Mobile SEO - The New Way to Get Ranked

With all the buzz about Google’s new algorithm, mobile-friendliness, and relevancy in content, it is easy to get lost. There are a handful of ways to optimize your site for mobile use and innumerable options for optimizing content. What is Google looking for, and how do you meet their standards?

Responsive Design Vs. Adaptive Design

There are two ways to make your site functional on mobile devices – responsive or adaptive design. With responsive design, smartphones request a website, and the website delivers content. With adaptive design, separate URLs require the web-server to detect the device type it is delivering to before returning content.

For websites delivering the same content for mobile devices, responsive design is the faster choice. Responsive design is the recommended Google format, and the bots read it more quickly. Whichever you choose, start first by optimizing your website for speed before implementing a mobile optimization strategy – a slow website will be an even slower mobile site.

Optimizing Images and Videos

Just because your website is optimized doesn’t mean that everything on it is. Text must be readable and videos must be playable. Google recommends using HTML5 instead of Flash because it works well on all devices. For images, use Google’s Webmaster tools to test Javascript, CSS, and image files.

Don’t forget to use the Mobile-Friendly Test to make sure Google considers your website compatible. If you don’t use responsive design and instead use separate URLs, make sure your users are redirected correctly. You can use Google Webmaster tools to check this as well. There’s nothing more frustrating than clicking on a company’s “services” link and being redirected back to the home page.

Read more > Mobile Recruiting: Four Mistakes to Avoid

Optimizing Content

As always, make sure content is relevant and high quality. For mobile sites, this means that content needs to be well written and easy to read. Scroll-though should be fluid, titles should be more concise, and body text should never be cut off. This rings true for banners and CTA’s as well. Finally, buttons must be the right size – big enough for the average finger, but not big enough to get in the way of content.