How to optimize your web content for better mobile SEO

For a couple of years now, internet users have increasingly relied on their smartphones and tablets rather than traditional desktop computers to surf the net. This has had a significant impact on website design and has meant that businesses and web designers alike have had to adopt a mobile first mindset.With mobile now the new norm, the need to continually optimise content for mobile devices is more pressing than ever. This is a job that’s never done so read on to find out how to optimise your website content for mobile right now…

1. Ask yourself: is your content scrollable? When you’re designing your website, or working with a web designer to build your business website, you probably won’t be thinking about scrolling on a mobile device. That means that while your content could well be optimised, with optimal use of keywords and good keyword placement, it may not be formatted to be easy to read on a mobile device.Because of the smaller screens that come with using a tablet or smartphone, you’ll need to present content that can be scrolled through easily and is easy to digest. That means using plenty of headers and bullet points and keeping content in manageable chunks. 2. Are images appropriately sized and compressed? Visual content is key to a great looking site but you need to take extra care for mobile SEO. It’s wise to check that your images are of a good quality and the right size for mobile viewers (no scrolling to the right to see the whole image). You’ll also need to check that they are compressed to be as small as possible, without any loss of quality. This is important because page load speed is a key mobile SEO consideration – one of the biggest culprits of slow loading pages on mobile is big, heavy images. There are a number of compression tools out there that can help you make image file size small without a loss of quality. Try tinypng for starters. 3. Have you run a page load speed test lately? If you can’t remember the last time you ran a page load speed test, now would be a great time to rectify that. Google has said several times that page load speed is a mobile ranking factor so, it’s a consideration that you’ll want to keep front of mind. In addition to large images, things like excess code can make your pages slow to load. This not only hinders your mobile search position, it also makes users more likely to give up and go elsewhere.You can use the free Google page load speed test to check how quickly your site is loading up, and get a series of suggestions for improvements. The free report will also benchmark your site’s speed against competitors and other similar sites.