Building a Mobile First SEO Strategy

Mobile first SEO is becoming increasingly more important for SEO companies looking to drive traffic from a primarily Smartphone focused audience. When it comes to building a mobile first SEO strategy, it important to consider the design of the website, usability and technical changes to increase crawl rates. Furthermore, ensuring that behavioural metrics are tracked provides a data-led approach to mobile SEO.

Website Design and Usability

One of the key factors when developing a mobile first SEO strategy is the design and usability of your landing pages. In comparison to desktop websites, mobile sites are much more minimalistic, and should be focused on ease of usability. The key design aspect to keep in mind is to have all content short and to the point. With mobile screens being much smaller than desktop, you have limited space to create compelling copy, without impacting the usability of the page. There is a fine line between usability and content, so keeping titles and page content short and to the point will promote the most benefit for your users.

CTA buttons should also work well with touch screens. Ensuring that the buttons are large enough to click with one finger will optimise your landing pages for mobile user behaviour. If these CTA buttons lead to a contact page, then contact forms should ask for minimal information. While having larger contact forms can lead to more useful information for a sales team, SEO companies should focus on including only the key information. Mobile users may get frustrated with large contact forms, leading to higher bounce rates and fewer conversions. To optimise CTA buttons for mobile user behaviour, consider adding “call us now” CTA’s, alongside standard email contact forms. This provides added benefit only seen from mobile users. Ensure that you have call tracking software available to track the success of these calls.

Finally, making sure that the design looks and functions well both in portrait and landscape mode is extremely important. Users should be able to scroll through the page with ease, without having to search for content. There should not be too many navigation links, as this can cause confusion with users trying to find a specific page. If you do include navigation links, ensure that they are very clear and explicitly say where they are leading to.

Increasing Crawl Rates

Like any other landing page, it is important to optimise your mobile pages for SEO to increase crawl rates. This a key part of a mobile first strategy, as technical SEO changes can make a large difference in how high your page ranks in SERPs. Ensuring a quick load time is a beneficial change to make early on, to ensure a quick win for your strategy. Compressing images, including javascript and expanding browser caching will all allow Google bots to crawl your entire website, indexing all pages. Implementing an XML sitemap is also crucial to increase crawl rates, showing Google bots the structure of your website to crawl. Adding keyword optimised content, as well as blog posts will ensure a steady stream of content to your mobile site, increasing keyword rankings and driving mobile traffic.

Accelerated Mobile Pages

Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) are part of a project by Google and Twitter designed to create fast mobile pages. An AMP is created using a streamlined form of HTML code, promoting extremely fast load times on mobile sites. These pages can be extremely useful for any SEO company designing a mobile optimised landing page. However, to properly create an AMP, the SEO company will need a strong web development team. The new version of HTML is very specific about how it’s built. You cannot use certain code, and tags must all be in the correct order. If you do not build the AMP correctly, then it will be considered invalid and will not be processed. It is therefore important to evaluate the time-benefit ratio of implementing AMP’s. The project is still relatively new, so it may be better to stick to standard mobile pages, until best practices have been developed.

Behavioural Metrics

While integrating your mobile first SEO strategy, it is important to understand the key metrics and KPI’s. Like all SEO campaigns, standard KPI’s such as traffic, conversions and indexed pages should all be tracked on day-to-day basics via Google Analytics. However, for mobile SEO strategies, on-page metrics should be more closely followed. Average time on site and bounce rates are two key behavioural metrics to understand how engaging your mobile landing page is. Furthermore, ensure you are looking at mobile only traffic to get a full representation of your success.

Looking at traffic per device will allow you to decide whether to optimise you page further for the best performing devices. If your mobile only traffic is rising, and you are gaining a higher percentage of conversions from mobile vs. desktop, then your campaign is doing well. However, if you have high bounce rates and limited conversions, then you will need to assess both the technical and design aspects of your campaign to improve over time. Don’t underestimate the power of keyword optimised content. If you have a good design, but low keyword density in your content, then your mobile pages may not rank as well for your target keywords.

Finding the correct balance between design and content will ensure that your mobile SEO strategy becomes a success. Follow our guide, and you will be on your way to developing visually pleasing and SEO optimised mobile landing pages.