SEO tips for mobile content marketing strategy

Do you know that the average mobile session for one person is 40 minutes? Not just that, 52.2% of all website traffic is generated from mobile search. With that amount of huge traffic from mobile devices, you will be leaving a lot of money on the table if you do not have a mobile content marketing strategy in place.

It’ll be important to note that optimizing for mobile is a critical factor for SEO success as Google ranks mobile-friendly pages higher than those that aren’t. For every mobile content marketing strategy, there’s a need for mobile SEO to boost the content effort and aid discoverability in Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) for targeted keywords. 

With the above in mind, B2B marketers need to position their content marketing strategy needs to fall in-line with the emerging trend as 61% of consumers say they are more likely to purchase from mobile-friendly sites and 89% of people are likely to recommend a brand after a positive brand experience on mobile.

Consumers want to buy your products on the go and your website needs to meet that demand in order to increase your leads. According to a report by Hubspot, 49% of B2B researchers use their mobile device for research while at work and 55% of B2B buyers now expect to make a purchase on their mobile device.

Related: 10 Simple Ways to Improve SEO On Your WordPress Site

What does it mean to have a mobile SEO content marketing strategy?

Having a mobile SEO content marketing strategy means that all the components of your SEO strategy are working together to engage mobile users. All components of your content strategy from textual, to conceptual, technical, and visual components must be properly optimized for mobile users in order to have a wholesome mobile content strategy in place.

If you already have a website and wonder if it’s mobile-friendly, a good starting point is Google’s mobile-friendly test. Running the mobile-friendly test for your website helps you build a better presence for your business. It’s easy to use and all you need for the test is the URL of your webpage. You’ll be able to see how your page looks on a mobile device and problems that need fixing. You can then use the results from the test to determine how to make your website mobile-friendly. 

Mobile-specific SEO tips to implement in your content marketing strategy

Here are a few mobile SEO tips to improve your site’s discoverability in SERP for targeted keywords:

Speed up your site

53% of people are known to abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Google released a speed update that now makes your mobile page speed a direct ranking factor. There are various things that help with your website speed including your browser, device, web hosting provider, and content, web design, signup steps etc. 

Here’s how to go about it:

• Simplify your web design by minimizing your photos and graphics to speed up load times. 
• Minimize server response time by improving your server’s software and configuration. Your server response time is the time it takes your server to respond to a request from a browser and Google recommends that the response time should not be more than 200 milliseconds. 
• If you use a WordPress site, try out Pantheon.io for a good hosting with low server response. 
• Turn on your browser caching as it’ll help improve and speed up browsing. For a WordPress site, WP Rocket is a solid caching plugin you can try out.  
• Keep redirects down especially as most mobile users tend to use less reliable internet connections compared to desktop users. 
• Monitor your bounce rate with Google Analytics and page load time with the Chrome extension “Page Load Time”.  That way, you can quickly identify and pick up the slack.

If your site loads in 1.7 seconds, it’s faster than approximately 75% of the web and you have a higher chance of ranking.

Make your website responsive

Using a responsive design for your website makes it adjust to any device screen size, ensuring users have a great experience. With a responsive website design, tablets and smartphone users, as well as other mobile device users won’t have to scramble, zoom-in and out on your website to browse it.

A great browsing experience results in less bounce rate, contributing greatly to your SEO ranking. For a WordPress site, installing a responsive theme is a great place to start. Ask your developer to implement Google guidelines for a responsive web design if you don’t use WordPress.

You can also create a mobile subdomain of your website  to set up a mobile website such that when mobile users try visiting your site, what they see is the mobile version of your site.

A typical mobile subdomain URL usually appears as “m.website.com” or “website.com/mobile”. The mobile version of your is designed and adapted to give users on mobile devices a seamless browsing experience.

For web applications, adopting a pregressive web app (PWA) design is a great way to ensure responsiveness. PWAs are essentially websites that function just like mobile apps, hence creating a great experience for users on mobile. 

Beyond giving users a great browsing experience, a responsive website design greatly contributes to your SEO strategy success.

Put mobile users at the center of your user experience design

For every user that leaves your website without taking an action, Google interpretes the content you have on that page as low-value and de-rank them. Also, when users that leave your site click on the next link in search results, Google infers that you were not the right result for that query. So, you should try to put in various elements that aids the user experience.

• List the most important pages. You can use a collapsible accordion menu for this. 
• Think of search as part of your navigation. Create menu, footer bar and ther items that are navigable because navigation can increase conversion rates.
• EAT factors must be obvious in Mobile.
• Design for touch comes by making all items on your website responsive and ‘thumb-friendly’ 

• Your CTAs should be easy to find to boost engagement just like it is for Dropbox business.
• Use mobile-friendly fonts to create the right hierarchy and aid readability.
• Remember, if you must use pop-ups, you have to be careful with them. Use mobile-friendly pop-ups that follow device-specific display rules.  Exclude return visitors. Pop ups can be tricky, so don’t overdo them. 
• Your content element also plays a major role with your user design experience. You can have a table of content with jump links so your users can go to the content that best interests them, it helps them save time.

These jump links also contribute to your SEO effort as they  can show up in SERPS if they match a search query. 

• You can also have an overview section, a summary section at the top of your page or create a detailed FAQ plan to answer all likely questions from your target persona. FAQ Schema markup can show up in search results, and helps take over SERP real estate.
•  Lastly, for your CTA banners, go for the in article option because sidebars won’t show on mobile.

Optimize your content for local search

According to Google’s latest research, many mobile searchers do “near me” searches and optimizing for it makes your site authoritative, which raises your Google ranking. So, if you want to optimize your content for local intent searches, you have to: 

• First identify top local search terms in your area. 
• Create a Google My business account to get more visibility and improve search engine traffic.
• Use a location-specific “About Us” page, so that users searching for a keyword that’s related to your business, has something tangible about your business to read. 
• Consider time-sensitive blog posts and other localized contents as well. It’s a certain way of boosting your social signals (likes, shares, comments) at the allotted period.
• Ensure that ads aren’t intrusive. A great example is how Thrillist, a page for local events, displays ads that aren’t intrusive. According to Ben Lerer, cofounder/CEO, they put mobile first and have a growing audience there that generates 20% sales.

Focus on readability 

Mobile audiences have a short attention span. The average human attention span has dropped by 33% since the year 2000 and is now at 8.25 seconds. What do you have to do? Create mobile-friendly content.

• Make your content direct by using short paragraphs and sentences. 
• Keep key content at the top of the page.
• Have clear and short headlines and subheadings that’s built from H2s to H4s.
• Optimize title tags and meta descriptions, they determine if people will click on your listing.
•  Use the most important keywords and compelling copies in your meta description.
• Add testing title tags into your content creation process to ensure you make the best choice. 

• Keep an “above the fold” mentality by putting key content at the top of a page like Trello above. 
• If your content includes statistics, make them easy to skim and authoritative to show knowledge in your field. 
• Also remember to break your texts with visuals. 

Take advantage of social media platforms

Research suggests a strong correlation between social media and search ranking. So, make it easy for people to share your content, with social sharing buttons. It helps you to easily build backlink profiles for SEO. Moreover, people are spending more time on social media now, so if you build your content right, you can get more traffic there.

To use social media for your mobile content marketing strategy, you need to: 

• Understand your target audience and select the platform that’s right for them
• Optimize your content for social media and mobile. Stats shows that 98.3% of Facebook users access it via mobile. 
• Create ads on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms with mobile users in mind.
• Create content that your users would love to engage with.
• Create content that’s unique to each platform.
• Make your mobile marketing campaign more interactive.
• Use paid social media campaigns to reach more people and drive different objectives. 
• Optimize for video contentas it’s very engaging and if done properly, grabs the attention quickly.

Optimizing for mobile voice search 

 More mobile users are beginning to use the voice search option and to optimize your website for this, you should:

• Focus on phrases and long tail keywords that people will likely use in your field. 
• Ensure that your website is ready for voice search. 
• Anticipate and make provision for specific questions. 

Keep your finger on the pulse

Even after you’ve built a great content marketing strategy, knowing what elements to measure still depends on the goals and objectives you’ve set. There are different things that can be measured, such as:

• The number of unique visitors to your website 
• The amount of mobile traffic to your site using Google Analytics
• Use your mobile payment methods like codes and coupons to measure your content marketing performance. 
• Click-to-call rate can be a basis of analysis as well.
• Gauge  acquisition channels impact on conversion with Google analytics and look out for Assisted conversions. You can use this to monitor your mobile advertising channels performances.

You should also set KPIs that are easy to evaluate. They should indicate how the mobile marketing strategy is performing when it comes to leading audiences to a purchase and turning them into customers.

Remember that the goals have to align with your strategy. Some KPIs to measure  include social metrics, retention rate, interaction rate, etc.

Stay Ahead with mobile content marketing strategy that ranks.

People have twice as many interactions with brands on mobile than anywhere else, according to Think With Google.  A good place to start with optimizing your content marketing strategy for mobile is with Google’s mobile-friendly test.

Mobile SEO involves much more than proper keyword selection and now more than ever, mobile is where a brand’s target audience is most likely to be. This is why you need to build a mobile content marketing strategy that ranks.