1. Optimize your website for mobile
In this mobile-first age, your small business simply cannot afford to ignore the growing number of people searching for businesses and services online using their smartphones. Your website’s mobile optimization plays a crucial role in maintaining and even increasing your SERP ranking. Factors such as your loading time, design, font size and a mobile app all play a part. And because users’ searches on their smartphones are usually location-driven, optimizing your site for local SEO is also key.
Getting your website optimized for mobile is a process that should be started early and followed through. If your website is not mobile-friendly, the likelihood of visitors leaving your site as soon as they realize they can’t read it properly is very high. This is a huge loss to your business as it means that they won’t be able to find you or buy your products or services.
To avoid losing potential customers to your competitors, it’s important to optimize your website for mobile as early on in the design process as possible. A well-optimized mobile site will not only help your search engine rankings but it will also improve the user experience for those visiting your website on their phones.
It’s essential that your mobile website has a responsive design. This is because websites that don’t have a responsive design will be difficult to navigate and read on mobile devices. This can frustrate your audience and lead them to look elsewhere for the information they need.
With limited screen real estate, it’s also important to keep the text on your mobile site short and concise. If your website is full of lengthy paragraphs, users may get frustrated and leave quickly. Instead, try to use icons and graphics as much as possible, and only include the most relevant text on each page (without committing the cardinal sin of keyword stuffing).
As you’re likely aware by now, one of the most significant changes in Google’s algorithm is its focus on mobile-first indexing. This change means that mobile versions of your website will be prioritized over desktop versions, and that sites that aren’t optimized for mobile will see a drop in their SERP rank.
2. Optimize your content for mobile
As more people use mobile devices to search, it’s important to optimize your content for mobile. This includes ensuring your site is responsive, optimizing page speed, and creating succinct content. Ultimately, you want to create content that’s relevant to your audience and what they’re looking for.
One of the best ways to do this is by utilizing keyword research. This will help you determine what keywords your audience is searching and how competitive these keywords are. This information will help you develop a strategy to optimize your content for mobile.
Title tags and meta descriptions are two of the most important elements to consider when optimizing your content for mobile. They’re the first thing your audience sees when they click on a search result, and they help them decide whether or not to visit your website. To improve your chances of getting clicked, use your target keywords in your title tag and meta description.
Additionally, it’s important to create navigation that’s optimized for mobile. Using a hamburger menu is a great way to do this, as it allows users to easily navigate your website. It also helps keep your navigation clean and organized, which is an important factor in user experience.
Another way to optimize your content for mobile is by using structured data markup. This is a way to annotate your website content with a standardized format. This will allow search engines to better understand your content and display it in rich snippets in SERP.
Finally, it’s important to remember that mobile users are usually on the go and don’t have much time. This means that your content needs to be concise and easy to read. You can do this by using short paragraphs and by adding visual elements, like photos and videos, to your content. It’s also a good idea to use a font size that’s easy for mobile users to read. This will ensure that your audience can find the information they’re looking for and that they have a positive experience on your website.
3. Optimize your images
Image optimization is a crucial behind-the-scenes best practice that’s vital for optimizing your website and improving performance. Non-optimized images can eat up web server resources, slow down loading speeds, and negatively affect SEO. Optimized images reduce file sizes without sacrificing quality, so they consume less resources and load faster. This is especially important for websites and mobile apps that use many images to convey a message or create an experience.
Image size is a major factor in page load times, particularly for users on mobile devices with limited data plans. Large images take longer to download and are more likely to cause a delay in the first byte of page load time, which can lead to higher bounce rates and lower overall site performance.
Properly sized images can also make it easier for search engines to crawl your site and index your content. Additionally, by using a variety of different image sizes, you can ensure that all of your images are optimized for different devices and screen resolutions.
Another key aspect of image optimization is using compression to reduce the file size of your images without sacrificing quality. Compression is a great way to decrease the amount of data that your images require to display, which can help improve both mobile and desktop performance. By reducing the size of your images, you can also save space on your web servers and free up some space for other resources.
It’s also important to optimize your images for SEO by adding relevant alt text and tagging them with keywords. This will help search engines find your content and index it properly, as well as improve user experience by providing an alternative description of the image for visually impaired visitors. However, be careful not to over-optimize your images by filling them with keywords, as this can actually have a negative impact on your SEO.
With all of these tips in mind, you can start optimizing your images for both mobile and desktop so that your website loads quickly and looks beautiful on any device. Just be sure to test your images on different devices and browsers to ensure that they look perfect before making any changes. And if you don’t have the time or skills to manually resize your images, try using an image optimization tool like Imagify.
4. Optimize your social media
It can be difficult for small businesses to stand out on social media and get their message in front of the right people. Sprinkles Media is here to help!
While there are many factors to consider when optimizing your social media, some of the most important are content optimization and user engagement.
For example, make sure your posts are optimized for mobile by avoiding extra-long content and using short video content (users generally prefer shorter videos on social media). Also, be sure to include a trackable link in each post so you can see how much engagement each post gets.
In addition, be sure to respond to all of your users (both good and bad) on all of your social media accounts as this will increase customer satisfaction.