Many affiliates, and almost all beginner affiliates, decide to handle SEO on their own – as an in-house project. Even though standard SEO is a pretty well-defined set of practices and strategies, mobile SEO is still a big question mark. To make matters even worse, there are also additional things standing in our way that are not problematic at all for standard SEO, yet can cause some troubles for mobile.
This article presents various mobile SEO tips and lists the reasons why (sometimes) doing in-house mobile SEO sucks.
“What Is Exactly Mobile SEO?”
Is mobile SEO about optimizing for smartphones? Devices using WiFi? Those accessing the web through a 3G network? Devices with small screens? Devices small in size in general? Are tablets included? Or is it about all hand held devices?
There’s some serious confusion in the mobile SEO space and everyone will give you a different answer on this. The best solution would be to just have your own opinion about this and proceed accordingly when creating your campaigns.
Not Compatible Technology
Modern websites tend to be very heavy on technology. In other words, they feature a lot of JavaScript, animations, newest CSS functionalities, and so on. And it gets even worse for casino affiliate sites, where custom casino widgets provided by the program operators are not uncommon.
This all requires a lot of testing to make sure that your site works well on multiple mobile devices. Otherwise, there’s no sense in working on mobile SEO if you can’t guarantee a good user experience to mobile visitors.
Difficulty Tracking
These days, most of online tracking is done through various scripts that execute a piece of code on the user’s browser. All desktop web browsers have this script functionality built in (plus other, much more elaborate features). But when it comes to mobile browsers, it’s not always the case.
What this means is that you might have difficulty tracking your mobile efforts (traffic-wise) because even if your tracking system doesn’t show any activity from mobile devices, it’s not a proof that’s necessarily the case.
Difficulty Testing
A somewhat related problem is making sure that your split tests and other optimization mechanisms work correctly. Split tests are crucial for analyzing mobile traffic and SEO, but the problem is that they are also based on scripts.
For instance, if your site doesn’t behave properly on mobile devices when people try to access a page undergoing a split test, it can cause them to leave right away, which will in result increase your bounce rate. The bigger the bounce rate, the clearer the signal to Google that visitors are not finding what they were looking for on your site.
Problems With Distinguishing Search Traffic on Mobile
Google Analytics (GA) is a great product and it can help you a lot when checking your site’s results from SEO and other promotional campaigns. However, finding good and reliable mobile stats can be tough.
And it’s not even GA’s fault. For instance, one day, Apple decided that all devices running iOS6 will stop sending keyword data for searches executed via the search bar in mobile versions of Safari. This may seem like a small inaccuracy, but it actually makes it impossible to analyze your SEO results and impact on iOS devices.
SEO changes often, and it’s not exactly easy in general. But as it turns out, mobile SEO can be even more difficult, especially in the analytics department.