How to Optimize your Website for Mobile Search

Ensuring that your website is optimized for mobile search is essential if you don’t want to miss out on key traffic and potential customers.

One of the most often question asked by our clients is What’s the difference between mobile-friendly, mobile-optimized, and mobile responsive?

It can be really confusing what all of these terms mean. We’ll try to explain them here.

Mobile search is a constantly growing segment of the market, but mobile search has different rules from the traditional desktop search. This is why if you don’t want to miss mobile searchers, you need to adapt your website.

Not so long time ago Google rolled out a new version of their search algorithm that was specifically built for mobile searches called mobile first indexing.

To ensure your website is optimized fully for the mobile search, including mobile-first indexing by Google, you need to cover five areas.

Mobile friendly refers to a site that displays accurately between your desktop/laptop computer and a mobile device such as a phone or tablets.

With other words, it will resize itself and adapt according to the device used to view it.

Ensuring your website is mobile friendly is critical. As of 2019, the percentage of mobile users is quickly rising and surpassed the desktop usage.

All mobile-friendly websites are mobile-optimized, but not all mobile-optimized websites are mobile-friendly.

A mobile-optimized website will reformat itself for mobile users.

Responsive web design is an approach used to web design that makes web pages render well on a variety of screen sizes, devices, and windows. Mobile-optimization only does this for mobile devices.

Here are some very important rules to consider when optimizing for mobile search:

Users using their mobile devices search for keywords or for shorter keyphrases. In many cases, their search query is limited to only one or two words. You will be missing a lot of mobile traffic if you don’t rank well for shorter keyphrases.

Mobile users search mostly for local things. Mobile searchers are in most cases locally targeted. It is easy to understand – when a user is waiting for the taxi and is looking for a place for dinner, it is most likely looking for things in the neighborhood.

If you are not familliar you can check the guidelines of W3C to see what the current mobile standards are. Even if your site doesn’t comply with mobile standards, it will still be listed in search results but it will be transcoded by the search engine and the result won’t be pleasant to see.

Meta.txt is a file,  used to briefly describe the contents of your website and direct the user to the most appropriate version for it. Search engine spiders directly index the meta.txt file.

Even if a part of your website is not accessible, your website still will be indexed and you will still be included in search results. Meta.txt is similar to robots.txt in desktop search but it also has some similarity with metatags because you can put content in it.

Even website speed is not Google’s main factor, if your site loads slowly it’s definitely something you will want to address.

Use phrases, which are common in predictive search. Predictive search is more popular with mobile searchers because it saves time and typing effort. This seriously increases your chances to be found, if your keywords are among the common predictive search results.

Remember to check how your site is rendering on a mobile device. It is not possible to check your site on absolutely every single device you can think of, but if you can check it at least on the most important ones, this will be helful.

A reason site to  get distorted is transcoding, and it is recommended to make your site mobile-friendly first instead of relying on search engines to transcode.

Testing your site on mobile devices can be expensive  and time-consuming due to the vast number of different mobile devices. You can always use online tool to save you time and help you preview your website on different mobile devices and platforms.