Google has been consistent with its message since "mobilegeddon" in 2015: they are transitioning to mobile-first indexing, and your approach needs to be mobile-first too.
Mobile-first means Google is primarily crawling your mobile site and often only evaluates that version. No matter how great your desktop site is, if it fails to deliver an excellent mobile experience, Google will not rank it highly.
Google plans to shift to 100% Mobile-First indexing by 2021 and is currently cleaning up lingering sites. It’s likely that Google is already crawling your website mobile-first.
Mobile SEO is more critical than ever. Focus on Core Web Vitals, check your mobile content for improvement opportunities, and address mobile UX issues.
Here are 10 mobile SEO mistakes to avoid to stay in the search engine results, drive more traffic, and satisfy visitors on any device.
1. Core Web Vitals: Slow Site Speed
Your site must be fast, not just to load but to interact with.
Page load speed is a ranking factor; two-thirds of Google’s Core Web Vitals update focus directly on speed (Largest Contentful Paint and First Input Delay).
Beyond search engine rankings, Google research indicates that 53% of users abandon a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
Your site should render every page in under one second. Consider these fixes to enhance your mobile site speed:
- Minimize Requests and Redirects: Simplify pages, avoid unnecessary 301 redirects, remove page clutter, and optimize HTML. Minify CSS and JavaScript.
- Resize and Compress Images: Use tools in WordPress for automatic image resizing and services like compressor.io for file size reduction.
- Check Your Hosting Solution: Cheap hosting may not support high traffic volumes, especially for e-commerce.
- Monitor Your Progress: Utilize Google’s PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to check performance quickly.
- Adopt New Technologies: Implement lazy-loading to delay non-essential or large file loading.
2. Core Web Vitals: Interstitials
In 2017, Google announced that pages with content not easily accessible from mobile search results may not rank well.
The significance of intrusive interstitials—like pop-ups and banners intercepting user interaction—has grown.
By 2021, these signals were partially integrated into the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) metric. This measures layout shifts on a page during loading due to pop-ups and similar elements.
Poor user experience can lower your search rank:
- Popups hiding primary content, impacting users directly from search results or while scrolling.
- Standalone interstitials hard to dismiss, often misdirecting users.
- Deceptive layouts tricking users into clicking unintended elements.
Exceptions include:
- Legally necessary interstitials, including age verification and cookie usage.
- Login dialogs for unindexable content, like emails and paywalled content.
- Reasonably sized banners, such as app install prompts from Safari and Chrome.
3. Missing Content: Blocked Files
A notable difference between your mobile and desktop sites might cause discrepancies in content if Googlebot is restricted from accessing JavaScript, CSS, or image files, affecting your rankings.
Review your robots.txt file for disallowed items. Use Google Search Console to test it and tools like Fetch and Google’s mobile-friendly test for indexing and mobile-specific issues.
Be sure to compare the URLs and content differences between your desktop and mobile sites.
4. Missing Content: Unplayable Content
Consider site speed and multimedia playback when adding videos or multimedia content.
Provide transcripts where possible to aid Google in indexing and supporting users requiring closed captioning.
For animations, Google recommends HTML5, which can be created in Google Web Designer and is supported by all browsers. Ensure animations adhere to a good CLS threshold.
5. Missing Content: Bad Redirects/Cross Links
Faulty redirects are a common issue in sites not optimized for mobile, especially those with separate URLs for desktop and mobile.
Improvements should include:
- Redirecting mobile users landing on the desktop version to the intended mobile page.
- If no mobile equivalent exists, keep users on the desktop page rather than redirecting them to a mobile homepage.
- Direct dynamic URL requests to the correct mobile URL.
- Ensure consistent content delivery across all mobile devices.
- Avoid linking from mobile URLs to desktop-optimized pages.
A responsive design prevents most mislinking issues. Verify your mobile site with Google to discover mapping issues and crawling errors.
6. Missing Content: Mobile-Only 404s
Desktop and mobile users should access identical content. Resolve instances where mobile users encounter 404 errors while desktop users do not.
Avoid linking to broken content and crawl your site from a mobile user-agent to uncover these errors.
7. Missing Content: Structured Data
Google focuses on rich, accurate answers via schema.org, pivotal for mobile search results.
Not using Schema or Structured Data markup means missing out on driving organic CTR. Google’s rich snippets deliver query answers, and improper mobile implementation could prevent their appearance.
Utilize the Rich Snippet and Structured Data testing tools to maintain structured data integrity site-wide.
8. Bad UX: Not Specifying Mobile Viewport
Mobile screens vary greatly. Use the viewport meta tag to specify correct viewports. Common errors include fixed-width viewports and unsuitable minimum viewport parameters.
Fixes include:
- Enabling user scaling.
- Controlling dimensions/scaling via the meta viewport tag.
- Matching screen width with
width=device-width. - Using
initial-scale=1for 1:1 CSS and device-independent pixel ratio.
These adjustments enhance mobile and crawler usability and accessibility.
Utilize CSS media queries for styling different screen sizes. See Resources for Responsive Web Design Basics.
9. Bad UX: Poor Mobile Design
Differentiating “mobile-first” from “mobile-friendly” is crucial.
Mobile-first means Google prioritizes your mobile site. Mobile-friendly refers to good design for mobile devices.
Ensure your site is mobile-friendly to succeed in a mobile-first environment by designing for smartphones and tablets, avoiding illegible fonts, small fonts, and screen clutter.
Space page elements to prevent accidental user actions.
10. Responsive Strategies: Not Cross-Checking Metrics You Rely On
Know your tools and their data measurement methods. Use top-notch site auditing tools for optimization on mobile and desktop.
Examine content, links, tags, schema markup, etc., and compare mobile vs. desktop.
Different tools, even with similar purposes, may yield diverse results. Cross-check to find the most relevant metrics for your business needs.
Responsive SEO
Both Desktop and Mobile SEO start with usability. A successful strategy arises from understanding your audience, forming the basis for SEO, content, and design endeavors.
Ignorance of customer behavior can lead to common SEO errors, like selecting incorrect keywords or promoting on ineffective channels.
The key takeaway: Optimize mobile SEO effectively alongside creating appealing content for your audience. Foster online conversations, explore competitor strategies, and gain an extensive understanding of your core offer and audience, setting the stage for a highly optimized mobile website.
Image Credits: All screenshots taken by author, May 2021.
