The following are the top worst SEO mistakes you can make for mobile sites. Avoid them if you want to get the top slots in search engine result pages and get more traffic to your mobile website. This is the best way to ensure that your visitors remain content.
1.Slow Website Speed
Google looks at the speed of your website when determining website rank. Not only is it important to Google, but web surfers also concerned about speed. Per Google, around 53 percent of all surfers will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 second to load. Make sure your website loads in less than a second by doing the following:
- Limit the number of requests and redirects, which makes your pages load faster. Don’t use as many 301 directs. Also eliminate distractions from your websites and improve your HTML code. Basically, get rid of anything that will slow down the website speed.
- Compress pictures and resize images.
- Rethink your hosting. Don’t opt for third party hosting because it never provides optimal website speed.
- Monitor progress by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check website performance.
2. Blocked Files
Don’t restrict access to JavaScript, image files and CSS on your website. It makes it harder for Googlebot to crawl your site, and this definitely diminishes your ranking.
Analyze the website robots.tex file to determine if something has been disallowed. Use Google Search Console to test them. In addition, utilize Fetch by Google to make sure there aren’t problems that could jeopardize indexing.
Don’t forget to test all URLs. This is particularly important if your websites have different mobile and desktop URLs.
3. Interstitials Ads
Determine how your site handles interstitials and popup ads. If there are popups, think about changing the mobile design. Although it might be your best CTA, it could be a problem.
Determine if any of your pages provide a bad user experience. This could drop your ranking. Look for things such as the following:
- Popups on the main page.
- Interstitial ads that the user can’t get rid of. This really provides a bad user experience if the ad takes them to another page.
- Deceiving layouts above the fold that make users think they are looking at an interstitial ad.
4. Inaccessible Content
If you want to put multimedia or video on your website, determine the impact it will have on website speed. Also, figure out if video imbedding be done on all devices.
In addition, put a transcript on your site. This helps Google index your site. It also helps users who need closed captioning.
If you want to put animated things on your site, Google suggests using HTML5. This is easy to create via Google Web Designer.
5. Cross Links/Bad Redirects
When a website isn’t optimized for mobile usage, bad redirects are usually a huge problem. This is especially noticeable when the site has both a desktop and mobile URL.
The following are ways to avoid this:
- If a mobile visitor comes to your website via your desktop URL, redirect them to the mobile URL. Do not redirect this user back to the mobile site home page.
- If there isn’t an option for smartphone usage for your desktop page, create one.
- If a mobile user wants a dynamically generated URL, they should see a mobile version that gives them what they are looking for.
- All users should be able to see the same content.
- Don’t link to a desktop version from a mobile URL.
6. Mobile Only 404s
A desktop user should be able to access mobile information and vice versa. If a mobile user gets a 404 error when accessing a page that a desktop user can see, then make changes immediately.
Basically, get rid of all 404 and soft 404 pages ASAP. This will help rankings. Considering using website auditing software to find 404 errors.
7. Lack of Rich Snippets
Google is leaning toward using accurate, rich and instant queries. If you have not used Schema or Structured Data markup for content categorization, you’re skipping a very important aspect of organic CTR. Most people want to see snippets of the information they’re searching for.
8. Not Showing Mobile Viewport
Phones come in different sizes, and if you do not show the correct viewports using the right viewport meta tag, then your content will not fit various phones sizes. The following are some common problems:
- Using fixed width viewports for the wrong devices.
- Using smaller viewport parameters, which makes it difficult for users that have small devices.
However, these things can be fixed by doing the following:
- Use userscaling
- Enable the website’s dimensions by using a meta viewport tag.
- Match screen width via width=device width.
- Include initial scale=1. This ensures a 1:1 connection between CSS pixels and device specific pixels.
9. Poor Mobile Design
Your website should have a mobile friendly design. Create a design for tablets and smartphones. Don’t clutter the design with illegible fonts or small font sizes. Make sure there is plenty of space for your elements. This ensures that users won’t click on the wrong buttons or links.
10. Understand Your Website Metrics
Become knowledgeable about the tools that are need to make your website a successful one. How do these metrics work? Always uses a good auditing tool to determine gaps. Look at website content, backlinks, title/meta tags and other things that can make your website successful.
Also, don’t forget there are different tools that give different results for the same things. Use information from all tools to determine a balance and make your website a success.
Category Search Engine Marketing