What do you do if your mobile website is not optimized for search engines?

1 Mobile Audit

Begin by conducting a thorough audit of your mobile website. This means checking for mobile-friendliness, page loading times, and the overall user experience. Google's Mobile-Friendly Test can be a useful tool to see how your site performs on mobile devices. Additionally, assess your site's structure and content to ensure they are optimized for mobile users. Remember, a good mobile experience is essential for retaining visitors and improving your search engine rankings.

2 Improve Speed

Speed is a critical factor for mobile websites. Slow loading times can frustrate users and lead to higher bounce rates, which negatively impact your SEO. To enhance your site's speed, optimize images, leverage browser caching, and minimize the use of heavy scripts and plugins. Tools like Google's PageSpeed Insights provide actionable recommendations to improve your website's loading times on mobile devices.

3 Responsive Design

Responsive design is non-negotiable for a mobile-optimized website. This approach ensures that your site adjusts seamlessly to different screen sizes and devices. Check that your website's design is fluid, with readable text and accessible navigation on smaller screens. CSS media queries are an essential part of responsive design, allowing you to apply different styles based on the device's characteristics.

@media screen and (max-width: 600px) {
  .navigation {
    font-size: 14px;
  }
}        

4 Content Strategy

Your content strategy must cater to mobile users. This means creating concise, easily digestible content with clear headings and bullet points. Focus on the relevance and value of the content to the mobile audience, and ensure that it is easily navigable with a finger tap. Engaging, high-quality content is more likely to be shared and linked to, which can improve your search engine rankings.

5 SEO Best Practices

Adhere to SEO best practices by optimizing your titles, descriptions, and headers for mobile search queries. Keep in mind that mobile users often search differently than desktop users, favoring shorter queries or using voice search. Incorporate local SEO strategies if your business serves a particular geographic area, as many mobile searches are local in nature. Regularly update your site with fresh content and ensure all SEO elements are in place.

6 Technical SEO

Lastly, don't overlook the technical aspects of SEO. Ensure that your mobile site has a clean structure with a logical hierarchy, proper use of tags, and is free of crawl errors. Create an XML sitemap specifically for mobile pages to help search engines crawl and index your content more effectively. Also, check that your robots.txt file doesn't inadvertently block important pages from being accessed by search engine crawlers.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?