The mobile first index will be coming this July. The index will start using the mobile page speed as a ranking factor in the search results. Voice search also continues to rise in popularity, increasing the need to begin working on improving both mobile and voice search for your website. Improving your mobile marketing strategy really is essential. Here are 3 ways of improving your mobile SEO efforts and increase engagement with your audience.
Page Speed Must Not Be Left Behind
As page speed will soon become a ranking factor for the mobile first index you really need to be working on ways to ensure your pages load quickly. Page loading times play a massive part in user experience and they are a massive contributor to high bounce rates. Here are a couple of interesting stats for you to consider:
- According to DoubleClick research, 53% of users bounce from mobile sites that take more than 3 seconds to load up
- Conversions are reduced by 7% when the page response has a 1-second delay
There are plenty of ways to reduce page speed loading times. Here are 5 areas to get you started, but they really are just the start of the efforts you can take to speed things up.
- Remove all pop-up ads – pop-up ads are hated by many users, especially those on mobiles.
- Design your website to load up the content above the fold before the content below the fold.
- Optimise the images so they have smaller pixels.
- Enable caching on your website.
- Decrease the server response time.
Reduce the Size of Your Content
It’s so important to optimise the CMS so that mobile users receive specific content for mobile. You won’t have to create a whole new website with brand new content, but you will need to tweak quite a lot of pages. Headlines should be shorter to fit on the screens, calls to action should also be shorter and more apparent and easier to interact with. Additionally, consider using modular web design, it’s easier to edit and alter the website and make it appealing to those using mobile.
Use Push Notifications
Mobile devices open new ways of remarketing to your customers. Push notifications and SMS give you simple and effective ways of advertising directly into the hands of your customers. You can send news of limited special offers and promotions, time-sensitive information and even market towards people that are close to your business.
These 3 steps will help to speed up your website and are great places to begin making changes for the positive.