Steps To Mobile SEO Success in 2017

Take the Mobile-Friendly Test

First off, you need to check if your site's pages are mobile-friendly. Google's mobile-friendly test includes a selection of usability criteria, such as view port configuration, use of plugins, and the size of text and clickable elements. It's also important to remember that mobile friendliness is assessed on a page basis, so you'd need to check each of your landing pages for mobile friendliness separately, one at a time.

The quickest (and free) way to run the check is with Website Auditor — Google's mobile-friendly test is incorporated right into the tool.

Run a Comprehensive Audit of Your Mobile Site

Having all your important pages pass Google's mobile test is a good start — but there's a lot more analysis to do. A full site audit of your mobile site is a great way to make sure that all your important pages and resources are accessible to Google bot and your mobile pages are free from errors.

The simplest way to conduct an in-depth mobile website audit is by running a site crawl in a tool like Website Auditor with custom user agent and robots.txt settings.

Do Mobile Keyword Research

The keywords people use to search on mobile devices are different from desktop queries. This has to do with a number of factors; first, over 20% of mobile queries are voice searches. Second, mobile searchers typically have different, more urgent needs in mind.

Google calls these needs micro-moments of 4 types :

Consider AMP

Accelerated Mobile Pages is a Google initiative to build a faster version of the mobile Web. AMP is a new way of building web content for mobile devices that results in a simpler, much lighter version of HTML. Apart from a mobile ranking boost, there's a number of other reasons for going AMP:

Ultimate user experience. It's no secret that speed matters. Multiple research has shown slow loading time correlates with higher bounce rates. AMP pages were designed for lightning fast speed — their median load time is 0.7 seconds, while non-AMP pages have a median load time of 22 seconds. Yup, that's not just faster; that's 30 times faster.

More clicks from search results. In his presentation at this year's SMX East, John Shehata shared the results of his AMP research. He found that AMP pages tend to perform better in search not only in terms of rankings, but also in terms of their CTR.

Focus on Location

The impact of the searcher's location on the search results they get has been growing in the last few years. Not surprisingly, mobile searches are even more location-focused than desktop queries: Google says 80% of "near me" searches come from mobile.

Search engines want to show results located near the mobile searcher for queries with local search intent, such as "takeaway restaurants" or "bike repair".

This means that setting up your site correctly for local search is crucial for mobile SEO, especially if you run a local business. Here are some of the main factors to pay attention to.

Track Mobile Rankings Regularly

Finally, to see the effect of your mobile SEO efforts, it's only logical that you should be tracking your mobile ranks alongside your desktop positions. You can do it with SEO PowerSuite's Rank Tracker by adding the mobile versions of your target search engines to your project.

Avoid Common Mobile SEO Mistakes