Why is Mobile SEO So Important?

You want your website to be found where ever your audience is searching so you spend hours working on your SEO. But what about your mobile SEO? It's important to think about how Google views your site, not only on desktop but also on mobile.

Why is mobile SEO so important? Over 60% of all Google searches happen from a mobile device. Additionally, in July 2019 Google rolled out Mobile-first indexing. In other words, if you want to rank high on mobile and get a majority of search traffic, your mobile site needs to be optimized.

Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page's content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user's query. Since the majority of users now access Google Search with a mobile device, Googlebot primarily crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone agent going forward. - Google Dev Documentation

While most of your mobile SEO strategies will be the same as your desktop site, however, there are a few important things to take into consideration.

Mobile SEO Optimization Tips

Look at your mobile layout. Most websites automatically format the mobile site. You'll want to make sure that your mobile site is formatted most effectively. For example, what content appears above the fold of your site? If the very first element is an image, try to move text above the image so that it appears before the image. The image could take up so much space that it pushed your content farther down the page.

Shorten your page with accordion boxes. Using expanding accordion boxes that can be tapped to expand for more content is a great way to shorten your page length while keeping all of the content. Just make sure that you check the page source and that the content which is visibly hidden within the accordion is visible in the code. Remember that Google reads the code, not what you see on the website so you want to make sure that the text is in the code.

Consistent metadata on mobile and desktop. Some mobile sites have different URLs than the desktop site (i.e. m.facebook.com). Google wants to see the same metadata on your mobile site as your desktop. This means your page title, description, etc should be identical.