Let Voice And Mobile Optimization Drive Your 2018 SEO Engagement

 

Mobile optimization is how you make sure visitors can not only access your content using a mobile device, but also have an experience optimized for such technology.

 

What Exactly Is Mobile Optimization?

 

People are spending a growing amount of time each year on mobile phones, tablets, and devices. Yet, too many websites aren’t actually designed to handle varying load times or screen sizes. Mobile optimization is the process of analyzing a website’s design, structure, pagespeed, images, content, links, and many other factors to make sure you’re not ignorantly sending mobile users away to competitors because your own site is burdensome or even unusable.

 

Are There Best Practices For Mobile SEO?

If you know that you’ve already optimized your site sell for search engines, then you only need to take a few more steps for mobile optimization.

 

Page Speed:

 

Given connectivity and hardware factors, which sometimes change just based on where a person is, page speeds for mobile users are far more critical than they are for desktop users. Optimizing images is a good start, but you should also reduce redirects, leverage browser caching, and minimize coding.

 

Avoid Blocking Images, JavaScript, Or CSS:

 

Older mobile devices wouldn’t support many of these elements, so a lot of webmasters handling mobile sites blocked them out individually or even collectively. Nowadays, it’s no longer necessary. Also, consider that the Smartphone GoogleBot is wanting to see all the content users do, and then also categorize it. So, hiding anything is a bad idea now. Such elements also prove essential in Google figuring out if your site is responsive or not.

 

Mobile Site Design:

Source: http://bit.ly/2oXavdm

Mobile devices are doing more than revolutionizing how sites get designed, they’re simplifying things. “Above the fold” was a term carried over from newspapers to desktop content, but it loses meaning when people can just scroll endlessly.

 

Optimize Meta Descriptions And Titles:

Source: http://bit.ly/2CLy4HZ

Remember the mobile users have smaller screens, and so there’s a lot less space to work with. If you want your best work showing up in SERPs, then you need to be as concise as is practical when you create URLs, meta descriptions, and titles. Just make sure you don’t actually sacrifice any of your information or quality in the process.

 

Local Search Optimization:

Does your business have a local element? You need to remember to optimize any mobile content for those searching locally. That means standardizing your name, phone number, and address, as well as making sure your site’s metadata has the city and state included.

 

SEO is how you go on the attack in marketing. Your efforts here might not get recognized for your eventual success, and yet you know you can’t win without it. Keep reading to learn a half-dozen SEO points you need to consider for your content marketing in 2018:

 

1) Brand A “Mobile First” Burn Mark On Your Forehead:

Source: http://bit.ly/2BmCZTz

Okay, don’t take this one literally. You’re not being advised to physically harm yourself, and you likely couldn’t find anyone who would legally do that in the first place.

 

What you do need to do is remember each and every day that more than half of all searches are happening on mobile devices, which means that mobile consumers are who you should structure your content for before anyone and everyone else.

 

Consider your page design. Do you even know how it looks on someone’s phone? Can the fonts be read easily? Do users have the power to zoom if buttons are difficult to access?

 

On top of all this, remember to make mobile sharing easy. Social icons are better than text, particularly since images prove more effective at getting the eye’s attention. That comes in really handy when your content is so delightful that they just feel compelled to share it.

 

2) Make All Your Content Available To Mobile Users:

Source: http://bit.ly/2z5oLjW

Google is gearing up to change to an index that is mobile-first. It’s going to take mobile content into account, meaning that only the mobile version of a website might be visible in the search results.

 

If you want to keep the ground you’ve already gained, then you have to make sure that every piece of content you have is also available on the mobile version of your site. You can use an SEO consultant in New York to help you make sure that you have 1-to-1 alignment between mobile and desktop experiences if your two websites don’t share a URL. Verify that the mobile URL has everything the desktop address has to offer.

 

3) Page Speed Is More Critical Than Ever Before:

Source:http://bit.ly/2BaJhl1

Everyone hates waiting on their phone to load a page, and that plays a serious role in your SEO. If you know anything about SEO ranking factors, then you know that page speed is a critical one.

 

Did you know that you can reduce photo sizes anywhere from 40 to 90 percent without sacrificing image quality? That’s an easy win in your fight with slow loads that drive consumers to other sites.

 

You might even want to consider the mobile page-speed answer that Google developed. Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMPS, lack extraneous features such as excessive JavaScript, so they load in the blink of an eye. Using AMPS also means that a marketer could leverage features specific to them in Google search results. Also, it is right now the only way you can get featured in the carousel of top stories.

 

It takes development side-work to get AMP up and running, but it’s definitely worth it. If you don’t have the resources or personnel for this, talk to an SEO consultant in New York.

 

4) Be Prepared For Voice Search To Dominate:

Source: https://selnd.com/2kwhMfB

Traditional search phrases are often between two and five words. Voice searches are different, as people usually speak in full sentences. This brings about an entirely new way of organizing content.

 

Marketers are now being advised that their title or subhead should include any verbally-expressed query they’re hoping to answer, as that will boost the odds that Google features the answer they provide. For instance, if you currently have a page focused on the topic of ‘when will Brexit finally happen?’, then make sure that this question is right there in the title of your page. Also, make sure it’s verbatim.

 

You might even want to start using voice search yourself as much as you can. That will help get a good feel for just how voice queries are structured to start with, and you can be in a better position to deliver content that satisfies those searches.

 

5) Remember Just How Your Demo Speaks:

Source: http://bit.ly/2B9qp5K

What specific words are used in your target demographic? You need to optimize for the language they speak as well as the words they use. If you’re running a website with content about a basketball player, you might need to also realize that people look them by their nicknames. In the modern NBA, Internet users might not even know how to spell a player’s name, so they look up the ‘Greek Freak’ or ‘the Unicorn’ as some up and coming foreign players have been affectionately nicknamed.

 

Also, imitate the success of others. Study any sites which Google directs you to, and you’ll quickly learn how you can structure your own content in ways that Google prefers.

 

6) Enhance Your Relationships With Social Team Members:

Source: http://bit.ly/2kwjq0L

Google’s focus is squarely on getting its users content that is as relevant as it can possibly be. In order to gauge something as subjective as relevance, Google is likely to start judging social discussions of content. As a marketer, you need to reach out to any influences you can and even share your own content through social media. Make yourself familiar with your social team, because you’re going to really need them in the new year.

 

Follow each of these ideas alongside the contributions of your SEO consultant in New York, and you’ll have an awesome 2018!

Author Bio

Grace Lee has been practicing in the field of digital marketing for several years now. She has already brought numerous sites in search engines’ first pages in search results. In her spare time, she loves listening to podcasts about Google algorithm updates and other matters related to SEO.