Complete Guide to Mobile SEO and Mobile Sitemap

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Mar 2, 2024

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Mobile SEO

Mobile SEO refers to optimizing a Website for search queries from mobile devices. It can be implemented if a Website has a responsive Web design. This means web content automatically adjusts for the screen size, irrespective of any device used, such as a tablet, smartphone, or laptop. Note that a responsive design serves all devices with the same code. Mobile SEO enables a Website to rank for mobile searches.

Google recommends using a responsive Web design on account of the following reasons:

• Easier to share content with a single URL.
• Uses algorithms to assign indexing properties to the page.
• Requires reduced engineering time to maintain multiple pages for the same content.
• Requires a single Googlebot user agent to crawl the page once. There is no necessity for different Googlebot user agents to crawl multiple times all versions of the content.
  
  

Mobile SEO has become crucial as almost everyone uses mobile to communicate and look for information.

Factors Affecting Mobile Rankings:

Describes certain factors that positively affect mobile rankings.

Positive Factor:

• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): AMP is an open-source framework designed to create fast load times for mobile pages. Features of AMP are fewer JavaScript and CSS elements. AMP allows simple mobile websites to load instantly.
  Note that optimizing page speed and mobile experience is essential for SEO. The use of AMP then becomes important.
  
  
• Compressed Images: Creating visually appealing content is an important aspect of engaging the audience. This brings in the use of images. The use of compressed images decreases page load time.
  
  
• Mobile-friendly Keywords: These are short, unlike lengthy search terms for Websites. This is because users do not type lengthy search terms on mobile. After all, it is very tedious. Mobile keyword research is used in mobile SEO to identify keywords a mobile user might use as search terms.
  
  
• Social Signals: Social signals refer to the engagement that the content receives on social media platforms in the form of comments, likes, and shares. While Google does not consider social signals as a direct ranking factor, it does have an impact on the search rankings. Bing, on the other hand, has a direct impact on its search rankings.
  Note that over 77% of content shared using mobile is done through messaging apps such as WhatsApp. This makes such applications an excellent platform to attract visitors.
  
  
• Local SEO: Local SEO is an essential part of mobile SEO as it is found that more mobile users search for local businesses, such as"bakery near me" and "chess classes near me".
  Local searches can be enabled by using local keywords, such as "Italian bakery in Agoura Hills, CA". Using local keywords helps appear the site in local search results.
  
  

Describes certain factors that negatively affect mobile rankings.

Negative Factor:

• Crawl Errors: These are the errors that do not allow search engines to crawl. Google's Search Console provides a complete report on the errors it encounters and also guides on how to resolve them. Ensure such tools are used so that reports are constantly monitored. Any error that it reports can then be resolved.
  
  
• Too many ads: Too many ads take away the content experience. One must examine how they affect the site. A visitor can accidentally click an advertisement when scrolling the content.
  
  
• Small Fonts: An ideal mobile font size should allow the visitors to read comfortably at a distance. The ideal base font size for mobile is 16 pixels. Font sizes smaller than this will require the visitor to pinch and zoom to read. This will be a bad user experience.
  
  
• Intrusive Interstitials: Intrusive interstitials are popup ads that block most of a mobile landing page. This can frustrate users and give them a poor experience because they are unable to access the content as expected. It further adds to the problem as mobile screens are usually smaller. Google does not rank high such pages. Intrusive interstitials can:
  
  1. Cover the main content immediately after users land on a page from the search results.
  2. Cover the main content while users are looking through the page.
  3. Be displayed as a standalone interstitial that users have to dismiss before accessing the main content.
  
  
• Small Touch Elements: Small elements placed next to each other without any space can prove to be a bad mobile experience. This could occur when the user intends to click the first button but ends up clicking the next button. A mobile layout should use a lot of negative space around elements. It refers to the area around the objects that is left empty. In addition, ensure that the touch elements are not too small or close.
  
  

Mobile Sitemap

A mobile Sitemap provides information about the mobile pages. Search engines read this file to crawl mobile sites more efficiently. A sitemap informs the search engines which pages are important in the mobile site and also provides valuable information about them. Google recommends that a responsive Website developed for mobile should have a different mobile Sitemap. This should be submitted independently to the search engines so that they serve mobile search requests better.

Following are some considerations for mobile Sitemaps:

• If the site includes multiple mobile markup languages, create a separate mobile Sitemap for each markup language.
  
  
• URLs for different markup languages should be included in each mobile Sitemap that applies to the Website. For instance, a URL that serves HTML and XML content should be included in the two mobile Sitemaps.
  
  

If there are Sitemap index files to manage mobile Sitemaps, ensure each Sitemap index file includes mobile Sitemaps for one markup language only.

Points to Remember for Mobile SEO

In 2019, Google enabled mobile-first indexing by default for all new Websites. Since then, Google has been predominantly using the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. It crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone agent.

Note that while a mobile version of the pages is not mandatorily required, Google strongly recommends having them. In addition, there is no separate mobile-first index. Google Search uses only one index. It continues to show appropriate URLs (whether desktop or mobile) in search results.

Following are certain best practices for mobile SEO:

• Ensure the same content for desktop and mobile. This is because almost all indexing on the site comes from the mobile site. A mobile design layout can be different from a desktop layout to enhance the user experience. However, the primary contents should remain the same. Some of the content on mobile can move to tabs.
  
  
• Use meaningful headings.
  
  
• Both desktop and mobile sites should have the same structured data.
  
  
• Ensure to use of same page titles and meta descriptions for desktop and mobile sites.
  
  
• Bad placements of ads can harm the mobile page ranking. Follow ad standards when placing them. Ad standards can be accessed here https://www.betterads.org/standards/
  
  
• Ensure images on the mobile follow best practices. Some of the best practices are:
  1. Use high-quality images.
  2. Use the same alt text for images as the desktop site.
  3. Use the same descriptive titles, captions, and filenames for the images on the mobile site as for the desktop site.
  
  
• Both images and videos used are of supported format.
  
  
• Videos have the same structured data as the desktop site.
  
  
• Videos are placed in an easy-to-find position.
  
  
• In case, Google Search Console is used, ensure both versions are verified by the console.
  
  
• The error page status is the same on both the desktop and mobile sites.
  
  
• Ensure the robots.txt directives work as intended.