Mobile search engine optimisation (SEO) is essential if you don’t want to lose out on a big piece of that traffic pie. Having a mobile-friendly design, optimising your content for voice search, and making sure your site speed is lightning fast are just a few ways you can make your site ready for mobile visitors. With so many people now searching from mobile devices, Google has started showing the mobile version of websites within the search results. This means that if your website is not optimised for mobile, you are very likely to miss out on a large share of traffic. There have been indications that Google prioritises websites based on their mobile performance, so having a mobile-friendly version of your website is practically a necessity if you want to rank at the top of the search results. Whether you have a simple portfolio site, a large e-commerce site, or anything in between, you need to implement mobile SEO if you want to attract organic traffic.
How do we create better designs for mobile?
Whether it’s a mobile website or mobile ad, mobile advertising is one of the most critical factors for a successful campaign. When it comes to the performance of any mobile ad, “Creative is critical.” 56% of a brand’s sales come from digital advertising, often due to high-quality creative. Some rules and regulations can be followed to maximise the mobile experience. Knowing these rules and specifications, learning when to use them, and innovating are critical to creating an excellent creative concept. Let us discuss how to develop a mobile-first creative.When developing a high-quality creative for mobile, a few things need to be considered:
- A website must always be responsive for mobile.
- Good stock or photographed imagery is a key factor, as it is the first thing a viewer will see.
- Statistics now show that the average adult viewer’s brain can concentrate for 8 seconds. Keeping an ad simple with less text is always a win! Keep it quick and easy to read.
- Make sure all mobile-friendly creatives are saved in RGB colours and not CMYK colours. RGB is a web and mobile-based setting, while CMYK is a print-based setting.
- Viewers lose interest in a mobile website if it takes too long to load, which is why image optimisation for creatives is important.
Let’s talk about image optimisation
It is very important that the image being used be of good quality and creative design, these are the markers of an effective presentation. In order to optimise a website images take centre stage as they often are the first thing a viewer notices.The main issue arises from the size of the image being too large leading to a delay in loading. Fortunately, you can reduce your image’s file sizes to help improve your mobile website’s performance. One issue with formatting an image is that changes often reduce the quality. There are some tricks and techniques that let you resize website images for mobile and still keep them pretty enough to proudly display them. Here are some tools to find the best image format for mobile devices: Adobe Photoshop Gimp Paint.NET GIFsicle JPEGtran JPEG Mini OptiPNG pngquant FileOptimizer ImageOptim Trimage ImageResize.orgWeb Page responsiveness
Slow loading is typically the worst on mobile website pages. This generally means an image is too big in file size or the dimensions of the image are incorrect, when looking through a mobile webpage. This can cause a longer loading time of a page which then leads to a decrease in customer retention and a decrease in online sales. To avoid this, make sure your images are the correct dimensions for social and mobile website display.Recommended image formats for mobile devices:
- JPEG Format You can adjust the quality level for a good balance of quality and file size.
- PNG Format Produces higher quality images, but also has a larger file size.
- WebP
Recommended image sizes for mobile phones:
Here’s a table that Google shared to help understand the pixel-to-byte relation. This will give you an idea of how large an image can be based on its dimensions.| Dimensions | Pixels | File Size |
|---|---|---|
|
100 x 100 |
10 000 |
39 KB |
|
200 x 200 |
40 000 |
156 KB |
|
300 x 300 |
90 000 |
351 KB |
|
500 x 500 |
250 000 |
977 KB |
|
800 x 800 |
640 000 |
2500 KB |
WordPress and mobile design
Considering the fact that many websites are built in WordPress, here are some good practices to remember when designing creatives whilst keeping SEO in mind:
- If using a WordPress plugin, use one that compresses and optimises images externally on their servers. This reduces the load on your own site.
- Use vector images whenever possible alongside your PNGs and JPGs. Vectors, no matter how small, will always produce good quality.
- Remove unnecessary image data. Crop the white space and recreate it by using CSS to provide the padding.
- Save your images in the correct dimensions. WordPress now supports responsive images to serve them up without resizing them with CSS.
- Always use the .ico file format for your favicon.
- Use web-safe fonts instead of placing text within images – they look better when scaled and take less space, especially on a mobile-friendly website.
- Limit your colour palette, keeping it simple. The eye can only focus on so much.
- Explore the mobile WordPress template to find the best settings for each format.
- Use PNG if you need high detail and high resolutions.
- Use JPG for general photos and screenshots.
- Save images as “optimised for web” in tools like Photoshop.
- Use WebP in Chrome to serve up in smaller images.
The benefits of mobile SEO go far beyond simply generating more traffic from mobile search; it improves the overall experience for your visitors. This helps boost conversions and keep users engaged with your site, even when they are navigating it on a small screen. By following the practices above, your well-optimised creative will encourage people to visit and engage on your website. They will also be favoured by search engines, browsers, and networks, and will load much faster for your readers.
Feel inspired? Learn more about the SEO services we offer.