10 Deadly Mobile SEO Mistakes to Avoid in 2020

Mobile SEO Mistakes: From different algorithms such as “mobilegeddon” in 2015 to mobile-first indexing in last 2016,Google has been always delivering a message i.e. your website should be mobile-first.

It means mobile SEO is now more pivotal than ever. 

Here are the top 10 deadly mobile SEO mistakes that you have to avoid if you want to get better positions in search engine results pages, grab more traffic to your mobile website.

1. Slow Site Speed

Page load speed is one of the main Google ranking factors. 53 percent will abandon a webpage if its loading speedis more than 3 sec to load by Google research.

Your website goal should be to get a mobile page to render in under 1 sec.

How will you get a mobile page to render in under 1 sec?

Here are a few immediate tips that speed up your mobile website (Mobile SEO):

• Minimum redirects: Webpages should be simple and clean. Avoid using the 301 redirects as much as possible, optimize your HTML code, remove unnecessary codes from the page, and also minify the Javascript and CSS code.
• Image Optimization: You can install the plugin such as compresspng.com to compress the file size.
• Check Web Hosting : If you have large numbers of page on your website then cheap hosting provider wouldn’t give you the speed like e-commerce website.
• Check website performance: Using Google PageSpeed insights is a easy tool to check the website’s performance.

You can also create AMP optimized pages. These pages load multiple times faster than regular. 

2. Blocked Files

If you mobile version are different from the desktop version, then there might be chance of content gab between them.

Google crawlers should able to access the website same as the users. So, don’t block the CSS, JavaScripts, and image files on your site for the crawlers that will derank your website keywords.

Check your robots.txt file on monthly basis to see if any important elements are disallowed mistakenly.

Test your robots.txt file in the Google Search Console.

Moreover, check the difference between the both desktop and mobile version and solve these differences.

3. Interstitials Ads

If your website displays any pop-up ads that cover the full screen, then you might rethink your mobile design- especially when it is your most compelling CTA.

Any website that has poor user experience would have lower rank in the search engine result pages. These includes:

• Pop-ups that appear on a page’s main compelling con.
• Pop-ups that cover a website’s page main content
• It is hard to dismiss the standalone interstitials, especially when clicking on these redirects you to a webpage.
• Don’t use misleading layouts in which the above the fold part tricks users to view an interstitial.

4. Unplayable Content

Before including the video on the webpage, consider how will it affect the website speed and Is the video-embedded is working on all the different devices?

If possible try to use transcript which help both the users who need caption and search engine for indexing.

Use HTML5 if you want to include the animated content on the site.

5. Bad redirect or cross links

The major issue is wrong redirects which should be optimized for mobile. It is more pivotal for those who have separate mobile and desktop URLs. 

You can improve in the given area:

• If  mobile users by mistake land on the desktop, then redirect that users to the mobile of the webpage they are looking for. You should not redirect them to the mobile website’s homepage.
• If you don’t have the mobile version same as the desktop version. Then solve it before the pages will be live, you should land users to the desktop version as opposed to redirect them to the mobile home page.
• Mobile users who requested for the dynamic URLs must be taken to the mobile URL that properly displays the information they are looking for.
• Mobile users should be appeared the same content across all devices.
• Avoid linking to desktop versions of the website pages from the mobile URLs.

6. 404 Error

Users on the mobile and desktop versions should be shown the same content. If users access the page on desktop, but not able to see the content on mobile. Then, your website has an error and you have to solve it as soon as possible to maintain the traffic on the website.

Avoid interlinking to the broken page.

Generally, you should eliminate all 404 and soft 404 pages- these could help improve the search engine ranking of your website. Website auditing software such as ahref will help you easily find and fix the broken links and 404 errors.

7. No Rich Snippets

The search engines like Google always show the results with rich, intent match, and accurate to the queries. Using the schemas on the website can help in improving the CTR of website in the mobile search results.

If you are not using the structure data markup on your website then you are loosing the organic CTR.

You should check the schema of your website in the structured Data testing tool to conform that schemas are correctly implemented across the website.

8. Not specify the Mobile Viewport

Mobile viewports comes in different sizes, so use the correct viewport by using meta tag.

Some of the mistakes are:

• Fixed width that is used for certain mobile devices.
• Minimum parameters that leave users with small mobile devices dry and high.

These mobile mistakes are easy to fix:

• You should enable the user scaling.
• You can control the dimensions of the page by using viewport meta.
• Match the smartphone screen width in device with width=device-width.
• You should ensure the relationship pf 1:1 between the device-pixel and CSS pixel by including initial-scale=1.

9. Poor User Experience

Some of the website owners are confused with the term “mobile-first” and “mobile-friendly”. Here, Mobile-first defines that search engine crawlers is going to crawl the mobile version before the desktop version, and that’s why mobile version of any website is very important.

Mobile-friendly means you site is responsive for all mobile devices. You website should be mobile-friendly to see the growth in the mobile-first.

So, start designing for the tablets and smartphones, not for the desktop version.

Avoid small fonts and should be space between the elements so that users are not click the wrong button.

10. Not Cross-Check the Metrics of Tools You Rely On

Understand the metrics of the tools that you are using on the daily work. Whenever you are optimizing the website for both desktop and mobile, ensure that you are using the best SEO audit tool to find the gaps.

Check the onpage SEO including the content, internal links, and title, description, schemas, and any other factors that paly a important role in the website growth. And also compare both the desktop and mobile version of your website.

Different SEO tools have different parameters to audit the website. So, cross-check the results also with other tool and you will see the difference in the results.

Conclusion:

Try to avoid all these mobile SEO mistakes and work to optimize the mobile SEO, but all these efforts have no use if your content intent is wrong to your target audience. Try to know the audience intent and then you can start to optimize your mobile website.