Last year, Google introduced an update to its’ algorithm (the method in which Google decides the position a site appears in rankings for a certain term is decided). It explained that sites which had mobile-friendly uses would rank better than non-optimised websites.

Along with the SEO benefits that having a site optimised for mobile devices can bring your business, it also has many positive effects on your audience and customer base.

We share the importance of ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly on both your business’ SEO and audience:

1. There is more mobile traffic than desktop

In 2015, over 1,900 million people used a mobile device to browse the internet – a mind-blowingly large amount when compared to the 1,700 million using a desktop browser.

This graph demonstrates that not having a well-optimised website lead to your business losing out on more than 2 million people – the chance to make a hefty sum of cash for a small bit of optimisation work that could potentially be outsourced for a minor fee in comparison.

52% of tablet users say that they now prefer to shop on their tablet rather than their PC. Due to a tablet being a form of mobile device, it is important to secure a website design that caters to a number of different screen sizes.

If you’re thinking that a customers’ preferentials don’t impact their spending habits, you’re wrong. Tablet users have been found to spend more than 50% than PC users – a substantial amount that your business can be losing out on!

2. Positive user experience is important

It has been reported that if a user clicks onto your website through a mobile device hoping to make a purchase, there is a 61% chance of them leaving if they grow frustrated and are unable to find what they are looking for.

Customers visiting your e-commerce site are more likely to buy online when the site meets their mobile needs, so a mobile-responsive design is most effective when font and image size, page load time and a limited need for pinching and scrolling is taken into consideration.

Instead, try your best to provide a customer with all of the information that they’d need in one place. A search bar that co-operates with the integral keyboard on a mobile device is a great example for this, along with large buttons that bigger fingers can press with ease.

3. It is beneficial for SEO

User experience is one of 200 factors that complete Googles’ supposed algorithm and means that if a site is easy for a human to navigate, read and complete a purchase through, a business’ website has more value. If a site is poorly optimised for mobile devices, it can cause the customer to leave your site and induce a high bounce rate.

This means that a search engine will not see that your web page is providing people with the correct information for a search term and therefore, will position your business lower when compared with competitors. This can lead to lost customers and in turn, a loss of income.

4. There are more social referrals on mobile devices

Almost 80% of social media time is now being spent on mobile devices and as this figure continues to grow, your business can learn to exploit the benefits that social media can bring to your shareable content.

Let’s say your business has a company blog; you’re producing great content but your site isn’t mobile-friendly and visitors on a mobile site aren’t seeing the best of your articles. You’ve invested money in social media but it’s still not converting. What is the problem?

If you want to take full advantage of social media and the power it has to bring in a new audience, design your site to be responsive on mobile and tablet devices. This means that when your article, page or site is shared, it can be viewed by people across multiple different platforms whilst providing a great user experience.

Optimising your website to become more mobile-friendly can help your business to get a slice of the social media pie whilst helping to convert impressions into purchases.

If your website isn’t optimised for a variety of devices by now, you’re definitely missing a trick!

Starting a business blog is usually one of the things that a PR/content marketing agency will recommend and their many notable benefits mean that it can have a great impact on your lead generation and conversions, with as much as 37% of marketers reporting that blogs are the most valuable type of content marketing.

However, it can be frustrating when you pour all of your efforts into writing well-written, informative articles that never gets seen anywhere. This could be partly down to a lack of social promotion but ensuring that your article ranks in Google is a proven way to increase your business’ traffic; making sure that your content is being seen by the right people.

We share the biggest SEO mistakes that businesses tend to make with their blog and how to avoid them:

Duplicate content

When your website is hosting copy that is duplicated elsewhere, search engines can have a hard time when deciphering the page which has the most relevance to a search term. This means that copy which has been directly taken from elsewhere on the internet and posted to your business’ blog can be invaluable; adding minimal SEO benefits to your site.

Although search engines are extremely clever in the way that they work, they may struggle to know which site hosted the original copy. This would be the page that is ranked highly for a search query.

Duplicate content is one of the biggest SEO mistakes that a blog could make as it can cause businesses to suffer traffic and ranking declines, as well as search engines providing less relevant results to a search term. It is important to ensure that content hosted on your site (especially on blogs!) are unique pieces of copy that can’t be found elsewhere.

Too little copy

Blogs have been rated as the fifth most-trusted source for accurate online information so ensuring that your business’ blog is well optimised with enough copy can lead to your website becoming a hub for information relative to your industry. From selling washing machines to providing people with an easy online service to sell their old clothes, every industry has some valuable advice that can be told!

Content-rich sites have been proven to get more links, so it’s definitely worth investing time in to master. This is likely to be because people are more willing to link to valuable content that is found elsewhere but can’t be directly copied from your site.

Whether it is a blog post explaining how to check for faults in a vehicle engine or advice on selling old pieces of clothing; try to keep the well-written whilst including as much valuable information as you can.

Stuffing keywords

Yes, content-rich blog posts are beneficial to your business’ blog but the quality of copy shouldn’t be compromised. Although longer content has a better chance of giving search engines an idea of the topic being discussed on your page, the quality of the copy is taken into account when determining rankings.

Labelled under the black hat SEO umbrella, keyword stuffing happens when as many relevant terms as possible are crammed into an article. Here’s an example of a badly-stuffed copy:

“Look no further for cheap earrings. We have a number of cheap earrings in our selection of cheap earrings, and can provide you with cheap earrings that can challenge the price of other online cheap earrings retailers.”

This example has 5 mentions of the ‘cheap earrings’ keyword in just 37 words of copy, which is far too many to be beneficial. Instead, it can come across as ‘spammy’ which isn’t ideal for your readers. Considering that user experience is becoming more important in Google’s algorithm, best practice is to avoid keyword stuffing.

The keyword density – the number of words on a page divided by the number of instances of a keyword/phrase – is likely to be used by search engines to determine the relevance of your page to a search term, but over-stuffing pages are crucial SEO mistakes that can result in your site being de-indexed.

Meta data

The meta data that your site provides are crucial for quality SEO – it is the number one way that a search engine can instantly recognise what your page is talking about!

Ensuring that the meta title on your business blog is optimised can have great effects on your rankings. The best way to ensure that the meta title is having a positive impact is to be wary of length, keyword placement and branding. As a rough guide, the entire meta title tag should be between 65-75 words and include the main keyword at the beginning.

The meta description tag is where you can go into more detail surrounding the page and encourage the searcher to click on your page as opposed to your competitors’. This tag exists to provide a short description of a page’s content that is no longer than 160 characters.

Creating your own sphere of valuable and relevant information through your business’ blog is a proven way to get results, and we’re sure that our tips on common SEO mistakes can help you to steer through the myths that often cloud a successful blogging strategy.