If you are trying to boost the mobile accessibility of your website, you can actually build a mobile edition of the whole website. This is because even though mobile SEO is very close to standard SEO, it needs special changes.
There are three common options for hosting both a desktop and a mobile version of a website: hosting a mobile version on a subdomain, depending on elastic service or utilizing responsive architecture.
Hosting a smartphone edition on a subdomain is a practically outdated workaround that requires essentially running two different copies of the website, which is not realistic at all – and, apart from being messy and troublesome, is not in fact consistent with existing SEO best practices.
Dynamic service is a much better choice that allows you to host various versions of your website dynamically from the very same URL, based on the user-agent that makes the request. Although potentially more streamlined, it’s also a complicated approach that requires handling two different copies of the website behind the scenes.
According to Google, the best alternative possible for the three is responsive design, as it requires a different web and desktop edition to be hosted from the same URL and using the same code base. Here, the emphasis is clearly on adapting the interface to the user-agent making the request. This is the most technically elegant choice that would enable the adoption of websites to be available for immediate inclusion in the current Mobile First Index.
By focusing on responsive architecture rather than hosting two different copies of your smartphone and desktop website, you can potentially save a lot of hassle. When running different versions, you need to ensure that certain variables are fairly consistent in all versions, including organized data, metadata, social metadata, site maps, and site power, just to name a few.
Once you’ve introduced a responsive interface, make sure you state it explicitly to the Google bots by inserting meta name = “viewport” somewhere in the header portion of your pages.
Focus on user experience and Performance
At this moment, you might be thinking just what you can do to boost your visitors’ mobile experience and ensure that your website performs impressively every single day. Simply put, you now need to emphasize performance over aesthetics; in other words, you now need to build performance.
The most apparent aspect of excellent website success comes down to a single variable: page loading time. This isn’t just a random pet fascination with Google engineers, either! In this day and age, it’s a well-known reality that websites that take longer than a few seconds to completely load can usually lose a lot of visitors who are simply not able to wait to see what they’re searching for.
Achieving fast page loading times can be tricky, as websites begin to get larger, pages longer, and widgets more abundant. In any case, only a good programmer would do to keep the loading times short and smooth, and page loading speed is a very straightforward and clearly observable variable – so put as much resources as possible to boost this variable and the website would be much more trusted for both human users and search engine bots.
Tools for Validate your Mobile SEO website
There are two useful resources available from Google that you can use to evaluate how your website functions on mobile devices: PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse. These resources are very easy to use, and we suggest that you review your baseline results today and start looking to boost it immediately. The reports provided by these resources would show the necessities that you need to give priority to working on.
You can also try new advanced software for calculating mobile results, accessible from Google Webmaster Tools, to see more in-depth data. A fast analysis tool called “Mobile-Friendly Test” is available as well as a deep analysis tool in the “Mobile Usability” segment.Make sure you get acquainted with these tools and have a good idea of what to do next to match your website with the new user needs and best practices for mobile search engine optimization.
