The Most Harmful Mobile SEO Mistakes To Avoid

There are 10 mobile SEO mistakes every website owner should avoid to remain in the SERPs, make their web visitors happy, and at the same time drive more organic traffic. Mobile SEO Mistakes To Avoid

Since mobilegeddon in 2015, Google has been delivering a consistent message, and they are now switching to mobile-first indexing.

The Mobile-first Indexing means Google will crawl mobile websites first, and they will only stick to the mobile websites.  Google has promised not to rank your desktop website well, even if it is the best. They only want to focus on the mobile website since it is the way most people access the internet now. 

Google has planned to switch to 100% Mobile-First indexing in 2021, and they are now cleaning u any straggling website. What does this mean? Google is going to crawl the website mobile-first. 

Website owners need to pay close attention to Core Web Vitals, check mobile content for opportunities, and fix the mobile UX issues as Mobile SEO is more important than ever.

Below are 10 mobile SEO mistakes all website owners should avoid to ensure their website remains on the SERPs and drives more traffic.

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1. Core Web Vitals: Slow Site Speed

It is imperative for a fast, fast-to-load website but must have a speedy interaction. 

We should all have it in mind that Page load speed is part of Google ranking factors. In fact, two-thirds of Core Web Vitals updates has to do with the site speed, which is strongly affected by Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and First Input Delay (FID).

From Google research, analysis, and even outside the search engine ranking factors, 53% of website users will abandon a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. 

Website owners should make sure that their site and every web page are loading in one second, and below are the fixes that can help sleep up a mobile website:

• Minimize requests and redirects: Keep the pages simple, clean, and eliminate any 301 redirects as much as possible. In addition, remove all unnecessary elements, optimize HTML code, and minify CSS and JavaScript, which might slow down the website speed.
• Resize and compress images: There are built-in tools available in WordPress that you can use to resize images and compress file sizes automatically.
• Check your hosting solution: A cheap third-party hosting solution is a factor here, as they won’t give your site the speed to host a vast volume of traffic.
• Check your progress:  Google PageSpeed Insight and Lighthouse are good tools for checking your website’s performance. So please make use of them.
• Use new native web technologies: Make use of Lazy-Loading to delay loading unnecessary or large files.

2. Core Web Vitals: Interstitials

Google announced in 2017 that.

“pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as high.” 

The changes Google was talking about did not have any significant impact on ranking until now. The Intrusive Interstitials are newsletter signups, pop-up ads, and other banners that interfere with users accessing web content on your website. 

In June 2021, these ranking factors were partially extended into the CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) metric. CLS is a Core Web Vitals factor used for measuring the overall layout shift that occurs on a web page as it loads. It oversees interstitials moving content around, pop-ups shifting content down, and other irritating user-unfriendly UX. 

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Website owners should bear in mind that any website or page with a poor user experience will be ranked lower in organic search. This includes: 

• Like the one users accidentally click standalone interstitials that are difficult to exit, redirects users to a new page.
• A pop-up that covers the page’s content like those that cover page when you scroll through the page and those that pop up when users click through the Google search result.
• Deceptive layouts where the above-the-fold portion tricks you into thinking you are viewing an interstitial. 

Google has some exceptions to this rule, and they are:

• Sized banners that are reasonable, e.g., the app install banners located above pages provided by Safari and Chrome
• The legally necessary interstitial like age verification and cookies usage.
• The login dialog for unindexable content like private content such as emails and contents behind paywalls.

3. Missing Content: Blocked Files

Some mobile sites are totally different from desktop sites, and users can easily find out that there is content missing between them. Website owners should set their site for Googlebot to be able to crawl it like an average user.

Unfortunately, website owners who restrict access to JavaScript, CSS, and image files are actually harming their websites on Google rankings. I will advise website owners to check their site robots.txt file to see any disallowed instructions on the file.

Go to Google Search Console and test your robots.txt file. Use Fetch by Google to ensure there are no further indexing issues and the mobile-friendly test for mobile-specific issues. Always check your desktop and mobile URLs for differences between the two.

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4. Missing Content: Bad Redirects/Cross Links

Redirecting a deleted page on your website is a good practice, but a faulty redirection constitutes a significant issue on a website that has not been optimized for mobile.

Typical areas of improvement are: 

• If a mobile user lands on your desktop version by mistake, redirect them back to the mobile version of the same page they are looking for. They must not be redirected back to the mobile site homepage. 
• Website owners who do not have a smartphone equivalent desktop page should fix it ASAP. Until those pages are live, do not leave users on the desktop page instead of redirecting them to the mobile homepage.
• Mobile users who request dynamically generated URLs must be taken to an equivalent mobile URL that will properly display the information they are seeking.
• All mobile users across all devices must be served the same content.
• Website owners should avoid mistakenly linking to desktop-optimized versions of their pages from the mobile URLs.

The best way to prevent these is to make sure your website is responsive rather than a separate domain to avoid the most common mislinking problems

with Google. This will help you isolate mapping issues and detect crawling errors that you can later correct in the Google Search Console.

Make sure you Verify your mobile website with Google as this will help isolate mapping issues and detect crawling errors that you can later correct in Google Search Console.

5. Missing Content: Mobile-Only 404s

Users on the desktop and mobile versions should be able to access the same content on your website. However, as Google is giving high priority to the mobile version of the website now, any content that can not be found on the mobile site but is present on the desktop version will not be ranked.

Website owners should fix any instances where mobile users receive 404 errors while accessing a desktop page.

Avoid linking to broken or missing content, and ideally, crawl your site from a mobile user-agent to find any 404s.

6. Missing Content: Unplayable Content

Website owners who like to include multimedia or video on their web page should consider its effect on the site speed and make sure it is playable. You should include a transcript whenever possible as this will help both Google indexing and users who need closed captioning.

Furthermore, if you wish to add animated content on your website, Google recommends using HTML5, and you can easily create it in Google Web Designer and be all browsers supportive. Note, make sure all animated content has a good cumulative layout shift threshold.

7. Missing Content: Structured Data

As the internet is getting flooded with millions of websites now. Google is also heading toward accurate, rich, and instant answers to queries.

Using schema.org to provide those answers will help in mobile search results.

Website owners who are not using Schema or Structured Data markup to categorize their content miss out big time on a critical driver of organic CTR. Instead, Google and its users usually respond to rich snippets that display information samples of what they are looking for. 

Use a Rich Snippet tool and Structured Data testing tool to ensure your structured data is well-maintained across the site.

Your rich snippets may not show up in search results for many reasons. Unfortunately, improper mobile implementation is one of those reasons. Mobile SEO Mistakes To Avoid

8. Bad UX: Poor Mobile Design

Most people get mixed up between “mobile-friendly” and “mobile-first.”

Mobile-first means that Google will crawl your mobile site before it crawls the desktop site, and the mobile site is what it cares all about. Mobile-friendly means your website is designed well for mobile devices.

You don’t have to be mobile-friendly to be mobile-first, but you have to be mobile-friendly to succeed in a mobile-first world.

So design for smartphones and tablets, not the desktop experience. Advisably, avoid illegible fonts, small font sizes, and on-screen clutter. Space your page elements so that mobile users aren’t at risk of clicking the wrong link or button.

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9. Bad UX: Not Specifying Mobile Viewport

Mobile screens come in all shapes and sizes, so if you don’t specify the correct viewports using the viewport meta tag, then your users may experience pages improperly fitted to their devices.

Common mistakes include:

• Using fixed-width viewports, which are only optimized for certain devices.
• Poor minimum viewport parameters, leave users with smaller devices high and dry.

Fortunately, these are relatively easy problems to fix:

1. Enable user scaling.
2. Control your page’s basic dimensions and scaling using the meta viewport tag.
3. Match the screen’s width in device-independent pixels with width=device-width.
4. Include initial-scale=1. This ensures a 1:1 relationship between CSS pixels and device-independent pixels

These fixes don’t only help mobile users and crawlers but are essential for accessibility as well.

You can also use CSS media queries to style your page differently for small and large screens. For more information, visit the Google Developers blog on Responsive Web Design Basics.

10. Responsive Strategies: Not Cross-Checking Metrics You Rely On

You need to understand how the tools you use every day work and how they calculate the metrics you rely on. 

When optimizing your mobile or desktop version, make sure you use excellent site auditing tools to discover your gaps.

Ensure you check your content, links, title and meta tags, schema markup, etc. Just make sure you check everything that will make your website a success and don’t forget to check the desktop version against the mobile site. 

You also need to understand that when different site audit tools brag for similar functions, you need to double-check your results very well against the results of another tool; you might be surprised by how much they differ.

Make sure you understand how each tool arrives at the metrics they churn. This will help you identify the numbers that matter most to your business so that you can rely on the metrics that matter. Mobile SEO Mistakes To Avoid

Responsive SEO

Desktop and Mobile SEO all start in the same place: usability. 

The scope of any successful SEO strategy depends on a solid understanding of your audience. This research should be the backbone of everything you do on your website – SEO, site design and even your content should depend on what your audience sees and read.  If you know how consumers behave online, you will be better able to appeal to your audience.

Not understanding your customers usually leads to many of the most common SEO mistakes, whether choosing the wrong keywords, using headlines that address the wrong pain points, or promoting on the wrong channels.

Conclusion

You can avoid all the above-mentioned mistakes and work tirelessly to optimize your mobile SEO, but note, that all of these efforts will fall flat if your content doesn’t appeal to your target audience.

Do yourself a favor and use your favorite tools to tap into your customers’ conversations (and your competitors) are having about your brand. Get to know your core offer and your audience intimately. Then you’ll be ready to build an amazing and optimized mobile website.

Would you like to read more about Mobile SEO-related articles? If so, we invite you to take a look at our other tech topics before you leave!