SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) has been the forefront tool for digital marketers for promoting their product and engaging with the target audience. However, the recent times has seen marketers looking into effective utilisation of mobile devices for marketing purposes, since it has now become the go-to medium for individuals who are constantly on the go.

Google’s ‘Mobile First Index is one of the major development towards the preference of mobile friendly sites whereby it ranks the search results based only upon the mobile-version of the page (not to mention on the basis of correctly utilised keywords) and this occurs even if the user is searching from a desktop. Considering the rate of growth of the trend ‘it’s all about mobile’, it comes as no surprise that according to Google there are 27.8 billion more queries performed on a mobile than a desktop.

Adding to this, according to a report on Mobile Search:  Topics and Themes, by Hitwise, 58% of all searches for Google are all carried out via a mobile device, indicating the vast usage of the medium. Hence the recent ‘mobile’ trend has led to marketers focusing upon a new realm of search engine optimisation, namely Mobile SEO which is the practice of optimising a website for users utilising Smartphones and/or tablets. In order to do so, marketers need to go beyond the traditional means of search engine optimisation and focus upon further tools of SEO which can enable them to rank higher on search engine result pages.

As a result of this, marketers and business owners looking to achieve organic hits for their websites and rank higher on search result pages need to keep in mind the smart tools and techniques to optimise their website for mobile devices via Search Engine Optimisation; some of which have been elaborated upon in this article.

Mobile Usability Test

You need to ensure your website is mobile friendly in order to rank higher on the search engine result pages, thus in order to gage whether your site has existing mobile usability issues or not, you can easily utilise the ‘mobile usability’ tool found in Google Search Console, which can enable you to know whether the user has any issues using your site. Or you can even use Google’s Mobile Friendly test whereby you can insert your URL into the tool and incur a full report for the same.

Page Speed

Due to the connectivity and hardware issues pertinent to mobile devices, the speed of the sites page whilst loading becomes of the utmost importance to ensure a lower bounce rate and allowing you to rank higher on search engine result pages. Some techniques which can be opted for include optimising images, leveraging browser caching, minifying code along with reducing redirects.

Let Google Crawl

If in the past you blocked Googlebot from accessing CSS, Javascript and other parts of your site’s code, you ought to stop now. Unless Google can crawl your page fully it won’t be able to deduce whether your site is mobile friendly or not. Needless to say, if the former doesn’t occur the chances of ranking higher in the Mobile-first index are low.