For the past few years, “mobile first” has been the mantra for web developers, designers, and content producers to capture the vast and continuously growing mobile market. At this point, mobile web traffic eclipses desktop PC traffic by a sizeable margin, and failing to capitalize on this trend means missing out on the lion’s share of the traffic that could be going to your brand. Search engine optimization (SEO) has been a staple of the marketing world for years, and now SEO experts are starting to adopt a mobile-first mentality, too.
Playing with Algorithms
Google commands roughly two thirds of all searches conducted online, and recently unveiled a new update that would offer preference to sites optimized for mobile devices. Web developers scrambled to ensure their sites performed admirably across mobile devices, leading to the advent of concepts like responsive design. Now, SEO professionals need to have a firm grasp over mobile-focused data and functionality.
To judge your SEO’s effectiveness on mobile devices, you’ll need the reports showing your mobile audience’s search behaviors and trends. This will help you target your SEO more effectively to capture search results from your audience and hopefully draw them away from your competition. You’ll want to investigate third-party mobile ranking sites to check your progress and make adjustments accordingly.
Check the Competition
It’s important to understand the context behind your site’s visibility on mobile devices. If you’re not getting the share of traffic you expected, it’s important to find out why this is happening. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to analyze what your main competitors are doing to capture mobile searches.
Mobile Website Triage
You may find that your mobile site’s construction is hurting your SEO efforts, so obtain your site’s page speed information and talk to your development team about how to improve it. Make sure your mobile content renders appropriately on mobile devices and determine if your page load times are acceptable. If not, you may need to adjust your mobile site’s design for better SEO results.
Ultimately, mobile-first SEO will be the standard, much like it became for web development. There is simply too much mobile device web traffic to ignore, and the number of mobile devices and searches performed on those devices continues to grow at a staggering pace. Adopting a mobile-first approach to SEO will help ensure your brand gets its due share of search engine traffic as the mobile market continues to grow and evolve.