Now more than ever, mobile search engine optimization has taken a front-seat and is driving arguably a majority of brands’ interactions with search engines. As the day-to-day search queries and requests from users increasingly come from mobile devices, search engines have upped the ante on being ranked highly in results shown to mobile users.

Most brands now understand that responsive design is an absolute must for being visible in mobile search results, but there are a variety of other tips and tweaks that can improve overall mobile SEO. Today, we’ll review some small but meaningful changes you can make to help further improve your standings in these search results.

Optimize Your Content for Mobile

Improving the design of your website to accommodate mobile users is definitely important, but so is optimizing the actual content for mobile users. Some forms of content may be better suited for desktop users, while others work better for those on mobile. In most cases, mobile users prefer to absorb content either via audio or video, which can result in more shares and engagements.

Even with content in the form of text, ensuring that it is formatted for mobile browsing by keeping descriptions short can help improve reception. By pinging servers with content that is optimized for mobile browsing, you’ll naturally generate signals to Google and other search engines that help you rank more highly.

Improve Page Speed

Mobile users are often on-the-go, which means that they’re likely running on internet connections that are slower than in most homes. As a result, mobile users tend to be a bit less patient with slower loading speeds. If you want to ensure that your websites are ranking highly in mobile search, then you need to optimize page speed for maximum results.

If any one of your pages is taking longer than two seconds to load on most mobile devices, then you are losing traffic from mobile users. This in turn sends signals to search engines that your content – for one reason or another – is not “relevant” to mobile users, due to them backing out of the page. Remedy this problem and you’ll be able to retain a greater share of visitors, and therefore avoid negative indicators in mobile SEO.

Monitor Mobile Actions

How your mobile users are interacting with each page can tell you a lot about where to improve. When pinging servers with pages and content, it’s vital that you optimize their placement for maximum mobile engagement. An increasing number of brands are beginning to use mobile click tracking as one way of doing this.

In short, mobile click tracking will tell provide a heat map of where exactly people are touching and engaging on each page. This can help you figure out which elements are generating the most attention, and which ones are out-performing where their placement on each page would suggest. With this info, you can optimize content placement to ensure that more engagement – and therefore, better SEO outcomes – is occurring.

All too often, focus is paid to broader SEO efforts without considering the mobile implications. By focusing more on mobile SEO, your brand will likely be able to grow at a faster rate than at present, attract new visitors and ultimately dominate in any niche.