact the SEO rankings.
The idea here is to access the robot.txt file associated with the website and see if all the essential metrics can be crawled. One can also use ‘Fetch by Google’ for addressing other indexing issues.
Businesses must also check all their URLs— separately for the desktops and mobiles.
#3. Inaccessible Content
Content playback or rendering is one of the major SEO hacks pertaining to a mobile-centric website. Be it adding multimedia or videos to the website— businesses must understand the implications of the same on site speed. Moreover, they should be aware of the fact that the embedded stuffs can be played across multiple devices.
Another method of gaining an edge is to include transcripts with videos. If you are willing to work with animated videos, opt for HTML5 and the much-useful Google Web Designer.
#4. Faulty Redirects
Many website have separate desktop and mobile links which often lead to bad redirects. In most cases, desktop-specific websites aren’t optimized for mobiles and this is where the business lands into trouble.
A perfect approach to combat the situation will be to redirect users to the mobile-version of a wrongly accessed page rather than sending them over to the mobile-homepage. If there isn’t smartphone accessibility added to the pages, include the same as soon as possible. Many users accessing kik login forms and other messenger databases via mobiles are usually redirected to the desktop pages which often kills the excitement associated with surfing.
Lastly, there are many users who prefer dynamically generated addresses to render the requested content and a business must make sure that each of them gets what is being desired. In addition to that, businesses must try to offer the same set of contents across every device. At the end, linking desktop optimized versions of concerned pages should not be linked with the mobile URLs.
#5. Interstitial Ads
It is important to analyze and revisit ad placements on a particular page. Google is pretty lenient towards pages where the content is easily addressable despite businesses adding adverts. This is where you must reconsider the website layout and revamp the positions of the popup-ads. Ad placements actually fall under the category of user experience and lack of the same can easily lower the organic search rankings— courtesy the predominance of bounce rates.
It must be understood that popups often cover the main content which can get intimidating at times. Moreover, there are standalone interstitials which are often clicked mistakenly and redirect users to a new page. Lastly, deceptive layouts must be done away with which include ‘above-the-fold’ portion tricks. These often give the impression of interstitials— working against the ethical resources of generating revenue.
The Wrap
In addition to the mentioned loopholes, business also need to account for average snippet quality, lack of mobile viewport, poor site design, error messages and minimal cross checks as potential SEO killers. The secret to a successful search engine optimization strategy lies within the audience base. As more number of people are going mobile with their searches, customer behavior is one major consideration which cannot be overlooked.
While eliminating these 5 pitfalls can readily amp up the mobile SEO strategy, there are newer loopholes to uncover which will be discussed in the subsequent posts.
