Is Mobile SEO Different From Desktop SEO? The answer depends upon whether your focus is on individual sites or an entire network of sites.
If your business caters to the needs of a local community, there’s no reason that mobile-specific SEO methods won’t work just as well.
But for most businesses, it makes more sense to build a wider web footprint with local listings. Why? Because there are many more potential customers who can be reached via a mobile phone.
And because it’s easier to add and remove mobile links from the desktop version of your website, it’s more convenient to have a “real” site versus a “service” site that’s not really all that personalized.
So, what exactly is the difference between Mobile SEO and desktop SEO? Essentially, it comes down to the way search engines look at content.
For the most part, they find it more convenient to give websites the main page (as in, the one that shows up first in the results) rather than having them nestled within a “site” or series of pages.
In order to get to the main page, or home page in Google’s eyes, the mobile-optimized site has to be designed very differently than its desktop counterpart.
One difference is page rank. When Google started out evaluating SEO, they put a lot of weight on how many pages each page displayed. They didn’t want sites with only a few pages ranking highly (and thus appearing high in the results) because those were “low quality.”
Today, they’ve come to recognize that a few pages on a mobile-friendly site will usually do just as well as pages with dozens of tiny links sprinkled throughout. It’s not only about page rank anymore.
Another difference is the structure of the links. On desktops, there are generally just a few logical locations for links.
For instance, a typical eCommerce website could have a home page, an About Us page, a Contact Us page, and a Search Engine Results Page. Mobile sites usually have no structural link structure at all – and that makes SEO more difficult.
The final consideration is the actual text used on the site. Because desktop Internet searchers type in keywords in the address bar and do not look at the rest of the page, search engines tend to give higher priority to sites with good keyword density. With mobile Internet users, this trend tends to reverse.
Sites with heavy text are often given lower rankings, even though they probably have more relevant content.
Is mobile SEO different from desktop SEO? No, it’s not.
Both of them are important tools for increasing traffic to your website. But when someone searches for a mobile-friendly version of your site, you can bet that mobile-optimized pages will be much higher up on the search engine results page.
And just like any other optimization technique, mobile SEO takes some time and effort. You’ll need to optimize each of your pages for both mobile and regular searches to gain full benefit.
You’ll also want to take into account any new accessibility features that your devices may have – especially for those of us with poor eyesight. Even then, however, mobile optimization tends to yield very high ROI.
So what is so different about websites offering mobile services compared to their desktop counterparts?
Well, for one thing, websites offering mobile optimization tend to be smaller in size, which allows them to utilize smaller font sizes and colors.
This results in less visually cluttered layouts, which means that visitors can more easily scan through each page of your website to get the information they’re looking for. In addition, since there’s a less dense design, it’s far less likely that visitors will experience screen freezing.
Is Mobile SEO different from websites offering desktop versions of the same product or service? Yes, again – as previously mentioned, there’s quite a bit of difference between these two strategies.
However, it’s usually very small differences, and you’d be hard-pressed to find any significant difference between the websites offering mobile optimization as compared to their desktop counterparts.
So what is mobile SEO different from desktop SEO?
It’s not that much different at all. It’s just that your website needs to work a bit differently to attract mobile-friendly browsers. That’s all there is to it. You can easily make your website mobile-friendly by optimizing it correctly.
Conclusion
If you ask most web developers what makes Mobile SEO different from other Search Engine Optimization techniques, they will tell you it’s because it’s not as important.
However, there are some important differences that you need to understand before you decide if this form of internet marketing is better than the rest.
First, unlike desktop optimization, it doesn’t rely on keywords. It’s all about the content. Now, I know you’re wondering what the big deal is about the content, but this is because mobile users aren’t looking for a list of keywords; they are searching for the content.
This is what makes Mobile SEO different from other website optimization techniques. The first thing you have to consider when optimizing your website for a mobile user is the size of the mobile device.
It’s a no-brainer that if your website is in landscape mode, then you have to adapt the design accordingly. If your website is in portrait mode, then it doesn’t really matter as your layout will look the same as the desktop version of the site.
What you have to do to make sure that your website is viewed by a mobile user is to make the content accessible via the mobile device. In desktop versions of your website, this may be a problem because a lot of websites have flash on them and as a result, you won’t be able to access the content on a mobile phone.
One way around this is to place images on the mobile phone so that the user can access the content with their finger. Another option is to provide links within the content so that the desktop version of the site can link to the mobile website.
You’ll want to keep the font size the same as you do on the desktop so that the content doesn’t appear scaled on a smaller screen.
Since search engines aren’t going to cater to mobile devices any time soon, your SEO efforts need to be targeted at people who will be most likely to be using these devices when they perform searches online.
This makes sense, especially given that search engine optimization has been such an important part of web development for years now.
Even if it isn’t considered “mobile-friendly” yet, the next few years will probably see this change. That means that you need to adopt strategies for SEO that are currently more beneficial on mobile devices.
Because search engine bots crawl mobile-friendly websites more frequently, your content will need to be updated more often to remain relevant. As a result, you’ll want to keep your pages up to date and frequently revised, especially if you’re providing news or information updates for users who use mobile devices.
The last thing you want is to provide content that is outdated and that will result in the user deleting it, especially since this means they’ll be missing important updates. In order to ensure that your pages load quickly and are considered relevant, you should try to implement some practices that are commonly used on desktop versions of your site.
For example, many businesses have moved their social networking accounts to mobile devices such as iPhones or Android. When this happens, the content published needs to be considered for both desktop and mobile users.
This means that it should be optimized for the mobile user’s browsing experience, but that it should also share certain elements between desktop and mobile versions of the page.
For example, it can benefit to post headlines and summaries on mobile-friendly versions of your content rather than just placing them on the home page of your site.
These small changes will help you ensure that your pages load quickly and remain highly valuable to your mobile user base.
