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SEO has evolved significantly since the very first result page was developed. As the years pass by it becomes challenging to stay abreast of the numerous algorithm changes and the different procedures. Mobile-first implies that Google is used to crawling your specific mobile site. Google seems to be ignoring your desktop site and browsing through your mobile site only. Your desktop site may be the best; however, if it doesn’t promise a brilliant mobile experience, Google will give you a poor SERP ranking.
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Google has been steadily shifting to 100 percent Mobile-First indexing. Google is even now, in 2022, busy cleaning up trailing or straying websites. Google is possibly browsing through your site mobile-first. Mobile SEO has never been so critical before. According to Neil Patel, the mobile phenomenon doesn’t seem to be a surprise anymore. Mobile-First is the usual ‘way of life’ today. You should focus on Core Web Vitals, examining your mobile content for fixing mobile UX problems and opportunities. Let us explore some mobile SEO blunders you should remember to avoid. That way, you can gain a higher SERP ranking and keep all your visitors to your site satisfied and happy, irrespective of the type of device they seem to be utilizing
Missing Content
If your mobile site is not identical to your desktop site, it is likely it is due to the difference in the content. Since Google web crawlers need to be able to crawl the website just like users, restricting access to image files, CSS, JavaScript, etc., has the potential to hurt your SERPs. You need to check the robots.txt file of your website to find out if any of the necessary elements have not been allowed. To test your robots.txt file, you should go to Google Search Console and then use Google Fetch to verify that there are no more indexing issues and that the website passes the test for mobile friendliness. Checking the difference between the URLs of the mobile site and the desktop site also helps.
Unplayable Content
Videos and multimedia content are great for keeping users engaged on the website. You can get across to them with greater clarity without forcing users to read a lot of text. However, before going the whole hog on including video content, you should figure out how it will affect the site loading speed and if the embedded video content will play across various devices and operating systems. You should invariably include a transcript since it will help people requiring closed captioning but also Google index the site.
Google endorses using HTML5 for including animated website content on a website. Google Web Designer is a great tool for creating these animations, and the advantage is all web browsers will support them. You must also ensure all website animations achieve the desired threshold of Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). CLS refers to the phenomenon of the webpage elements like images, videos, fonts, buttons, etc., suddenly shifting when the webpage is downloading.
Bad User Experience Due to Unspecified Mobile Viewport
Since the screens of mobile devices come in various sizes and shapes, users may find that the web page does not fit correctly if developers do not specify the correct viewports. Some of the most common mistakes include using fixed-width viewports optimized only for specific devices and poor minimum parameters for the viewport that leave smaller devices unable to display the page correctly. However, despite their serious nature, these problems are easily fixed by enabling user scaling, which involves controlling the basic dimensions of the web page and using the Meta viewport tag to scale. By making the initial scale equal to one, you can ensure a one-to-one relationship between device-independent pixels and CSS pixels. In addition to helping mobile users and search engine bots, these fixes are also vital for accessibility. Web developers can also employ CSS media queries to style the web page differently for large and small screens.
Bad UX Due to Poor Mobile Site Design
As per SEOStrategy.com, you must understand the difference between “mobile-first” and “mobile-friendly because many people get confused. The mobile-first concept means that Google bots will crawl mobile sites before desktop sites and rank them higher in the SERPs. When a site is designed to display and function well on mobile devices, the website is called mobile-friendly. While sites need to be mobile-friendly to succeed in a mobile-first search environment, the reverse is to necessarily true. Website developers should focus on designing sites from the ground up for use on mobile devices rather than building a desktop site and adapting it for mobiles. Some essential tenets of mobile website design include avoiding illegible and small fonts and clutter on the screen. The different elements on the web page should have enough space between them so that users do not click incorrectly on links or buttons.
Slow Site Speed
It is a mistake to carry on with a site that is slow to interact and equally slow to load. Page load speed seems to be a crucial ranking factor for your site. According to research findings, around 53 percent of people will surely abandon a site or webpage if the site takes more than 3 seconds for loading.
You may focus on keeping your web pages simple and clean. It is best to minimize redirects and requests. Discard all unnecessary elements or characteristics, and minify everything such as JavaScript and CSS that may adversely impact your site’s loading speed. Compress, and consider resizing images. Examine your hosting solution. Avoid cheap, low-grade, third-party hosting solutions. Keep checking how much you have progressed. Consider using native web technologies such as lazy loading to defer or put off loading large or unnecessary files.
Conclusion
An important point to remember is that while you can do all that is necessary to avoid design mistakes, you will not achieve success if the audience does not find the content relevant, engaging, current, and original. Content marketers should use everything they have to listen to customer feedback about your brand, the user experience, and also your competition. They must know the target audience and the core offer intimately to arm them with the knowledge for building a successful and optimized website.
