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July 19, 2024

Mobile SEO Checklist: Mobile Website Design for Local Businesses

Do you know that search engines receive around 5.5 billion daily searches from mobile devices? In contrast, data from Google reveals that approximately 2.3 billion searches come from desktop devices.  

With the rising accessibility to the internet and smartphones, these numbers shouldn't come as a surprise. Yet, some online businesses are still operating websites that only look good on desktops and laptops. If your company is one of them, there's a great chance you are losing over half of your potential customers.  

Considering over 60% of website traffic is generated from mobile devices, not having a mobile-friendly online business can be costly. It will lower your search engine result page (SERP) rankings, page visits, and revenue.

Additionally, search engines tend to give more preference to mobile website design. Consequently, mobile SEO or mobile search engine optimization can improve your site's SERP ranking. It can enhance user experience and ensure your website runs flawlessly across all devices.  

Are you curious to know how to integrate mobile SEO into your website?

In today's blog, we answer just that through a detailed mobile search engine optimization checklist.  

So, stick around to the end!

What Is Mobile SEO?

Mobile SEO directs to the procedure of optimizing your website for mobile devices. A mobile-friendly website offer countless benefits. It ensures that a website appears attractive and functions well on smartphones.  

When you incorporate mobile SEO tactics, you ensure a positive site experience for the 92.3% of internet users who access the internet using a mobile device. Regardless of their device's screen size, they will enjoy an easy browsing experience like the rest.  

A non-mobile-friendly website, on the other hand, can alter your audience's perception of the online business. As your website takes more time to load on smaller devices, it will increase the bounce rate, sinking its SEO rankings even further.  

Also, it will make it harder for your mobile audience to read the site's content, use CTA buttons, and navigate its pages. Hence, if you wish to get the most out of your digital marketing practices, design a mobile website that caters to all.  

Mobile SEO For Local Businesses: A Checklist for Success

Mobile searches have been exceeding desktop searches for a while now. Most customers use their mobile devices to find your business online. When you create a mobile website design, you allow the audience to find your online business and complete their buyer's journey without trouble.  

Also, Google has recently switched to a mobile-first index. The search engine tests a web page's mobile friendliness to determine its SERP ranking. Hence, without mobile SEO, your website is bound to rank low.

Several surveys and research have also pointed out that around 45% of customers prefer to complete online shopping via mobile devices. In a way, mobile searches are driving sales as well. Hence, it's unsurprising that more and more websites are incorporating mobile SEO checklists into their digital marketing agenda.  

Here's a detailed guide on how to make your website mobile-friendly to help you join the crowd and reap the benefits of mobile SEO!

Website Optimization for Mobile

Responsive web design, or RWD, is a website design approach that aims to deliver optimal user experience across all devices with different screen sizes. It ultimately enables you to promote your online business to a larger audience.  

With RWD, your website will use flexible images and fluid grids to adapt to the viewport size of a device. It will make the website content easy to read and access. To achieve this, you will use Cascading Style Sheets or CSS and the max-width property to set the content container's maximum width.  

Creating a mobile website will eliminate your need for separate websites for different devices, saving time and resources.  

Furthermore, responsive web design places user experience at the forefront of importance, which automatically enhances the SEO of a website.

Here's an outline of how making a mobile website can improve your online business's UX and SEO.

  • Responsive designs allow users to find what they seek regardless of their device. They encourage users to spend more time on a website, increasing mobile traffic and reducing bounce rates.  
  • Integrating mobile SEO tactics in a website makes it accessible to all, even customers with disabilities.  
  • Duplicate content can be bothersome to the audience and negatively impact SEO rankings. Responsive web design helps avoid duplicate content by maintaining consistency across all devices.
  • RWD improves the visibility of your website by making it easy for viewers to share your content via social media.
  • Also, RWD makes it more straightforward to link to your website, promoting backlinks and SEO scales.
  • Visitors are more likely to engage with a website's content, services, or products when they find navigating it enjoyable, improving the conversion rate.  
  • In addition to improving site performance, mobile website design prepares your website to meet Google's mobile-first index requirements.

Mobile Website Speed Optimization

Faster-loading sites are paramount in improving user experience and SEO. Most search engines, including Google, greatly favor websites that load quickly.  

Surveys have also revealed that around 40% of users abandon a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. The two to three-second mark is where the website bounces rate skyrockets. Understandably, slow-loading websites can be frustrating for mobile users.

Hence, ensure your mobile SEO checklist includes speed optimization. It's essential for a positive user experience, search engine bot crawl ability, SERP rankings, reduced bounce rate, and conversion.  

Here are a few ways you can optimize the speed of your website for mobiles:

Optimize images:

Your website's media files, like images and videos, are often the main reasons behind a lagging website. To change this, consider optimizing the files without compromising on quality. You can use WebP to compress the images, JPEG image format, maintain the 4:3 aspect ratio, and enable lazy loading.

Code minification:

Code minification filters unwarranted characters from HTML, JavaScript, and CSS without impacting the site functionality. We recommend reducing unnecessary code, whitespace, and compression techniques, like Gzip and Brotli, to make a mobile website load faster.

Mobile-friendly caching:

Mobile-friendly caching is another common technique for reducing website loading speed. It involves holding static resources on the user's gadget. When the customer revisits your site, the cached resources can load faster. When enabling browser caching, set the correct expiration headers for your resources and use cache-busting techniques for updated content.  

Google My Business Optimization

Around 46% of Google searches are location specific. When you search for a business with a specific location, one of the first things you spot is its Google My Business profile. Optimizing this profile is essential to win the trust of your potential customers.  

A complete, optimized GMB profile can improve local SEO rankings, make it easier for the audience to find your business with map integration, allow users to contact you through the GMB interface, and highlight customer reviews.  

A few practical ways to optimize your Google My Business profile include:

Accurate business information:

Once you have created your GMB account, fill in all the required information accurately. It will help both search engines and customers find your business. Typically, the profile asks for a business name, address, contact information, website, opening hours, products/services, category/attributes, business description, questions and answers, posts, and reviews.  

High-quality photos:

Google says customers are 42% more likely to check out a business's location if its profile has photos. So, upload high-quality, keyword-optimized images of your business to demonstrate its activity, include the photos in image search results, and increase business credibility. Include your business logo in the pictures, update the images weekly, avoid stock photos, and follow Google's photo guidelines.  

Cheerful customer reviews:

Customer reviews are among the top factors influencing buying decisions, and the Local 3-Pack appears on the first search engine result page. Hence, remember to optimize your Google client testimonials. Consider starting with your long-term, loyal customers. You can request them to leave a review via social media, email, text, or in person.

On-Page SEO for Mobile

Do you know the first page of Google captures around 71% of search traffic clicks? According to Moz, this percentage can go as high as 92%, and the best way to take advantage of this is by incorporating a solid on-page SEO strategy for mobile.

As previously mentioned, half of all Google searches have a local intent. Hence, your on-page SEO strategy must prioritize local and mobile-search-specific keywords. It's essential for enhancing the visibility of your mobile website design to search engine bots and users. Furthermore, in the long term, on-page SEO is crucial for improving user experience, conversion rates, organic traffic, and click-through rates of websites.

Wondering what to include in your on-page SEO strategy? Here are a few tips to help you get started:

Keyword research:

Mobile keywords tend to be more conversational and localized. As searchers increasingly use voice search on their phones, mobile search terms are also longer and more specific. Therefore, we recommend prioritizing long-tail keywords.  

You can start your keyword research by looking into the terms you already rank for through Google Search Console. Then, you can target relevant localized keywords based on favorable search volume and difficulty level. Also, you can use websites like Semrush to identify relevant voice search keywords.  

Optimize title tags and meta descriptions:

Title tags, headlines, meta descriptions, image descriptions, and page URLs should indicate the page's content. Optimizing these elements with the correct keywords makes it much easier for search engines to determine your website's relevancy. Users are also more likely to click on links with relevant meta descriptions.

In addition to optimizing the elements with the applicable keywords, ensure they adhere to ideal content limits. You can increase click rates by incorporating powerful words like free or exclusive and internal links.  

Local Citations and Online Presence

Local citations refer to any mention of your business online. It can be your business name, phone number, and address. It plays a crucial role in building your online presence in two ways: by helping you rank higher for local search queries and by allowing people to discover your business online.

Local citations have two types: structured and unstructured. Structured citations list business names, addresses, and phone numbers, such as online company profiles or directory listings. On the other hand, an unstructured listing refers to contextual mentions of a company, such as blog posts and forum posts.  

Whether you use unstructured or structured citations in your mobile SEO checklist, keep it consistent and accurate across platforms. Different contact information on distinct platforms will confuse your consumers and search engines. A study has recently found that almost 80% of consumers lose trust in a business if they see inconsistent or incorrect information.  

To enhance your online presence through local citations, you shall:  

  • Consider getting listed with data aggregators like Express Update, Neustar Localeze, and Factual. Data aggregators collect business information and distribute it to countless other websites, giving your citations in many places.  
  • Submit your business information to core sites such as Google My Business, Apple Maps, Facebook, Bing Places, Yelp, and Yellow Pages.
  • Submit to popular listing sites based on your industry. For instance, if your company operates in the hotel and hospitality industry, you can list your business on TripAdvisor.  

Going Beyond the Basics: Optimizing Your Mobile Presence

Creating a website can be an exciting endeavor. The excitement often immerses site owners so much that they overlook critical details. One of those details is optimizing the website for smartphones.  

Thankfully, the above tips have updated you on the basics of making a website mobile friendly. Yet, if you hope to perfect your mobile SEO strategy, we recommend a few more steps.  

Take a look!

Mobile-Friendly Content and User Experience

If you wish to deliver your audience comprehensive, accurate, and tailored information, then it's crucial to keep the site's content mobile-friendly. As one of the fundamentals of making a mobile website, the responsive content layout can help your site reach a wider audience, increase conversion rate, boost SEO, and enhance user experience.  

But how do you make a site's content mobile-friendly?

We have previously mentioned incorporating mobile-specific, localized keywords in your website elements. In addition to that, we recommend:

  • Crafting a robust and to-the-point introduction  
  • Keeping the paragraphs short, no more four to five-lines
  • Considering how your user consumes the content, particularly their pattern of reading the content (e.g., bypassing pattern)
  • Include a summary or highlight of the given information.
  • Eliminate unnecessary words and information, redundancy, and difficult words.
  • Shorten the length of your sentences.
  • Take advantage of videos, images, and infographics to deliver your point.
  • Use high-contrast colors
  • Keep the titles short.
  • Strategically place call-to-action buttons.
  • Use larger fonts and avoid excessive pop-ups.  

Once you have crafted the content for your mobile website design, review it before publishing. Check how your website content appears on a phone screen and identify opportunities to add applicable subheadings, break up the paragraphs, and incorporate white space and supporting images.  

Ensure your content is free of errors that can make your site appear less credible. Also, avoid giving your audience excessive information that can be time-consuming to grasp. Instead, focus on creating high-quality content that educates your consumers and persuades them to purchase from you.  

You can check out our website launch checklist to ensure you are not missing out on anything important before clicking the publish button.

Voice Search Optimization

Voice search optimization refers to improving a site's online presence by optimizing it for voice search queries. The primary goal of voice search optimization is to get picked by voice assistants like Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa. Statista estimates that voice assistants will reach 8.4 billion this year.  

On mobile, around 27% of people regularly use voice search to find answers to their queries. As the use of voice assistants increases, this percentage will also rise.  

To ensure your website doesn't lose a competitive advantage, we recommend optimizing your website content for natural language queries. Besides that, you should consider

  • Researching and including keywords specifically for voice search
  • Focusing on question keywords, conversational keywords, and long-tail keywords
  • Analyze keywords you wish to target, with particular attention to featured snippets, 'people also ask,' and local pack
  • Audit and improve your content
  • Include schema markup and add FAQ sections when you design a mobile website
  • Improve the site's technical SEO by enhancing page speed and enabling Hypertext transfer protocol secure
  • Improve your local SEO
  • Test and monitor your website's performance  

Mobile Analytics and Tracking

Once you have completed creating a mobile website and incorporating all the above tips, focus on analytics, tracking, and updating.  

Web analytics refers to tracking and comprehending how people interact with your website. The ultimate goal of using web analytics is to use user data to improve the site's UX and optimize its performance.  

With web analytics, you can gain insights into how many people visit your website from their smartphones, their journey from the start, the pages they visit, the time they spend on each page, and how many abandon the site.

Furthermore, there are typically three metrics crucial to analyze to improve site performance on mobile.  

  • Acquisition-related metrics that cover users, new users, and their sessions
  • Behavior-related metrics, including bounce rate, exit rate, pages per session, and session duration
  • Conversion-related metrics, such as e-commerce conversion rate, revenue, and transactions

Here are a few tips and tools you can use to analyze and track the performance of your website on mobile:

  • Use Google Analytics to study visitor demographic data, including location, age, gender, interests, and conversion rate.
  • Use analytics tools like CANDDi to understand visitors' behavior, including their viewed pages, primary traffic sources, time spent on a page, best sources of conversion, and more.
  • Furthermore, you can employ Instapage to analyze landing page data and Crazy Egg to understand users' scrolling patterns.
  • Analytical software like Pingdom can also check your site's loading rate.

There are countless other analytic tools to analyze your audience's user and shopping behavior. In addition to using these tools, our expert advises carrying out routine A/B split tests. Based on the outcome of your analysis, consider periodically updating your website's content, keeping mobile updates in mind.  

Craft Result-driven Mobile SEO Strategies with GT Wizard's Digital Marketing Solutions

Your mobile website design will only attain its intended goals when you combine it with effective mobile SEO strategies. With over half of your audience using their phones to contact you, a mobile SEO strategy is crucial for reaching a broader customer base. It's critical for improving SEO rankings, enhancing user experience, and building a more robust consumer bond.  

So, take your notepad out and check the above tips today! Focus on incorporating localized, long-tail keywords, responsive layouts, improved page loading speed, and on-page SEO techniques.  

Alternatively, if you wish to simplify creating a mobile website, visit GT Wizards today! We offer 360-degree digital marketing solutions personalized to your needs. From designing responsive pages to creating mobile-friendly content, we will take care of every little detail while you enjoy the benefits of having a flawless, responsive business website.  

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