If SEO Services are an important part of your internet marketing strategy, then you simply can’t afford to ignore mobile. Having a mobile-friendly website is now essential for a viable, successful online presence for your business.

Smartphone and tablet adoption is increasing rapidly. Mobile sales have already overtaken desktop sales, and mobile Internet usage overtook desktop internet usage in 2019. It is only logical that mobile search will leave behind desktop search soon enough. Is your business ready to reap the benefits of this new phenomenon?

Your Mobile Site Should Offer the Speed & Content of the Desktop Site

As avid searchers and Google lovers, we have often experienced the frustration of waiting… and waiting.., and then waiting some more, for a website to load. This can annoy mobile users even more, because they are typically in a hurry to get at the information they are looking for. Research statistics tell us that on average, websites can suffer a seven percent loss in conversions for every one second of delay in loading. (Source)

Mobile sites have to deal with less-than-powerful processors and potential bottlenecks in bandwidth. But for mobile searchers and shoppers that may not be a very good reason to keep them from trying to use their mobiles. If you think your customers and clients won’t use mobile to look for you, check this out:  Google says that 60 percent of all local searches originate from mobile. And what’s even better is that 80% of all mobile searches lead to conversions. Now is the time to sit up and straighten out your mobile website act!

Remember: Page Delay is Your Enemy!

And you must annihilate it to get to the coveted prize of better leads and conversions. It’s the only quest that really matters and all else is just practice leading up this.

Anyways…

That page delay can really mess things up! Industry-average for leading mobile sites is seven seconds. Imagine 7 seconds of doing nothing but staring away at the phone screen that only displays a partial page, or worse, a white screen. It must cost a lot in conversions. This is why leading sites load in one to two seconds, less than one-third of the average, and they comfortably claim many of those conversions.

Usually heavy images and video can be blamed for slow page load times. But they are vital to a great browsing experience, and an important part of the web design and content marketing elements.

Optimize Image Formats

This should be the first on the agenda against lazy loading pages. We realize that as an eCommerce SEO services provider that an eCommerce site won’t be much use without images, but there are ways to optimize image for mobile websites to enhance load times.  For example, the PNG image file format takes forever to load on mobiles; JPEG is a much better, faster option. However, it may represent a logical nightmare of sorts. Sit down with your design team and figure it out, because your profits may depend on it.

Related content: SEO strategy

Speed Up the Site with Lazy Loading

If your website is image heavy then lazy loading may just be the thing to save it. Here’s how it happens:  Your visitor accesses a page full of images and as they scroll down the page, the images appear just as they get to them. This is lazy loading. Facebook does it and LinkedIn does it. So images are not loaded until they are actually needed, that is when that part of the page comes into view. This is how you can give the visitor the illusion of a quick loading page of they interact with the page sooner.

Deploy SEO Services for Media Viewers

The usual SEO strategies and link building services such as tags and keywords are rendered useless in media viewers and video content is still pretty much invisible to search engines. A crafty way of going around this issue is with placeholder images, while the media viewer loads behind the scenes. This placeholder image has it all, i.e. alt tags and keywords that can be indexed by search engines. The media viewer shows up when it is fully loaded, or when the visitor asks for it by clicking on the placeholder image.

You may also read:

• The Ultimate Guide to Content SEO
• Schema Markup Implementation: A Step-by-Step Guide for Technical SEO
• Why Small Business Owners Should Focus More on SEO
• How to Increase your Mobile ads revenue

The Last Word: Go Mobile STAT!

The number of social media users accessing via mobile grew by 55 percent over the past year alone. Not surprisingly mobile search accounts for 31 percent of all growth in Internet activity, in the last 12 month. In fact, Facebook alone is responsible for 24 percent of all mobile activity online.

Those are some impressive numbers, and these should be enough to convince small and medium sized businesses to pay more attention.

Responsive web design is recommended by Google. It allows one website to be accessible via a variety of devices and many screen sizes without glitches.  This provides a good user-experience across devices and makes managing your SEO services and strategy a lot easier.

Build a Sustainable Local Marketing Strategy

Location data used to be a passive phenomenon for SEO purposes. But with development of specialized local search services, it has become more relevant than ever. A consumer enters a search query, and Google can quickly display your brand at or near the top of search results thanks to good location data.

According to Google’s Mobile Search Moments study, 75% of all mobile searches end up in the user taking some sort of action. Mobile users are increasingly going to company websites, checking out their favorite stores online and sharing information with their friends on the go. When it comes to local searches, the data is very compelling. Technology has made it very convenient for everyone to shop online, so much so that nearly 50% of online visitors of a store, buy online, or call their nearest branch within an hour of the search.

So how do your customers find your local storefronts? What do they see when they search online for products and services similar to yours? If your location data and website are nicely optimized for local search, potential buyers will see exactly the information they need to see to make buying from you a priority.

About the Author:

Joseph Dyson  is an SEO expert at Search Berg. Experts in website SEO services, Search Berg helps small businesses with services like website rankings, website management and reputation building etc.