5 Mobile SEO Mistakes That Are Sabotaging Your Mobile Marketing Efforts

SEO remains one of the most popular topics on the internet. Why?

Because webmasters are always fighting to get search traffic – the better your pages are optimized for search engines, the more chances you have to rank your content, and the more traffic you’ll drive to your site.

That’s not all; it equally means that you’ll be making a lot of money (provided your site is optimized for conversions).

It doesn’t matter whether you are in blogging, content marketing, affiliate marketing, social media, or e-commerce, the challenge is the same…

…Every website owner is searching for the right skills required to make their sites perform better in SERPs (search engine result pages).

However, while implementing SEO strategies, one area most people often fail to give adequate attention to is mobile SEO.

In today’s marketing era, mobile marketing is becoming increasingly popular. Any marketer who’s not yet paying attention to mobile traffic is not doing SEO correctly.

As more and more people are starting to use mobile devices for every task that used to be only possible on desktop, one thing has become apparent:

The mobile web is gradually taking over the internet.
And, I’m not talking about just surfing the net. I’m talking about everything from browsing social networking sites, checking emails, collaborating with teams, and making purchases.

According to statcounter.com, mobile browsers enjoy 53.03% of the total number of people who access the internet, while desktops have 42.19% and tablets have 4.78%.

Furthermore, in an article on the Hallaminternet blog, Jonathan Ellins stated that:

“In 2016, we saw an increasing number of people using tablets and mobile devices instead of desktop computers to browse the internet. On average, the combined number of mobile and tablet users finally surpassed the number of desktop users globally and the upwards trend is continuing.”

Therefore, it’s important for site owners and internet marketers to pay more attention to the mobile version of their sites so that they will benefit more from these mobile users.

However, just like desktop marketing, mobile marketing requires the right SEO tactics to get you a significant position in SERPs.

Sadly, a lot of marketers still make huge mobile SEO mistakes that end up robbing them of a considerable chunk of internet traffic – thereby leaving a lot of money on the table.

What Are These Mobile SEO Mistakes?

1. You’re Not Using A Responsive Design

What exactly is a responsive web design, and why does it matter?

According to HuffingtonPost:

“A responsive design simply means a website that has been constructed so that all of the content, images and structure of the site remains the same on any device. For example, when a user accesses a site on their desktop, they are getting the full view of the site. But when that same user goes to visit the site from their smartphone or tablet, the site will retract to fit on the smaller screen.”

Responsive Design Example

(Source: Freshparks)

In 2015, Google started taking a website’s mobile presence as one of its ranking factors – this alone can justify why using a responsive design is essential.

Typically, one of the reasons why responsive blogs perform better in search rankings is because they provide a better user-experience over websites that are not mobile-friendly.

Additionally, Google likes the fact that responsive sites use a single URL as opposed to using different URLs for separate versions of a website.

With a responsive site, you no longer have to worry about creating different websites for different devices; your website will run perfectly across all devices.

Apart from all these obvious facts, there are also other vital reasons why you should instantly switch to a responsive design right now.

Responsive sites:

Enable you to reach more clients and customers on smaller devices (smartphones and tablets).
Decrease labor and costs as you no longer have to run separate websites for various devices.
Track and report analytics from one place.
Increase customer satisfaction, which will eventually lead to higher sales and conversions.
Stay ahead of the competition as over 44 percent of fortune 500 companies not yet mobile ready.
Finally, if your site is not responsive, you will lose out on mobile traffic as a lot of mobile users who try to access your site will quickly hit the back button and leave.

Further reading:

How To Make A User-Friendly Blog For More Conversions
Find Out How Responsive Web Design Equals To SEO benefits
How To Radically Increase The Overall Performance Of Your Responsive Website?

1. Your Mobile Pages Load Slowly

Just as people who access your site on desktop computers hate slow loading pages, so do mobile users.

According to Think With Google:

“Slow loading sites frustrate users and negatively impact publishers. While there are several factors that impact revenue, our model projects that publishers whose mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds.

Mobile Pages Load Slowly

The same study also observed 25% higher ad viewability and 70% longer average sessions for sites that loaded in 5 seconds vs. 19 seconds.

If your site takes too long to load, visitors might leave before they’ve even seen anything.

Apart from annoying visitors, Google also punishes slow loading pages and ranks them very low in SERPs.

In a blog post on the Appticles blog, Alexandra Anghel stated that, “when your mobile website or app is clumsy or slow, 29% of smartphone users will immediately switch to another site or app if it doesn’t satisfy their needs (that is, they can’t find information or it’s too slow).”

Below are the basic things you can do to boost your mobile page speed:

Reduce server response time.
Load above the fold content before below the fold content.
Enable browser caching.
Optimize your images.
Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML
Activate Google AMP.
Further reading:

Check How Fast The Mobile Version Of Your Website Is Loading: Free Tools
7 Smart Ways To Reduce Your WordPress Blog Loading Time
How To Reduce WordPress Database Size To Improve Blog Performance

1. You Have Blocked Files

Internet marketers understand how critical search engine indexing is to their website search experience. This is why they always do their best to help the search engines to properly crawl and index their sites, spending time and money in off-page and on-page optimization such as website structure, content, links, meta descriptions, tags, image optimization, etc.

But, while it’s obvious that high-quality website optimization is paramount to success in search, not paying attention enough to the technical aspect of SEO can be disastrous.

If you’re not familiar with terms like robots.txt, XML sitemaps, microformats, and meta robots tags, you might be putting yourself in a lot of trouble.

Let’s focus on one of those terms right now – robots.txt.

Robots.txt is simply a text file whose function is to instruct search engine robots (also known as spider, bots, or crawlers) how to properly crawl and index web pages. Typically, the robots.txt file is placed in the top level directory of your site so that the bots can easily access its instructions.

Unfortunately, in an attempt to optimize a site and rank higher, some site owners make a big SEO blunder by shutting out the Googlebot from indexing their files.

How do they do that? They restrict Google’s access to their CSS, JavaScript, and image files.

And if your robots.txt file disallows the Googlebot from accessing crucial elements of your site, your rankings will definitely drop.

To prevent this potential disaster, always check your robots.txt files to see that no essential elements are disallowed. You can also test your robots.txt files on the Google Search Console to be sure that all is well.

Further reading:

How To Fix Googlebot Cannot Access CSS & JS Warning

1. You Don’t Have Rich Snippets

Let me ask you a question:

Have you ever noticed that when performing a search on Google, some listings often look more attractive and sexier than others? For example, check out the screenshot below:

Rich Snippets example

See that extra information like the star rating? That’s a rich snippet.

Rich snippets take relevant information from your blog and display them on your website’s listing in the search results, apart from the usual page title, URL, and meta description. This additional information can include star ratings, images, author information, etc.

Rich snippets are often neglected in SEO strategies, and this is because they are more tedious to implement than traditional on-page SEO tactics. But if you can spend a little time practicing how to use them, it will be well worth it in the end.

According to Search Engine Land, adding this extra piece of information to your Google search listings captures the eyes of viewers, and they can increase your click-through rates by 30 percent, even if you’re not occupying the first position.

(source)

Google loves websites or blogs that provide rich, accurate, and instant answers to queries. If you want to be the website that provides those instant answers, you should use Schema.org on your site.

Finally, using these kinds of rich snippets increases your CTR because it makes your site more attractive to users, and Google tends to reward these helpful additions.

Further reading:

4 Best Rich Snippets Plugins for WordPress
How To Use Rich Snippets, Structured Markup For High Powered SEO

1. Your Multimedia Content Is Causing Problems

Adding videos and multimedia content to your site is a great way to make your blog posts better and more engaging. However, you need to be sure that your site is able to play this content without any issues.

In a situation where this multimedia slows down your site’s speed or isn’t playable, this could pose a great challenge to your mobile marketing efforts.

Back in the day, all the videos you’ve ever watched on the internet were channeled via a 3rd party plugin such as RealPlayer, QuickTime, or Flash. With these great plugins integrated into the various available web browsers, almost invisibly, the viewer wasn’t concerned about how they were seeing the video.

Nowadays, problems occur when the audience suddenly attempts to view a video on an unsupported platform. This is especially problematic for mobile users who may not be using a supported browser.

One good way to overcome this problem is to follow Google’s advice by using HTML5, especially if you want to display animated content on your website.

With an ever growing number of people viewing video content on mobile devices, ensuring video can be seen on any device and with any browser should be of great concern to every webmaster.

Further reading:

How To Embed YouTube Videos In WordPress (It’s easier than you think)
How to Fix Mixed Content Error in WordPress After Adding SSL Certificate
Mobile SEO Mistakes

Because the mobile internet is so ubiquitous, optimizing the mobile version of your website will not only improve traffic, it will also go a long a way in improving your income as well.

Do not wait until you’ve lost your users before implementing changes on your site. People love sites that load fast, have responsive designs, and have obviously been optimized for their specific platform.

And in doing this, Google will reward you.

Implement the tips we have provided in this post, and you will surely notice some level of improvement in your SERPs.

What things do you do to improve your mobile SEO? What tips can you add to this list? Let me hear your thoughts in the comments below!