Why you must track mobile ranks and 5 useful tips to improve mobile ranks
If you've been reading SEO rank tracker's articles, you will notice one thing I've mentioned many times, that mobile ranks is getting more and more important now. If you or your company is serious about SEO and website ranks, you should pay more attention to mobile ranks from now. Signals from search engines like Google have shown that now they take mobile ranking into account before others.
Mobile rank tracking
If you've launched a new site and paid attention to the search engine spider crawl log, you will find Google's mobile bot comes at the first time. Google will first evaluate your mobile version grades to determine if it should rank well in SERPs. In one word, your whole website rank in search results depends highly on your site's mobile version. One fact you should be aware is that this is the same with all sites, even if you're only targeting desktop users. If your mobile site performs well, it will bring positive affect to your overall rank in organic results. If you're only doing well in desktop SEO but ignored optimization on mobile version, it will eventually affect your desktop SEO rank.
Now you must be expecting to know, how is your website ranking in mobile. To get the accurate mobile rank data, you will need to get the help of an SEO rank tracker. Only with one SEO rank tracker will you get the true rankings. Here is why, if you've already been doing SEO for some time, you should know that each people searching Google with mobile phone is seeing different results, even if they're searching the same keyword. This is because mobile results from Google is processed with many factors, which include locations and devices. Each phone gets a GPS module and when he searches, Google will gets his location, then Google will show results more relevant to the location. You can read this post to learn more about mobile rank tracker: Are you doing SEO without a rank tracker? You're doing wrong. If you want to track mobile rank, the SEO rank tracker can feed you with results from locations all over the world.
With Google's mobile first criterion, users can get results that are more relevant and more useful to them. If you're searching "Pizza" in Miami, then the pizza shops in Miami will be shown prior to shops from other locations. If you're searching in New York, then you will first see shops in New York. In this way, you won't get irrelevant results that are thousands of miles away. The shops who're doing mobile SEO well in this situation will rank better than others and will get more traffic.
Now you know you should track mobile ranks, here are 5 useful tips on how to improve your mobile ranks.
Your site should be responsive
Responsive web design
Have you ever viewed your site through a mobile phone? How does it look? Is it mobile friendly? If not, you should make change immediately. Responsive design means when developing a web site, you should make it viewable through phones first. The mobile version should not be a simplified version of your desktop site, almost all content, links and images viewable in desktop site should also be viewable in mobile. Google has guides on responsive design, you should learn about it.
If you have already developed another site especially for mobile devices, you should make it separated from the desktop version, they should have different URLs. A mobile site usually has URL like m.domain.com.
You should consider using Google's AMP
The aim of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) from Google is to make it possible for mobile phones load website more quickly. According to tests, sites using AMP will be loaded in 1/4 time of the sites not using AMP. If your site is using AMP, it will possibly rank better in Google's results.
Your site should be human friendly
By human friendly, it means your site should be easy to navigate through. There is no mouse in mobile browsers, people can only click links with their thumbs, which is quite big to the texts and links on screen. So your links and buttons should be big enough and do should not be close to each other.
Use HTML5 instead of flash
Flash is CPU consuming and could cause the mobile pages frozen for a little while. You should consider using HTML5 to replace all flash elements first. HTML5 has better performances on mobile devices. Now more and more sites are switching from flash to HTML5.
Pay attention to local SEO
Local SEO
When you're doing SEO for you site, make sure that local SEO is not ignored. You should be aware that if your site is ranking well in local SEO, it will finally rank well in desktop too.
There're some other reasons why you should take mobile ranks seriously, the reasons we're talking more and more. The most Internet traffic is generated by mobile devices nowadays, there are more people using the Internet from mobile devices than desktop devices. And mobile devices will become more preponderant in the future.
It's time for you to take actions if right now your site is not ready for mobile yet. Do not do it too late when your desktop ranks fall down because of ignorance. The first thing you should do now is to pick up an SEO rank tracker and add your site to check it's mobile rank, to see if it's ranking well in Google, then start to optimizing it accordingly. 6 factors you must consider before choosing an SEO rank tracker.
