Best SEO UK Strategies For An Optimised Mobile User Experience

These days, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are preferred by users over desktops for surfing the Web. Because of this, a lot of businesses online are striving to improve their website’s quality and rankings to catch the attention of potential consumers. Today, the best SEO UK based experts and marketers prioritise content for these mobile devices. Doing so lets them earn better rankings on Google’s mobile-first indexing.

Through mobile-first indexing, the mobile version is prioritised over the desktop version whenever Google crawls, indexes, and ranks a website. However, what can be done to make sure that your mobile users get the best experience possible? To help you in this matter, here are just some of the best SEO UK practices that you should carry out for mobile-first indexing.

Hire a WordPressdeveloper to help you

Perhaps you have a custom-built WordPress theme or site and can’t move to a new WordPress theme. In such cases, you might need to hire a competent WordPress developer to make a mobile-friendly version for you. This could involve moving your site to a new framework or even refactoring all your base code. Make sure to get an estimate from one of the best SEO providers first before proceeding. Depending on your site, this could be a small or very large undertaking.

Use the similar content for both versions

If your mobile site has less content than your desktop site, update your mobile site so that its content is equivalent to your desktop site. This is because Google will treat your mobile site as the primary source of content.

Don’t roll out broken or incomplete mobile sites

Google has said in the past that if they can’t find your domain’s mobile site, they will index the desktop version without any penalties for the time being.

In case your business website’s mobile version is slow and doesn’t work properly, it’s probably a good idea to take it down as soon as possible. It wasn't an issue in the past because Google relied primarily on your desktop site to compile its search index. If your mobile site was glitchy or broken, it might have hurt you in other ways, but your index was safe.

Avoid using different meta robots tags You need to use the same meta robots tag for your desktop and mobile versions, especially nofollow and noindex. If you don’t do this, Google may fail to crawl and index your page when your site is enabled for mobile-first indexing.

Also, one of the best SEO practices you should do is toallow your resources to be crawled by Google. Some resources have different URLs on the mobile site from those on the desktop site. If you want Google to crawl your URLs, make sure that you're not blocking the URL with the disallow directive.

Utilise Google AMP

If you’re still struggling with the speed of your WordPress site, you might also want to look into implementing Google AMP. Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages Project) essentially offers a way to serve up a stripped-down version of your current web page without all the things that slow it down, such as JavaScript, bloated CSS, etc. There also exist many third-party plugins which can make this process a lot more convenient for you.

Ensure the servers can accommodate crawl rate increases

Mobile-first indexing can put a lot of strain on your hosting and slow your website down for visitors, especially if it contains a lot of webpages. Google says they do their best to avoid degrading site performance, but ultimately it’s hard to judge from a distance.

There’s not a lot you can do to fix this issue, since increasing your hosting capacity can get quite pricey if you don’t need it. But you should monitor your mobile speeds closely as Google rolls this out and pay special attention to customer complaints about load speeds.

Verify your mobile version in Search Console

This tip is quick and easy, and highly recommended by the best SEO companies, but ignoring it can cause your site to be improperly categorised or even missed by Google. In case you haven’t done this yet, open Google Search Console and add your mobile site to it, or verify the site if it has been added already.

Use a mobile plugin for WordPress

If you’re facing strict deadlines one option you can use is a mobile plugin for WordPress. While this is recommended strictly as a last resort, it can be one of the easiest ways to ensure your site is mobile-friendly right away. With so many plugins that you can download today, finding the right one for your website certainly won’t take a lot of time.

Even if you’re working with the best SEO companies available, you still need to pay close attention when optimising the experience of your website for desktop and mobile devices. Considering the increased demand for mobile search, having a responsive business website is crucial. If you want to beat out your competitors, it’s advised to start building a good mobile website early on and taking the time to perfect it.

With Google becoming increasingly stricter with regards to mobile-first indexing, you must carry out the best SEO UK practices possible so that you won’t see any drops in rankings. Keep the things mentioned above in mind, and you’ll be good to go.