With people using their smartphones 24/7, and Google focused on mobile indexing, this has resulted in:

  • 80% of all shoppers buy on their smartphones
  • 62% of eBay purchases include a mobile touchpoint
  • More than $12B per quarter of eBay sales are typically completed via mobile

As it’s more crucial than ever before that your website is not just “mobile-friendly,” but actually optimized for people who search from their cell phones, tablets, and other mobile devices, here are four ways to optimize your website for mobile:

 

See your mobile site through Google’s “eyes”

Ensure your site has a mobile-responsive design so search engines can crawl all parts of it and image files are being properly indexed. Your Google Search Console is also chock full of free tools (like the URL Inspection tool, which shows you information about the indexed and live versions of a URL, with the ability to request a crawl) that can help you find ways to improve and optimize your mobile site performance.

 

The faster, the better

Google factors page speed when it ranks search results for mobile. Of course how fast your site loads has always impacted your rankings. As Google puts it, “speed equals revenue.”

 

Source: Google/SOASTA Research, 2017

 

Even a couple of seconds makes a huge difference in bounce rate. Start by testing your site’s mobile speed using Google’s free tool, and consider following these steps to help reduce your site’s bloat:

  • Compress your code
  • Use fewer images
  • Size pictures and graphics as small as possible without losing too much clarity with online image resizing tools such as TinyPNG and Kraken.io
  • Always optimize your images with alt text and SEO-friendly titles
  • Don’t use Flash, and if you do, consider getting rid of it

 

There are many additional ways you can speed up your site’s load time and optimize performance -- and they all boil down to using more streamlined, lightweight assets and programming.

 

For more recommendations on what you can do to make your web pages load and run faster on all devices, check out PageSpeed Insights, another free tool from Google.

 

Consider rAMPing up your site

Related to improving your site speed, Google’s open-source Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) project was created to get the web moving faster overall, one site at a time. It’s relatively simple to implement, and it could help give your site that speedy edge. While not a ranking factor – yet, anyway – AMP “enables the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful, and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms.” Here are Yoast’s tips to set up a Wordpress site for AMP, and here’s Google’s advice on how to create a basic AMP page.

 

Deliver an excellent user experience

Remember, the bottom line when it comes to SEO is that you must deliver valuable, relevant content that makes it easy for readers to get solutions to their problems.

 

The way you present your content is as important as the content itself. Structured data, used by eBay, makes it easier for buyers to find the merchandise that meets their search criteria, and quickly decide which products they want to purchase.

 

If you haven’t already, it’s time to optimize your site for mobile search. Meeting your buyers where they are -- wherever they are -- is the best way to keep your earnings moving in the right direction.