Mobile SEO for Beginners

Fundamentals of mobile search optimization, responsive design best practices, and mobile usability.

Speakers: Mehmet Aktuğ

08 Jun 2017

Video Transcript

⏱ 8 min read• 1,437 words

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Hey Zeo followers. Welcome to our very first video series. Today I'm talking about mobile SEO for beginners. Think of it as the fundamentals of mobile SEO. So why did I pick mobile SEO to start with? Why put mobile first? Let me explain. As we all know, there's a serious shift toward mobile every year. And the value placed on mobile keeps growing. That's true on the search engine side and the user side. Look at these stats. Over the past year, mobile users made up 51% of everyone online. Desktop came in at 42%.

And that gap will keep widening in mobile's favor. We fully expect that to happen. Here's another stat: total cell phones sold. As you can see, 500 million smartphones sold in 2012. By the end of 2016, that number is expected to hit 1.5 billion. That's a huge jump. Roughly triple in just four years. And by the end of 2020? Phone sales should reach nearly half the world's population. That's a genuinely staggering number. So it's clear why mobile deserves more of our attention every day. Of course, there are two angles here. There's the user's point of view. And there's the web sitesi owner's point of view.

Right now we need to look at this more from the web sitesi owner's side. Or from a web sitesi manager's side. How do we actually serve users the right way? What's the best setup on mobile? We'll cover some of that. Of course, first we need to see Google's perspective here. That's huge. SEO is one of the foundations of what we do on the mobile side. The point where Google really shifted its perspective? It started when they released a smartphone-only user agent. Basically, when they customized the crawling process for smartphones.

On top of that, there was an update last year on April 21. It also goes by another name: the mobile-friendly update. This was a pretty serious update. A big chunk of the web got hit by it. Same goes for web sites. Google announced this update and rolled it out for user experience, web sitesi speed. And more relevant results. So we started designing and building our web sites to match it. But are we doing everything right? Or are we getting it wrong? And how do we serve our users the best way? We'll walk through that using the three items here.

We've got responsive, dynamic serving, and separate web sites. So there are three different ways to design our web sitesi for users. Let's start with responsive. Responsive works for tons of different devices. Not just mobile and desktop. Tablets too, plus devices with all kinds of resolutions. And it serves our web sitesi from a single HTML structure. One single URL structure. The advantage here is a single URL structure. It costs way less. Think about time, plus the ongoing maintenance costs in the background. It lets me serve users at a much lower cost.

It's the presentation format Google recommends. The main reason comes down to one thing. I can serve the same web sitesini for both mobile and desktop. No differences on the code or software side at all. Having to serve identical content, though? Call that a downside. What I mean is this. We could have built some page groups customized for mobile. But on the responsive side, that gets pretty limited for us. The same page has to open on both mobile and desktop. You can't apply a different structure. Here's what we need to watch for. There's a part that runs on different CSS structures. So even if the HTML is the same, responsive sites swap CSS. Different CSS kicks in for desktop versus mobile.

Same idea here with what we call meta name viewport. The browser gets informed based on the visitor's device. That's what makes this work. The second thing we'll cover is dynamic serving. Just like responsive, the URL structure is identical. It doesn't change between desktop and mobile. The HTML structure is a bit different here. Think of it like building separate web sites for desktop and mobile. But we serve them from the exact same URL. How do we do that? We use something called Vary-http. It tells browsers what's going on through our web site.

So the browser figures out if the visitor is on mobile or desktop. Then it serves the right version. Mobile or desktop. A single URL structure, mobile-specific pages, better user experience. Those are the pluses here. The downside is that management gets more complex. We're basically running two web sites. And we have to set it up correctly. We can never skip those Vary-http parts. The setup has to be done right. Moving on. With a separate web sitesi, you get a completely different URL structure. Totally different HTML too. So we might be running something like m.seozeo.com. Or seozeo.com/m. Different domains or different subfolders.

The most critical thing to remember here? Mobile and desktop pages must point to each other. Use canonical and alternate tags. This matters for incoming user agents. It also matters when Google's bots crawl. They need to tell the content apart correctly. Another advantage is I can build mobile-specific content. I can create a page group just for mobile users. Or I can make the mobile page completely different from desktop. That way I can run different tests to lift conversion rates. Of course, there's extra work too. With every implementation or update, I have to keep both sites in mind. And I need to map the connection between them well. So those are the three points we summed up here. You can see them clearly.

There's another important thing to watch out for. Let me show you a few separate points here. The big one is what we just talked about. Mobile keeps pulling ahead of desktop, day by day. That's true for SEO. It's also true for the user experience side. We have to treat mobile as a bigger priority than desktop. So in our design, our project plan, or our web sitesi plan. We should start with mobile first. We're trying to serve more stuff in a smaller space. So a design or plan built for mobile ports to desktop much more easily. That's the mobile first principle we mentioned here. Prioritize the mobile work ahead of desktop.

It's a known fact. Google has said it likes responsive a bit more. The reason is the content we serve users. As web sitesi owners, we serve the exact same structure. That's one of the factors that makes indexing much easier on Google's side. Same story in the background. There's no big difference there. HTML structures and URL structures aren't different. So the odds of serving users the wrong content drop a lot. Another key point. I shouldn't block JavaScript, CSS, or images in any way.

Like I just mentioned, CSS use matters a lot in responsive design. Google needs to be able to reach your CSS code. That's how it sees the differences between mobile and desktop. It also needs to see which CSS file loads for which user agent. Same for which CSS rules apply. I shouldn't block CSS, JavaScript, or images from Google bots at all. Redirect checks matter a lot too. Especially when I use ayrı web sitesi setups. The links between mobile and desktop need to redirect correctly.

Mobile site speed is another big one for Google. It ties straight into user experience. Tap target sizes, font sizes, and site speed all need to satisfy users. Think about today's world. Even e-commerce runs on mobile now. Users reaching what they want fast is really important. By banner, I don't mean a full-page ad. I mean a small banner at the top of the page on mobile. It just points users to our ad or our link. Deep linking into your mobile app matters a lot too. Say I have both a mobile app and a mobile site. And I want to send users from one to the other. I need to set up deep linking correctly. That way I can send my user straight into my mobile app.

That's pretty much everything I wanted to cover on mobile SEO for beginners. Let me touch on what we can dig into in the coming weeks. AMP, App Indexing, App Store Optimization, and Progressive Web Apps. These are all mobile topics too. They're just deeper and more detailed. We covered the basics today. In the following weeks, we'll keep going with those four topics. Thanks so much for watching.

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