Mobile SEO can help you improve your rankings. If you have a WordPress site, getting started is not difficult; Just take a look at the simple-to-apply tips in this mobile-friendly WordPress website SEO guide.
Over the course of the last decade, we went from a very small subset of the world’s population using Palm Pilots and PDAs to 2.53 billion people having smartphones in 2018. That’s exactly 1/3 of every single person on Earth. So if your current marketing strategy isn’t focusing specifically on mobile SEO…that should change.
Luckily, since mobile search is booming, there are lots of neat tips and guide that we’ve been able to figure out that will absolutely make your SEO mobile-friendly WordPress website.
Website Mobile SEO In WordPress
These days, one of your main concerns for mobile SEO has to be page speed. Sure, keywords and clean code are ultra-important — they always will be. But if you have people searching for your site on their phones, they want your information from fifteen seconds ago, not fifteen seconds from now.
In this world, milliseconds matter. Tools like the Pingdom Website Speed Tester let you see exactly what can be better optimized on your site.
Now let me give you some tips that, once you go down, will increase your page rank with a mobile-friendly SEO guide.
1. Think About Google AMP
Love it or hate it, Google AMP is one of the best ways to get your site to rank in mobile searches. It’s a fairly controversial bit of technology, and you’ll have to weigh the pros and cons regarding whether it’s right for your mobile WordPress website SEO.
Stealing Tom’s words in his amazing blog post on the subject, AMP can be summed up like this:
The AMP Project is an open-source initiative launched by Google in October of 2015 as a way to improve the overall performance of mobile websites. The project boasts its own lightweight framework – AMP HTML – and was designed to build super light web pages, thus cutting down on loading times.
While the AMP Project is by no means the only lightweight framework developed specifically for this purpose, it’s pretty safe to say that with Google’s backing, they’re in an enviable position. For example, sites developed using the AMP framework will be cached directly by Google at no cost to their developers (although they’re free to use other caching services if they choose to do so).
The controversy can stem from Google caching your page content itself. Like I said, just weigh the pros and cons, keeping in mind that site speed is absolutely one of the main factors search engines take into account when indexing sites. It’s worth doing your research and determining if AMP is right for you.
2. Optimize Your Images
It may seem pretty obvious, but the best and most common way of increasing page speed is to turn all the big stuff on your page into little stuff.
But that’s easier said than done.
The images are big. And yours are probably bigger than you realize (mine always are). And as you can see in my example above, big ole images make up for the bulk of the issues that Pingdom found.
The easiest way to deal with image file sizes is to use a plugin like Imagify, Smush, or TinyPNG. They each have a bulk optimization feature, and you can reduce your image sizes by 50-80% with a click or two.
That can be (and often is) whole seconds off your page load speed, which is amazing for a WordPress website mobile-friendly.
3. Minify Your JavaScript and CSS
Minification takes beautifully formatted and impeccably structured JavaScript or CSS files and removes all the spaces between the characters and lines. It makes them an almost-unreadable wall of text, but all those blank spaces take up valuable bytes your users have to load. And browsers can read the code with or without them.
So take ’em out!
Divi users have this one easily. Head to Divi -> Theme Options, and at the very bottom of the General tab, you’ll find two toggles that say “Minify and Combine JavaScript/CSS Files.” Turn them on, and bada-bing, your site just got a quarter second more appealing to Google.
For the non-Divi users, it’s not quite as simple, but easy. But seriously, you just need to access the JS/CSS files you want to minify. You will copy/paste the code into either a JavaScript or CSS minified and then paste the output back into the original files and boom! Faster mobile SEO friendly WordPress site.
4. Stop The Pop-ups
Do you know what is the worst? Being on a website that has a really funny video of the cutest kitty you’ve ever seen, and then BAM! your whole screen is taken over by a pop-up that you can’t close. So you can’t even find that doggone little X. And no, you don’t want their special report on kitty cuteness, the pop-up advertisers. You just want to watch the most adorable video ever. But you literally can’t.
That’s not a good experience, and Google knows it. If you do this, know that Big G will not necessarily penalize you for using obtrusive pop-ups, but they sure aren’t going to reward you with higher rankings, either.
Oh, and speaking of not being able to click on or even find the X…
5. Make Your Touchable Elements Touchable
When designing for mobile, your touchable elements must be distinct, responsive, and apparent.
If there is a button, it needs to look and act like a button. No hidden functions or tricks. If a pop-up needs to be closed by tapping an X in the corner, ensure that your users can find the X easily and that it does what it’s supposed to do.
Menus should be readable, forms fillable, and videos playable. All with a touch, with minimal fuss. And definitely no muss.
On your WordPress SEO website, menus on mobile should be readable, forms fillable, and videos playable. All with one touch, with minimal fuss. And definitely no mess.
6. Use a Responsive Design
The days of having a separate mobile version of your site are gone. (This is your opportunity to cheer and do a happy dance.) So your website should function the same way on a cell phone or iPad as on a desktop. It should look the same and use the same elements and structure. Google looks at this and factors it into the search rankings.
Why?
Because mobile-only sites are notoriously terrible (plus they generally use tons of redirects which slows down the experience and makes users bounce). They tend to be difficult to use and difficult to navigate. Usually, they don’t have the functionality users want, but they can only access it via desktop.
Again, that is a bad user experience. And Google doesn’t like that.
7. Optimize For Local Mobile SEO
As mentioned above, mobile SEO is better than desktop SEO because it usually uses location information based on the user’s location. So that’s why it’s important to optimize your website for local SEO. At a minimum, you should include your business name, address, and phone number in your site’s metadata) to optimize your site for location results. For the most advanced claimed tactic, you should search for a Google My Business page and use Schema markup to create rich snippets in the SERPs.
Mobile SEO Consider the User Experience
People aren’t robots. They don’t care if your website is perfectly structured for mobile-friendly SEO WordPress. If it isn’t fun to use, they will bounce, regardless of how rock-solid your keyword strategy is or how clean your code is.
Not long ago, Google started ranking for user experience in addition to traditional SEO factors like speed and keywords. The takeaway here? Make sure you optimize for your users as much as you do the crawlers.
What’s Next for Mobile SEO WordPress?
Who knows? It could be almost anything, really. But the theme of the past few years is apparent: putting users first. So that’s what you should take away from this.
Sure, content is king, but if the user doesn’t have a good time interacting on your site, Google won’t grant them an audience in front of his majesty.
What mobile SEO tactics have you seen the most return from?
Conclusion
After reading this guide, you learn that SEO on mobile should be an integral part of your overall SEO strategy. With smartphone usage exploding worldwide, developers and marketers must adopt a mobile-first mindset when designing and building websites. Using the tips, we’ve outlined and thorough keyword scoring and site reviews, you can ensure smartphone users have a better chance of finding your site’s content in search results.
