10 Can’t-Miss Tips for Maximizing Mobile SEO

2nd August 2017Laura Scott

With the impending mobile-first index and almost 60% of searches being conducted on mobile devices, now’s the time to define your mobile SEO strategy.

In our recent webinar, Optimize your Mobile Strategy, Jeff Smith head of US professional services at Botify, shared strategies for auditing mobile implementation and improving performance.

We capture the highlights of that webinar with these 10 can’t-miss tips for maximizing your mobile performance.

Crawling & Log File Analysis for Mobile Audits

1. Crawl with both desktop and mobile user agents for your mobile SEO audit. When auditing websites with separate mobile URLs, crawl with both user agents simultaneously. This will help you identify the relationship between desktop and mobile pages and discover potential problems with those relationships. For responsive and adaptive sites, perform separate crawls with mobile and desktop user agents then compare the results of those two crawls. Differences in the way mobile and desktop user agents are crawling your content will highlight optimization opportunities.
2. Configure your crawler to follow AMP links within the HTML of crawled pages. The best way to discover and evaluate AMP pages on your site is to follow these link types during your crawl.
3. Join your crawl with log file analysis to see exactly which URLs are being crawled by search engines. Identify the crawl ratio for mobile pages to discover opportunities for crawl budget optimization.

Log file analysis uncovers differences in how Google’s bots are crawling AMP pages

Auditing Separate Mobile URLs (Including AMP and App URLs)

4. For websites with separate mobile pages, audit rel=”canonical” and rel=”alternate” links at scale. Capture tagging problems like canonical mismatch or canonical missing with a complete view of the relationship between mobile and desktop pages on your site.
5. Within your site crawl, create a filter for AMP pages. By reviewing only these pages, you can more easily identify issues and prioritize projects for improvement.
6. Audit the presence of app links within the HTML of page content. With a site-wide view of rel=”alternate” links to app URLs, you can audit the relationship between site and app content. See how many pages have links to Android and iOS app URLs, how many pages do not have deep links (links to deep app pages), and how many pages have a link to either Android or iOS app URLs but not both. This can flag missing or incorrectly configured relationships between pages.
7. Audit the presence of AMP links within HTML as well. Use segmentation to support your analysis. Reviewing these relationships by pagetype can help you identify where there may be missing AMP content or configuration problems.

Use filters to audit and monitor mobile configuration

Mobile Technical Site Audit

8. Audit status codes from your mobile crawl. Evaluate, at scale, redirects on mobile pages. Identify instances of incorrect redirects or crawl errors across the site to understand how they may be impacting mobile performance.
9. Review page speed for mobile. Google recommends mobile pages render in under one second. Mobile page speed is also directly related to bounce rate and conversion rate. Evaluate page speed across the site to identify the highest impact opportunities for improvement. Organize page speed by segment of the site, depth, or HTTP status code within Botify to identify patterns and create a strategy for pagespeed improvement.
10. Assign priority to mobile improvement projects. When performing a mobile technical site audit, evaluate the entire site and create filtered views of the metrics you want to evaluate. Creating a high level view of key performance indicators enables you to understand scale and properly assign priority to mobile improvement projects.

Evaluate page speed across segment, depth or HTTP status codes to identify areas for improvement

Mobile Audits with Botify

Hear more about these ten tips for mobile audits and view our on-demand webinar now to learn how you can optimize your mobile strategy.

To see customized mobile insights for your site, book a demo with Botify for a free crawl.