The vast majority of Americans surf the web from their phones. Here’s a quick-reference checklist of mobile web design and optimization tasks. When making your site mobile, make sure you check off the items on this mobile SEO checklist!
Choose a mobile platform
Decide which method of mobile design you’ll implement for your mobile site. Choose between responsive design (Google’s preferred method), dynamic serving, separate serving, or some combination of the three.
Optimize for crawling and indexing
Use Google Search Console’s Crawl Errors report for details on URLs that Google has trouble crawling. Make sure what arch spiders can discover, crawl, and index your mobile-specific content — and discern it from your desktop-specific content — so that your content can render correctly and rank well.
Optimize for page load speed
Use front-end optimization strategies to address mobile performance issues and get mobile pages loading faster. Google prefers that above-the-fold content renders in under a second on a mobile network. Focus on mobile image optimization to reduce load times.
Optimize design for mobile user experience
More than half of your inbound traffic is unlikely to return to your mobile site if it is met with a poor user experience. Website navigation is an especially important design component of your mobile website that requires careful design and planning.
According to a Google mobile research study, “61 percent of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site that they had trouble accessing from their phone.”
Implement analytics to track mobile conversion goals
Understand where your web pages are succeeding or failing by implementing analytics across your mobile site. Look at micro-conversions and device-specific bounce rates. Make reporting easier by setting up a custom mobile campaign dashboard. Monitor mobile site speed in Google Analytics by navigating to Content and then Site Speed.
Optimize content for mobile
Make sure that your content resonates with mobile users; what works and reads well on one device type might not work at all on another.
Visit your website using your smartphone and ask these questions of your content. Is your content easily read without excessive scrolling or zooming? Are your calls to action front and center?
Test your mobile site regularly
Regularly verify that Google sees your mobile site the way it should be seeing it by checking the Fetch As Google tools in Google Search Console. Make sure that all the usability features you built are working correctly. As an optimizer, your work is never done!