In a recent post on this blog, I introduced some current trends which I believe will be important for anyone who cares about website SEO in St Charles in 2016. One of the easiest predictions to make was the fact that businesses will really need to focus on being found by mobile Internet-users.
Improve Your Online Visibility with SEO for St Charles
To put the mobile search explosion into perspective, we are now at a point in time when one in every four Internet searches is conducted on a mobile device, as pointed out by a writer on the Clickz website named Navneet Kaushal. Navneet’s article (A Beginner’s Guide to Mobile SEO) also points out some of the key differences between mobile and desktop SEO; many of which you’ll need to understand if you wish to practice effective SEO for St Charles mobile-device-users to find you.
The following five tips will help you do just that—optimize your website effectively, so local prospects find your business online via mobile search.
1) Good Mobile SEO Starts with Good Mobile Website Design
If your site is currently designed only for desktop browsing, it’s a limitation you will need to address as a priority. If mobile users struggle to navigate and view your site on a phone or tablet-screen, you will lose them. Unless you have your own people to fix the design of your website, it will be a good idea to engage a St Charles web design firm to take a look at it and advise what should be done to make it mobile-friendly.
Digital strategy expert John Tabita wrote an article for SitePoint, called Mobile SEO: 6 Steps to a Mobile-Friendly Website in which he explains that a mobile-friendly website must meet four important criteria:
- It should be made up of text which can be read without the need to zoom.
- It should contain content sized to the screen of the user, to ensure that zooming and horizontal scrolling is not necessary.
- Links on the websites should be spaced-out so that users can easily tap to open them. If the links are too close together, your site visitors can get frustrated by difficulties in following them.
- It should be designed so mobile users aren’t presented with elements that use Flash or other “mobile-unfriendly” software.
John also goes on to talk about the different forms of mobile-friendly website designs. As he suggests, you should decide (perhaps with the help of your St Charles web design partner) whether to choose a responsive site design, have separate URLs for mobile and desktop browsers, or utilize dynamic page serving.
2) Don’t Use Pop-ups
As content marketer Emma Siemasko explains in her Grasshopper Blog post Go Pop-up-less: Why You Don’t Need Pop-ups On Your Website, pop-ups are irritating to users generally, disrupt the overall experience for visitors to your site and most importantly, are intrusive and often hard to close on the small screens of mobile devices. I completely agree with Emma’s views and would recommend that your SEO strategy precludes the use of pop-ups.
3) Meta Titles and Descriptions: Less is More for Mobile
Mobile SEO for St Charles business is all about small-screen usability. In most cases, this means the old adage “less is more” often holds true. For example, Meta titles and Meta descriptions, which can generally be up to 65 and 155 characters respectively when optimized for desktop browsing, need to be shorter for mobile optimization. Try to keep your Meta titles and descriptions as concise as possible for the best mobile-user experience.
4) Don’t Block Images, JavaScript or CSS
At one time, it was standard practice to block some forms of content for mobile websites, namely CSS, JavaScript and images, since these elements didn’t play nicely on mobile devices. Today that is seldom true, so ask your St Charles SEO and web design company to ensure CSS, images and JavaScript are enabled for your mobile-friendly site.
5) Mobile and Local Go Hand-in-hand
As SEO strategist Bill Hartzer explains, there are a number of tasks relating to local searches which should form a part of your mobile SEO strategy. According to Bill’s article (Mobile SEO: How to Ensure Your Site is Mobile-friendly) for Web Marketing Today, those elements comprise:
- Getting your business venue and location included in the Google business listings
- Using schema.org code to mark up your website
- Having local-area websites list and link to your business pages
Let Google Be Your Guide
Whether you choose to work on your own mobile search engine optimization or outsource it to a provider that specializes in SEO for St Charles businesses, you shouldn’t have any problem identifying when all the hard work has paid off. Simply use a mobile device to run a Google search for your company or website name. If your site is optimized successfully for mobile searches, the Google listing entry for your website will actually state the words “mobile-friendly”. You couldn’t ask for a clearer affirmation than that.
Changescape Web is a provider of marketing solutions to small enterprises, specializing in search engine optimization for St Charles and St Louis businesses. If you’d like to know how your website SEO currently compares with your competitors, we’ll be happy to provide you with a complimentary search rank report. Just look for the form on our website, complete the fields and click “submit”.