10 Important SEO Advices on Mobile Optimization from Thought Leaders

This article was updated on August 6th, 2020 at 05:58 am

The revolution in the mobile industry almost began with the release of iPhone. From there on the concept for which the mobile devices were made drastically changed and made a drift in mobile industry. The existence of such sophisticated mobile devices and the way people started using them even for browsing web and accessing internet gave rise to another revolution; the revolution of mobile SEO. Today it is need of the hour that you optimize your website for mobile search since a huge percentage of your traffic could be coming in from your mobile visitors.

1. Importance of optimizing text based and rich media content alike – Michael Gray

Michael Gray in an article about Mobile SEO talks about the need for mobile version of your site- rich media site such as Disney.com and no rich media but only text sites such as craigslist are the two extremities of type content any website can have. The result is sites like Disney need to have a mobile version whereas sites like craigslist may not need one. But the reality is most of the other sites fall in between these two types with combination of rich media and text. Weather such sites need a mobile version depends on the kind of business they do; online or offline.

2. Ensuring sticking to Google guidelines when optimizing for mobile – Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts talking about serving different content based on the visitor and redirecting mobile user in one of his videos says- when serving the visitors conditionally depending upon the kind of browser (desktop browser or mobile browser) they are using, the only criteria to be mindful of is to serve the same content for the two. If your content is different for desktop browser and mobile browser then you could come under cloaking.

3. The importance of strategy while optimizing for mobiles – Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk in his interview on smcitizens talks on the effect of new media platforms such as mobile and tablets- “It’ll change some tactics, but it won’t change strategies. In the end SEO is about reaching people where they search. Whether that is Google or Bing or the Apple App Store: I don’t care. Of course though, different tactics are needed for the different venues.”

4. Subdomain v/s .Mobi versions – Tom Pick

Tom Pick on the need for separate mobile version says- “Some sources have suggested that using a single website with responsive design is best for SEO, with a subdirectory approach (company.com/mobile) being second-best, followed by a subdomain structure (m.company.com) and finally a separate top-level domain (company.mobi). However, Mashable more recently reported that the search engines have figured things out and there is no longer any SEO penalty for having a separate mobile URL.”

5. Cheat sheet for Mobile SEO Optimization – Neil Patel

Neil Patel on his site QuickSprout gives a cheat sheet for getting hold on the mobile era. Here it is: “Trigger mobile-formatted CSS, User Opt-out to opt out of mobile-formatted CSS, Don’t block Googlebot-Mobile, Image rendering- use percentage or relative rather than pixel or absolute, Minimize the length of the links, Position call to actions on the top left of the site rather than the top right, Minimize the number of click throughs and Test your site’s mobile readiness.

6. Optimizing for mobile keywords – Lee Odden

Lee Odden gives his opinion on mobile keywords and says- mobile keywords are 25 percent shorter than desktop searches. The Google’s keyword tool has mobile filtering option for mobile keywords research and also gives insights on competition, global and local monthly searches and local search trends.

7. Dealing with JS and CSS for responsive design – Aleyda Solis

Aleyda Solis an international SEO expert talk about blocking CSS and JS in a Responsive Web Design approach and tells- “Google needs to crawl pages assets (CSS, Javascript, images)as specified here to be able to identify that a site is using responsive web design approach.”

8. Keyword Targeting in Mobile SEO – Matthew Barby

Matthew Barby says- any SEO campaign till date would start by targeting some keywords but its not case anymore. Getting results like ‘keyword X is now on page X position X’ has become increasingly difficult and reasons begin the personalized search, localized results and greater number of blended search results. All these make it difficult to define keyword ranking within SERPs.

9. Mobile browser factors affecting website optimization – Jason Taylor

Jason Taylor in one of his articles on Mashable says- These factors for mobile browsers to determine page rank include overall site performance, usability, download speed and screen rendering. A fully optimized mobile site will rank higher in search results than a website that has simply been reformatted for a smaller screen.”

10. Importance of using analytics data for Mobile SEO – Cyrus Shepard

Cyrus Shepard In one of his videos on whiteboard Friday videos talks about Mobile SEO and gives important tips- first take advantage of the statistics you already have in your analytics data. Most of the SEOs don’t even know these basic stats which on the contrary you should be checking every month.

Have you mobile optimized your website? Do you even know if your site needs mobile SEO optimization or not?