About 83.72% of the world’s population own a smartphone.
Many of these people use the internet on their phones, so as a business owner, it’s important to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. There are several ways in which SEO differs between mobile and desktop sites, and knowing what these are will help ensure your site is suitable for both.
For a rundown of 7 common mobile SEO mistakes and how to avoid them, keep reading.
1. Small Font Size
It’s not generally realistic to design a website on a mobile device, so you’ll usually build the whole thing on a computer. As such, you’ll be viewing it at all stages of the design process on a desktop display. Websites will show up differently on mobiles, and if you don’t take certain things into account, your site won’t display correctly.
One of the easiest mistakes to make is using fonts that are too small. This is because they’ll often look fine on a desktop, but with a mobile display, small text can become unreadable. Think about mobile website design when adding fonts to ensure visitors to your site can read everything properly.
If people can’t read your website, they won’t hang around for long. This is a surefire way to turn your audience towards your competitors.
2. Slow Load Speeds
In the past, slow load speeds were quite common, but these days people expect things straight away. It’s all about convenience.
With a mobile device, that’s what today’s users have come to expect. If someone clicks on your site and it doesn’t load up quickly, they’re likely to move on.
There are several things you can do to optimize a mobile-friendly website so that it loads as fast as possible. Media is one of the main things that can slow sites down, so don’t include things like unnecessary images. Where you do have images, you should compress them to a smaller size, as they will then load much faster.
Web hosting can also affect your load speed. Saving money by going for a cheap hosting service can be detrimental to your site’s SEO.
3. Poor Mobile Keyword Optimization
SEO and keywords are crucial to bringing traffic to a site, but things can vary between mobile and desktop sites. Due to how SEO works, keywords on a desktop site don’t always match the best ones for a mobile site. This is because people tend to search differently when using mobile devices.
Using a keyboard on a smartphone screen isn’t as easy as it is with a computer, so people keep searches shorter. They’re looking for fast answers, and will often use voice searches, which is rarely done with a computer.
Mobile searches can often be more conversational. Optimizing a site for this isn’t easy, but working with highly recommended SEO services can be helpful for this.
4. Unresolved 404 Errors
No one likes running into a 404 error page, and these can appear more often on mobile sites. The most common cause of these is someone entering a URL incorrectly, which is generally down to the user. They can also appear if a page doesn’t exist, which may occur on mobile sites without you noticing.
Webmasters sometimes don’t create mobile versions of certain pages – at the very least you will want your site to link to a desktop version of the missing page. Broken links will hurt your SEO, so you need to keep these to a minimum. Make sure you check your site for 404 pages and amend any that you find.
5. Blank Spaces
With mobile sites, you often want to present things differently to desktop sites. Avoid putting in too much content, as it can be a bit overwhelming. Short paragraphs (1-2 sentences) are ideal.
Doing this will make it easier for users to read and digest. This is suitable for mobile sites, as people tend to skim through them. It’s a simple change you can make that can have quite a sizable effect on how people use your site.
6. Bad Use of Interstitials
Interstitials are often used for things like promotions or advertisements, and they’ll pop up when a user visits a specific webpage. While these can be useful for engaging with visitors, when not used correctly, they can simply be annoying. This is another way to put people off of your website and push them toward your competitors.
One of the worst things to do with these is to have them cover the whole screen. Make sure you implement them with good calls-to-action and only have them cover as much screen as they need to.
7. Poorly Implemented Calls-to-Action
When marketing businesses online, there are various elements you should be using, and one of the most important is calls-to-action. You can use these to encourage users to visit other pages on your site, contact your team, subscribe to newsletters, and more.
You want to make these clear, simple, and easy to interact with. When using multiple, it’s good to make sure they’re not too close together.
If you can find a way to make them stand out, this can help. And ensure they’re near to relevant content.
Another thing you can do is make buttons that fill the entire width (not height) of the screen. This can help increase the overall click-through rate.
Avoiding Common Mobile SEO Mistakes
There are plenty of common mobile SEO mistakes that you can make with a website, and these will lead to less traffic to your site, which you don’t want. Make sure you take the time to ensure your site is properly optimized for maximum efficiency. Hiring a professional SEO company is the best way to do this.
For more marketing tips, check out some of our other blog posts.