Inarguably, rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) can make or break a website. Equally inarguably, many of the site-design aspects that influence SERP rankings are within the control of developers.

Traditionally, website developers have focused the majority of their attention on optimizing pages for desktop viewing. Mobile versions often seem no more than a stepchild of so-called “responsive design” — a member of the family, but one not given much special attention.

Of necessity, developers’ focus will change next year with the advent of Google’s mobile-first initiative. Hopefully, most developers already are tweaking their sites to ensure they perform as well — or better — on mobile devices as they do on desktop PCs.

To help in that endeavor, WebCEO, an SEO software provider, created a handy do-and-don’t-do guide to mobile ranking factors, broken down by technical, user experience and content issues.

Technical factors

Keep load speed under 1.2 seconds. The top 10 sites load in 1.10 seconds; average sites load in 1.17 seconds. If a site takes more than three seconds to load, users will move on.

Use AMP (accelerated mobile pages) HTML, which loads 30 times faster than standard HTML.

Don’t use Flash. Most mobile browsers don’t support the code.

Audit sites for technical errors weekly. Faulty redirects and 404 errors are the most common gremlins.

User experience

Google likes un-ordered lists even more on mobile sites than on desktop versions. Nine bullet points seems to be the magic number for mobile pages.

Optimize images until they scream, and use no more than four (on average) per page.

Dump intrusive ads (pop-ups, interstitials and banners that take up more than about 10 percent of the space on the page). Google won’t penalize cookie notifications, age-verification mechanisms and other legal notices.

Use 16-point fonts to ensure readability.

Make touch elements large enough and space them far enough apart that a human finger can press the correct one easily.

Mobile pages should have 75-percent fewer links than their desktop brethren, and the links should be spaced far enough apart that clicking the correct one doesn’t require surgical precision.

Content

Mobile pages typically have less text than desktop pages. Adjust keyword density accordingly.

Between 700 and 1,000 words of copy is ideal on a mobile page.

Make sharing easy. More than 77 percent of all content shared via mobile devices goes through apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Ensure content is sharable on the platform your users prefer.

Image © Christopherap