Mobile-friendly SEO is a critical aspect of the overall website SEO strategy that cleaning companies need to adopt in 2021. Every digital marketing strategy that you focus on ultimately centers on giving your brand a competitive edge – both online and offline.
Mobile marketing trends are fluid and they change according to tech innovations and user preferences. So unless you can mold your digital marketing to include mobile-friendly SEO as a way of accommodating for these changes, staying competitive can be extremely challenging.
And considering the fact that your target audience is heavily mobile dependent –it goes without that you need to plan and implement your mobile marketing strategy accordingly.
Continue reading if you want to know more about laying a solid mobile-friendly SEO foundation for your cleaning company,
What is Mobile SEO?
Before moving onto mobile search engine optimization techniques, it is important that you understand what mobile-friendly SEO means and why you should consider it for your cleaning company.
Optimizing your cleaning website for mobile SEO is focused on specific strategies that enable easy and seamless discovery of your site and optimized display of your content over different mobile devices. Also keep in mind that unless your site sports a mobile-friendly version, search engines such as Google will not consider you a reliable and credible source to display in search engine results pages (SERPs).
And as mentioned above, consumers today are heavily dependent on mobile devices. So unless your site is mobile-friendly SEO optimized, you will find it difficult to target and engage with large sections of your target audience base.
Why Do You Need a Mobile SEO Approach?
With each passing year, an increasing number of people are adopting a mobile-first approach – in the sense that they are more inclined to use their mobile devices for every aspect of their lives. This includes all their online activity pertaining to making buying decisions for all kinds of products and services.
However, even today, there are a substantial percentage of businesses who are not invested in optimizing their websites for mobile devices. Even among the ones who have done some form of mobile optimization, there is a lag in keeping up with new mobile SEO trends and requirements. As a result, these businesses miss out on some fantastic opportunities to connect and engage with new customers.
When you focus on mobile-friendly SEO for your cleaning company website, you optimize your site for different screen sizes which means regardless of the device type, your site will deliver a seamless and engaging user experience (UX).
Mobile-friendly SEO includes several focus areas including site design, page load speeds, and site structure among other criteria – each of these areas work collectively to ensure you are able to optimize on and boost mobile visitors.
Top 5 reasons why you should start focusing on mobile-friendly SEO for your cleaning company website:
- It can enhance your website SEO which in turn can boost your search rankings.
- It effectively improves your site UX for your customers – and if your users are happy, then search engines will recognize this and reward you with high ranking in SERPs.
- An optimized mobile experience can help in boosting customer attention which allows you to encourage brand interactions across multiple touch-points.
- A critical aspect of enhanced mobile UX is faster website loading speed – this is something that mobile SEO can deliver.
- It can give you a competitive edge – you will be able to reach customers faster and in their moment of need with offers and services that can make them prefer your brand over the competition.
7 Mobile-friendly SEO Best Practices for Cleaning Companies in 2021
Now that you realize the importance of focusing on mobile-friendly SEO for your cleaning company, consider the following 7 mobile SEO best practices that you can easily implement.
- Website Configuration
In most cases, businesses build their mobile and desktop mobile website versions to be identical. What you need to ensure is that the mobile version of your site not only offers faster loading, but also displays images that are proportional to the mobile device on which they are being viewed – and as such all your site content should display accordingly.
When creating a mobile version of your site, consider the following three methods;
Separate Site
During the early mobile browsing days, businesses maintained two separate versions of their website which is the desktop (main version) and then they had a mobile version.
So anytime a user visits the site, depending on their browsing preference (desktop or mobile) they would be directed to one of the two URL types. This method of course is more cumbersome from creating to implementation and maintenance since whatever you create, you would need two versions of the same. Not to mention, implementing SEO into the mobile version can present several challenges.
Dynamic Serving
Dynamic serving requires you to maintain just one single URL for all of your content as opposed to the previous method which requires two different URL formats.
So with dynamic serving, the user will not be directed to the appropriate URL version. Instead, dynamic serving ensures that your site will display a version of HTML/CSS which is compatible with the device type of the user.
There is however, an issue with dynamic serving – at times the server might display the wrong version to mobile users.
In addition, when using dynamic serving, you are required to maintain different content versions for different devices.
Responsive Web Design
Responsive design is the ideal choice since it effectively customizes site content and layout by simply converting it to match with the device type being used – and it does not require separate or multiple URLs.
Search engines such as Google prefer a responsive design and tend to lean towards sites supporting responsive design in SERPs. Another advantage of the responsive design is that it offers seamlessly SEO integration and site load times get optimized offering improved UX.
In addition, crawling by search spiders can be done much faster which again means indexing your site is faster – something that can help you in SERP ranking.
- Mobile Friendly
The next step in working towards mobile-friendly SEO is to ensure all your site content is mobile-friendly. While Google does check your site performance, it is advisable that you test every page of your site to get a more accurate assessment.
You can check your cleaning company website’s mobile usability using the Google Search Console and use the “Mobile Usability” option in the menu. If there are any issues with your site’s mobile usability, you will receive alerts as well as steps you can take to fix the errors.
Another way to check you site’s mobile usability is by directly adding your site’s URL into the Google Mobile-Friendly test tool. If you receive a green tag (Page is mobile-friendly) then you are in the clear. If you don’t, then here again you will be provided with reasons explaining the issues you need to fix to make your site mobile-friendly.
- Crawling and Indexing
One of the ways in which Google understands and indexes your site is by having its search spiders crawl your site content. If it finds that your site has adhered with all the SEO practices laid out, the search giant will reward your site with visibility in SERPs for the relevant search queries.
Reasons for Poor Rankings in SERPs
Without crawling your images, CSS files or JavaScripts, search engines will not be able to give your site high ranking in SERPs. Another reason for poor ranking can be if search crawlers are unable to effectively distinguish between your mobile and desktop versions. However, by using HTTP Header tags, you can make it easy for Google to quickly determine which version to display.
If you want to enable seamless and easy indexing of your site, then the best way to do this is by creating a mobile XML sitemap for each URL. You can then go ahead and submit the XML maps to Google Search Console in addition to your mobile site.
- Site Speed
Two common issues in offering a seamless mobile experience to users revolves around the hardware (different device types and screens) and of course connectivity issues. For these reasons, ensuring fast page load speed is particularly crucial for mobile users compared to desktop users. In addition to optimizing images, you need to focus on a few other areas including minification or compression of code, leverage browser caching, and minimizing redirects.
Each of these factors will play a crucial role in ensuring that customers enjoy a seamless experience when using your site. If there are issues, especially with site load speeds, users will not hesitate to leave your site and move to a competitor’s site. Which is why you need to ensure that your page load speed is up to mark.
To check how fast your mobile version loads simply enter your website URL into Google’s mobile speed test tool.
You will get to know your page load speed and you will also be provided with recommendations on how you can fix page load speed issues if any. Also make sure you make sure you focus on image optimization to ensure faster upload.
- UX Design
An optimized UX design is essential since your site is viewed on different screen and device types and also because users have different viewing preferences.
So while one user might be ok with your current site font, others might have to pinch the screen to enlarge the words or even to focus on a piece of content that interests them – something which can be challenging if your page is overcrowded. These issues can quickly tire users and they will move onto a site that offers simplified viewing experiences.
There are a few things you want to focus on when optimizing for mobile viewing. Consider the following;
- Ensure your content is easy to read.
- Remove unnecessary clutter.
- Write using short paragraphs.
- Use strong color contrast between the background and the text.
- Ensure you use a 14 to 16 pixels font size – ditch the fancy font.
- Make use of bullet points for lists.
- Position the meat of your content for faster discovery – don’t push it down the page since mobile users don’t have that kind of scrolling patience.
- Ensure you resize or compress images – you can also use HTML5 image tags when setting size dimensions.
- Don’t use Flash – if the user’s device does not have the plugin they will not be able to view it. Instead use HTML5 when creating any kind of special effects.
- Avoid using pop-ups – they can be irritating and frustrating to close on mobile devices. Users frustrated with too many pop-ups might simply decide to ditch your site!
- Don’t forget about the fat finger – touch screen navigation can be a nightmare if your buttons are not the right size. Think about the fat finger and customize accordingly.
- Optimize Titles and Meta Descriptions and Use Schema.org structured data
The fact that you are working with less screen space means you need to optimize in every way possible. So be concise when you create your titles, URLs, as well as meta descriptions.
Search engines make use of structured data to provide users with the most relevant answers to their search results. These results are displayed in form of rich snippets. So make sure you use structured data on your website if you want to effectively boost your search rankings.
- Optimize for Local Search
As a cleaning company, your major focus will always be to stand out in local search results. The best way to do this is by focusing on optimizing your mobile content for local search. So make sure you standardize your business name, address, and phone number. Also include your city and state name within your website’s metadata.
Monitor Your Performance
Lastly, don’t ever forget that SEO is an ongoing process. And this holds true for mobile-friendly SEO as well. So you can’t just optimize for the mobile once and then leave it at that.
Make sure you carry out routine analytical checks – if you come across areas that need to be updated/tweaked, then do what’s necessary. Also make sure you keep up with all the mobile SEO best practices. This is one way to ensure your site is always optimized for the mobile and also for search engines. Any lapses on your part could lead to your site getting penalized by Google in SERPs. And that is something you absolutely you want to avoid at all costs.
To Wrap Up
Mobile-friendly SEO is something that businesses cannot ignore in present times. Your core customer base is on the mobile – so you need to focus on mobile SEO if you want your cleaning company to enjoy enhanced search rankings and greater visibility in relevant search results.
These seven mobile-friendly SEO best practices can help you provide your users with a great mobile UX and also boost your overall SEO strategy. When this happens your cleaning business will effectively benefit from improved lead generation and sales conversions.
