SEO for Mobile Devices

Just how important is your Mobile Search Engine presence?

On 21 April 2015 Google began rolling its global mobile-friendly update thereby improving the rankings of mobile-friendly pages in mobile search results. Even back in October 2015, Google was receiving at least 50 billion mobile searches every month. And as Google Search SVP, Amit Singhal said, this trend will just continue upwards.

But exactly how valuable is this number for businesses? Back in 2013 Google analyzed that around 73% of mobile searches trigger an Additional Action or a Conversion, such as a Store Visit, a Call or a Purchase. This means that in October 2015 alone, there were at least 36.5 billion Additional Actions or Conversions that happened using Mobile Search.

Further research estimate claims that in year 2018, Mobile Search will generate at least 73 billion calls to businesses, up from 2013 figure of 30 billion.

73% of mobile searches trigger an Additional Action or a Conversion

We often come across sites that dont perform that well in Mobile Search as much as they do in Desktop Search. The main reason behind this difference is that most of these sites are not optimized for mobile devices and are missing some common SEO elements. As a leading SEO Company we understand the importance of your search engine presence on mobile devices.

Fundamentally Desktop SEO and Mobile SEO Services are pretty much the same. Which means that Relevance, Authority and User Experience play a key role in ranking websites, no matter which device a user is coming from.

However to better optimize your website for mobile devices, there are some basic configurations which might be required. Further webmasters often make some common mistakes while designing sites for mobile devices.

Our Mobile SEO services

As a leading Mobile SEO Company and a highly experienced Mobile SEO Agency our expert teams take care of all Mobile SEO issues as part of our regular SEO packages. We will resolve any mobile SEO issues (wherever possible without much coding effort) or else provide you a detailed list of issues and possible solutions for your website. Most mobile SEO issues are related to:

1. Website speed on Mobile Devices,
2. Bad User Experience, such as:
   • Touch elements too close
   • Small font size
   • Wrong view port settings
   • Blocked JavaScript, CSS and Image Files
   • Unplayable Content
   • Faulty Redirects
   • Mobile-Only 404s
   • Irrelevant Cross Links
   • Overlays that partially or completely cover the contents of the page
3. Incomplete settings for Mobile sites that use Dynamic serving or Separate URLs, instead of being responsive. Unlike Responsive sites, these sites require special settings such as using Vary HTTP Header, rel=”alternate” and rel=”canonical” markup, to ensure that Google understands the device specific configurations.

Best practices for Mobile SEO

To build a Mobile SEO friendly Website for Google, you can use either of the three techniques mentioned below that handle different mobile screen sizes:

1. Responsive Web Design,
2. Serve different versions of HTML depending on the device, or
3. Use separate URLs to serve different code to different devices.

Responsive design is Google’s recommended mobile SEO friendly design pattern

As such Google does not favor any particular URL format as long as the page(s) and all page assets are accessible to all Googlebot user-agents. However Responsive design is Google’s recommended mobile SEO friendly design pattern, as it serves the same HTML code on the same URL regardless of the users’ device (desktop, tablet, mobile, non-visual browser).

According to Google a Mobile friendly website should fulfill the following three main Mobile SEO guidelines:
1. The pages should render legibly at any screen resolution,
2. A mark up set on a content, should be viewable on any mobile device, and
3. Whatever the window size, a site should never show a horizontal scrollbar.

Mobile Devices recognized by Google

Google recognizes three main types of mobile devices:

1. Smarthpones,
2. Multimedia phones, and
3. Feature phones.

Because of a much larger screen size Google treats Tablets as a device having its own class.

The main difference between these categories of Mobile devices is that Smartphones render a broad set of HTML5 specifications, whereas Multimedia phones might not support some of the extension APIs in the HTML5 standard.

On the other end are Feature phones that have very limited capabilities and there browsers can only render cHTML (iMode), WML, XHTML-MP, etc.