The Very Best SEO UK Practitioners Put Mobile First - But What Needs Doing?

In a recent blog, we explained that Google is increasingly indexing websites and ranking them in search engine results according to their mobile-friendliness. In other words, the best SEO UK based practitioners now need to concentrate on building new websites to be viewed on mobile devices first, laptops and desktops second.

If you pay for SEO services rather than carrying them out in-house, you should expect your SEO agency to handle this for you. But it helps to have a general understanding of what mobile-first means for web design. First, you want your website to easily switch between the two formats, desktop and mobile. Clearly, a mobile has a much smaller screen, so each page must shrink to fit in. A mobile is also most commonly viewed vertically too, unlike the wider, more horizontal screen on a desktop PC. So it’s important that users can view the key information without having to scroll from left to right – which can be extremely tiresome. And precisely because a mobile has a smaller screen, the key information on your webpage must be just that: what’s absolutely essential, no clutter or fluff. This means that content is affected by mobile-first principles too. To hold viewers’ attention, SEO experts recommend only putting the most important information on your webpage and ensuring that any call to action buttons are clearly visible and accessible for the mobile user.  Content must also be easy to read and accessible. This tends to mean less in the way of distracting visuals, and more focus on the words.

Linked to the point about concise content with fewer visuals, it’s worth noting that videos, photos, infographics, and so on are pretty resource-intensive on a website. Consider each visual you use carefully – what does it add to the user experience? Because each illustration takes time to load up, the more you put on, the slower the response time of your webpage, and that can cause frustration. If pictures and graphics are essential, the best SEO UK services can resize them, compress them or use different file formats, so they’re both visible and don’t slow your website down. Navigation is another critical aspect a top SEO company should ensure is built into the design. On a laptop or desktop, users can click anywhere to return to the home screen. On a mobile, it’s less obvious unless you use tools such as sticky headers (fixed navigation menus that stay visible no matter where you scroll on the screen). And finally, some basic but best SEO practices: make sure URLs, titles, and meta descriptions are optimised, giving concise and accurate descriptions of the page content. And if your business has a local element, capitalise on people’s ability to search on the go by optimising your content for local searches.

In summary, the essentials that the best SEO UK services will concentrate on are around ensuring that content, site design and navigation are all kept simple yet effective. Most of the advice above isn’t rocket science, but apply the principles and you won’t get left behind in the rush towards mobile-first.