In recent years, people have been using their mobile gadgets to browse the web more than on desktops. Additionally, Google has adopted a mobile-first approach, which means they use the mobile version of a website to determine its ranking. If you want to rank well in search results and drive more traffic to your website, consider mobile SEO to optimize your site for mobile devices.

One of the most critical steps when optimizing your site is an SEO Audit. In this article, we help you understand what it is, why it matters, and walk you through the steps to conduct an SEO audit.

What is Mobile SEO Audit?

Mobile SEO audit involves checking the performance of your website on various mobile devices to determine the user experience and search engine optimization on mobile devices. It differs from a typical SEO audit by focusing on factors that affect the user experience on mobile devices. It pays special attention to issues such as:

• Technical SEO. This involves evaluating the technical aspects of your site.
• Mobile usability. Users of mobile devices view your site on a small screen. That means, when conducting an audit, you need to check the navigability of your site and the ease of consuming your content.
• Loading speeds. Many mobile users use either 3G or 5G internet, which can be slower. It is important to ensure your website loads fast if you want to succeed in a mobile marketing campaign.
• User behavior. You need to find out what mobile device users are doing on the site, the pages they visit regularly, and where they drop off. These questions can provide key insights for improving a mobile-friendly website.
• Keyword and traffic performance. The way people search on smartphones is different from how they search on desktops. When conducting an audit, you should pay attention to keywords, their rankings, and their appearance in search results. You should also use keyword clustering based on the search intent.

Steps in Conducting an SEO Audit

There are several steps you can use to conduct a mobile SEO audit. These are:

Conduct a Site Crawl Audit

The basis of any SEO is the site crawl. For mobile devices, this involves checking the exact issues affecting user experience on the small mobile screens, such as:

• Configuration of the viewport. You need to ensure the viewport tag is configured correctly so your content scales appropriately on mobile devices.
• Sizes of touch target. You need to pay attention to the buttons and links to ensure they are the right size and spaced appropriately for easy tapping.
• Mobile meta tags. Check the meta description and title tags to ensure they are within the required character limits in mobile searches.
• Content size. Check whether any pages contain content wider or narrower than the viewport width.

Check the Performance of Your Website

A key part of mobile SEO is a fast-loading website. When they visit your site, visitors expect it to load fast even on mobile devices. The site page is also an essential part of the customer experience, another key ranking factor. Therefore, a necessary part of mobile SEO is testing your site's speed.

If your site speed is slow, there are several tips you can use to speed it up. These include:

• Image resizing and compression. Tools like TinyPNG let you shrink your files without sacrificing quality. JPG is a good choice for images, while SVGs are suitable for graphics.
• Leverage lazy loading. This involves deferring video and image loading until they enter the viewport, so users can view the content quickly.
• Video optimization. Instead of hosting videos directly, you can host them on Vimeo or YouTube and embed them.
• User browser catching. This instructs the browsers to cache static files to improve repeat visits and load them faster.
• Minimize redirects. Reduce the number of times users get sent from one URL to another.
• CSS/JS delivery optimization. If there are some inline critical CSS and non-critical JavaScript, you can defer them.

Consider Your Audience’s Device

You need to understand the types of devices people use to access your site. This will provide insights into where your optimization efforts should be. You can get this information from Google Analytics. Simply go to Reposts>Users>Tech. Once you get to the platform, you will see an overview of your site's share of mobile traffic, operating systems, screen resolutions, and browsers.

You can then drill down into the data to the tech details to determine the device used and OS version, and then cross-reference the data. For instance, if you realize that most visitors to your site use iPhones, you can focus on optimizing your site for iOS compatibility. The data will also provide insights into the screen resolution you should target for the mobile design.

Compare Your Mobile and Desktop Traffic

Again, you can leverage Google Analytics to compare the amount of traffic coming from desktops with the amount coming from mobile devices. This can help you discover issues affecting visitors to your site that you may not have noticed earlier. If you realize that your overall traffic has increased but dropped on mobile, this may indicate an issue with your mobile SEO that needs to be corrected.

Check User Behavior

In addition to the traffic, you can use Google Analytics to better understand what your audience does when they visit your site and how they engage with content on small screens. For instance, you can check metrics on average engagement and average visitor engagement time.

Conduct a Content Audit

Many mobile users engage with content by skimming, so you need to make your content easy to consume. Some of the tips for doing that are:

• Showing the critical content first. Most visitors only skim through content and aren't ready to scroll much. Therefore, ensure they get the correct information as fast as possible.
• Keep it short. Instead of adding fluff, go straight to the point.
• Optimize the content structure. If you have long paragraphs, break them down and use headings, bullet points, and lists to improve the content's scannability.

Make sure you begin your audit with the most important pages. Pay attention to the average engagement rate in Google Analytics to determine which content requires the most improvement.

Check the Design of Your Mobile Site

If you don't ensure that your site design is adjusted for mobile devices, you are making a mistake. There are different ways to do that, but the most common is to use responsive design. This strategy ensures that every visitor to your site finds the same content and website, which also resizes to different screen sizes.

Pay Attention to the Layout

Link sizes and buttons so the site has readable fonts and pages that are easy to navigate and reach. Therefore, think like a mobile user on your site and consider whether it offers a great user experience.

Check Mobile Usability Errors

Google Search Console is a great tool for getting your data on Mobile Usability and highlighting the key issues that affect users of mobile devices. For instance, if the clickable elements are placed too close together and the content is wider than the screen, it will show you.

In Conclusion

A mobile SEO audit can be an essential tool for identifying issues with your content and fixing common problems such as broken links, poor design, and slow load speed, thereby improving the user experience and driving engagement. This can ultimately lead to higher conversion rates, a stronger brand image, and greater visibility. If you are getting started with a mobile SEO audit, the steps above can be helpful. We recommend you also read our guide on Pinterest SEO tactics to increase website traffic.