Top 10 Most Harmful Mobile SEO Mistakes

Want to drive more traffic to your website? You’re not alone. The billions of websites operational in the world are vying for the top rank on search engines and that’s why your SEO efforts matter more than ever.

Ever since 2015, Google has been talking about Mobilegeddon and unless you’re living under a rock, you would know the importance of switching to mobile-first indexing.

What is Mobile SEO?

Just like you performed search engine optimization for your desktop website, you need to do the same for your mobile site. Google now crawls mobile sites first and thus, no matter how good your desktop site is, if the mobile version isn’t up to the mark, Google won’t rank you well. As a business, you need to optimize your website in a way that looks perfect on a mobile screen – whether it’s an Apple or an Android phone. 62.06% of website traffic now comes from a mobile device – time to rethink your SEO strategies, right?

Why is Mobile SEO Important?

When you focus on mobile SEO, it guarantees that your mobile audience will enjoy a seamless browsing experience on your website. Whether it is the site structure, page speed, or UI/UX design, being mobile-friendly goes a long way in delivering a positive user experience.

For those who have a well-optimized website for search engines, making a few changes can help you in your mobile SEO. However, there are some harmful mistakes that most entrepreneurs and business owners do, resulting in lower rankings and bad customer experiences.

Here are the top 10 mistakes you should avoid ensuring optimum rankings on search engines:

1. Longer Page Load Time - #SpeedMatters

Did you know that 53% of people will abandon a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load? Resize and compress your images, minimize redirects and requests, check your hosting solutions and use native web technologies for faster load times.

2. Presence of Unplayable Content - #PlaytheFuture

If your website hasn’t been updated in a long time and has some flash files that aren’t mobile-compatible, it’s time to work with a web design and development agency in Pune to transform all your videos into a mobile-friendly format. Also, if you’re including animated content, use HTML5 to optimize the speed.

3. Too Much Missing Content - #RethinkMobile

If your mobile website and desktop websites are drastically different, there could be some content missing between them. The Googlebot must be able to crawl your website just like any other user. Restricted access to JavaScript, CSS or Image files can harm your rankings.

4. Excessive Mobile Only 404s - #ResolveErrors

There can be instances where desktop users can see a particular page but mobile users get a 404 error. In such cases, it’s essential to crawl your website from a mobile user agent and find all the prevalent 404s to resolve them.

5. Poor Mobile Design - #UIExpertise

While website designers are professionals in creating a striking web design, many times, they fail to envision how the design will look on a mobile screen. A responsive design and user-friendly UI/UX are essential to boost your SEO ranking.

6. Faulty Redirects or Cross Links - #ImprovedLinking

Websites that aren’t optimized for mobile viewing can suffer a lot from faulty redirects, especially on websites that have different URLs for their web and mobile versions. Make sure you don’t mistakenly link to desktop-optimized pages from your mobile URLs as it can hamper your rankings.

7. Missing Out on Titles and Meta Descriptions - #LeverageOpportunities

Since mobile screens are comparatively smaller, you need to focus on concise and precise text to spread information. Similarly, ensuring all pages have titles and meta descriptions will enhance your SEO results.

8. Not Specifying Mobile Viewport - #UXFixing

If you miss out on specifying the correct viewports, your users will experience badly fitted designs on their devices. Enable user scaling in your design, control the page’s basic dimensions and style your page differently for big and small screens.

9. Disregarding the Magic of Fonts - #VisualTreats

Many amateur designers or developers tend to miss font ratios and spacing when working on a mobile website. Remember, your headings, sub-headings and text must be visually optimized to meet the needs of your mobile users.

10. Forgetting to Compress Images - #ConquerDelays

Heavy images can take a long time to load and your mobile users may lose patience by then. All the files on your mobile website should be resized and compressed without losing their quality. You can do this using many online tools for hassle-free compression.

Mobile-friendly websites are a must-have in today’s smartphone age. If your website is doing well on the desktop ranking but needs a boost in the mobile search engine, it’s time to consult our SEO experts. At SenseBite, we understand your requirements, analyse your entire website and recommend changes to better SEO results. Talk to us to overcome these mistakes today!

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