2015 Website SEO Guide for Businesses (2015)

Mobile Optimisation

Mobile optimisation means that your website should work properly on all mobile devices. On the Amazon website for Christmas 2014, purchases from mobile devices were 60%.

In the USA, about 94% of people with a smart phone search for local business information and 77% of these happen when the user is either at home or in work.

Mobile is critical to your business and will continue to be so in the coming years, especially if you are using your website to sell products or services.

You need to do everything you can to make sure your website provides an excellent experience for your mobile visitors, otherwise you are losing out.

Here are a few common mistakes that I have noticed recently when working with potential clients.

1. They have forgotten about their mobile customers.

2. Have created a separate website for mobile customers.

3. Not checking out the competition.

Always check out what your competitors are doing, it will help you stay ahead of the game and will allow you to plan your website in advance.

If your website is not yet mobile optimised, it should be as soon as possible.

First of all, check your website using Google’s Mobile Friendly Test to find out if your website is mobile optimised or not.

There are three ways that you can optimise your website for mobile devices.

--Responsive Web Design

--Dynamic Serving

--Separate URLs

Responsive Web Design is the easiest and best way to go. Your website will be optimised, not only for smart phones, but also tablets.

In fact, if you are getting a new website developed, forget about Dynamic Serving and forget about Separate URLs. Focus on Responsive Web Design.

Do not use robots.txt to block search engines from crawling your website. If Google doesn’t have the correct access to your CSS, Javascript or Image files then they can’t detect of it is mobile friendly or not, which means search engines can’t decide if your website is mobile friendly or not.

Avoid the most common mistakes, such as videos that don’t play and stay away from Flash Video.

Mobile pages that provide a poor visitor experience will be demoted in the search rankings or will be displayed with a warning when your visitors try to access your website.

You’ll notice that some of your competitors may have a separate website for mobile devices. For example, m.yoursite.com will be for mobiles and www.yoursite.com will be for desktops. I don’t recommend this option at all, because your mobile pages will need to build their own reputation with search engines, so you are basically doing the same work, twice over. The mobile only pages will require their own unique content and will need to be well linked from other pages on your site or from other sites on the web.

If you already have a WordPress site, then you are in luck, there are a few things you can do to make sure it’s ready.

You can change the theme of your WordPress site. Choose one that is mobile optimised. Almost all of the Genesis themes by StudioPress are mobile ready, or you can check out ThemeForest and pick out a theme of your choice.

You can also just stick with your original theme and use a plugin to make it mobile ready. This would be more of a temporary fix, they work well in the short term, but a mobile optimised theme is preferable.