Mobile internet traffic has surpassed desktop traffic. Since you’re probably reading this on your phone or tablet, you already knew that. But what you might not already know is how to use this to your advantage. Here’s a few guidelines that will help you create a mobile-friendly website for your business, which will help you attract and keep customers as well as increasing your site’s SEO for higher rankings on sites like Google.
When it comes to a mobile-friendly website, appearance is everything. Make sure that your website is responsive and will adapt to whatever size screen the user has. (And also make sure that it does this correctly—you don’t want someone to get the mobile site from their laptop.) By doing this, you can make sure no important information is cut off and your potential customer doesn’t have to work hard to navigate your website.
You should also look through your mobile website to make sure the typography is easy to read on different formats and the buttons are large enough that users can hit the links they want on the first try. Remember, simpler is often better when it comes to websites because your users won’t stay on a website if it is difficult to read and understand.
There’s also a few steps you should take behind the scenes to ensure that your website loads quickly and abides by Google’s rules for better SEO results. The first step is to improve speed by using images that are just large enough to look good without taking too long to load. Instead of large HD images, trying scaling product photos down before uploading to your site.
You should also make sure that your website is not redirecting from a moved or deleted page too often. Every once in a while it can be a good tool to help users find pertinent information, but use it too much and it will slow down your website. Another way to make your site faster is to utilize browser caching. Make sure this is enabled on the back end so returning customers won’t have to wait for everything to reload on their device.
And the last and most important step to creating a mobile-friendly website is to ensure it is easy for Google to detect. Make sure your website doesn’t block assets like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS because this is how search engines read your site to help determine its ranking. There are many factors that go into the ranking for your website, and they are often changing in response to what users like to see in a website. But, doing all of the things in this article will help your website perform better in the rankings.
In the end, all of this information boils down to three important things: your mobile site should be easy to read and navigate, it should be fast, and it should be easy for search engines to detect and catalogue. If you think your mobile site is laking in any of these areas, be sure to talk to your web developer about fixing it asap. And if you have questions or want to discuss the possibilities of an all new, mobile friendly website through R&A, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We love talking about the latest trends in SEO and website design… seriously, we could talk about it for hours.