How to Optimize Your Mobile Site for UX Signals
As you know, SEO today is less about messing around with meta tags and more about having an awesome site. In fact, Google’s RankBrain algorithm is specifically designed to see how Google searchers interact with your site. If RankBrain thinks your site is frustrating their mobile users, they’ll drop you like a stone. And in this chapter I’ll show you some simple ways you can ensure that mobile users love your site.
Master Mobile Site speed
Does Google care how fast your mobile site loads?
Heck yes!
In fact, they recommend that your site loads in under a second for mobile users. That’s insanely hard to pull off. Fortunately, there are some free tools out there that can help you reach Google’s ambitious guideline. First up, we have Google’s Page Speed Insights tool. This tool lets you know how quickly your site loads on Mobile……and gives you some recommendations that you can implement to speed things up.
I also recommend checking out WebPageTest.org. By default, the tool will load your site on a desktop browser. So make sure to choose a mobile browser from the menu. And you’ll get a list of suggestions specifically adapted for mobile browsers:
Make Your Content Insanely Easy to Read on Phones
Do users have to pinch, scroll or squint to read your mobile content? Then they’re going to hit their “back” button like there’s no tomorrow.
How can you make your mobile content more readable?
- Use at least 14px font (I prefer 15 or 16)
- Use short paragraphs (1-2 lines per paragraph)
- Go with a line length between 50-60 characters
- Make sure there’s tons of contrast between text and background (people use phones outside, which can make low-contrast text harder to read)
Use HTML5 For Video and Animated Content
Do you embed videos in your content? Or does your page perform all sorts of fancy animations when people visit? Well, if that content is coded in Flash, it’s not gonna work on mobile devices. Instead, you want to code that up in HTML5.
Don’t Forget the “Viewport Content” Tag
Do you use responsive design? If so, don’t forget the viewport meta tag. This tag changes the size of your page based on the user’s device. And Google recommends that you setup your viewport meta tag like this:
If you forget this tag, or if it’s not configured correctly, your site could look funky to mobile users. So yeah, a friendly reminder to double check that you have this set up.
Implement These 3 Quick Mobile UX Hacks
These are three quick tips designed specifically to boost your site’s usability for mobile Google searchers.
1. Make Header Images Really Small: Mobile Google users want their answer NOW.
2. se Lots of “Negative” Space: Negative space is the space between text, buttons and design elements. And negative space is REALLY important for mobile sites. On a desktop, you can get away with a cluttered page. But on a phone, a cluttered page is IMPOSSIBLE to use. This is especially important for content that you want to rank in Google. If a Google searcher has trouble reading your content or finding what they need, they’ll bounce back to the search results.
3. Put Social Share Buttons as a Tab Bar: The fact is: social sharing buttons can SIGNIFICANTLY increase the amount of shares your content receives.