Gone are the days of households with a single computer. Even the days where phones were only phones are gone. Today, smartphones are like little computers, and more and more people are using them as their primary device for browsing the Internet. In fact, some website traffic can have half or more users come in from mobile sources. If your business’ website is not optimized for mobile devices, you will lose a significant amount of potential sales and leads. This is why your website needs to be mobile-friendly. In this blog post you will learn:
– What habits do consumers have today?
– What makes a website mobile-friendly?
– How does a mobile-friendly website affect your SEO?
What Habits Do Consumers Have Today?
Today, there are more users than ever visiting websites from mobile devices, and each visit to your website could be a sale or lead. Thanks to rapid advancements in smartphone technology, internet usage between desktop and mobile is becoming closer and closer worldwide. It has also allowed people to be constantly connected, even when out of the house, and on the go. Depending on what industry you are in, your website’s visitors may even be skewed towards a majority of mobile users! All together, these factors indicate that mobile internet use is at an all-time high, and without a mobile-friendly website you will miss out on the opportunity to convert your website’s viewers into sales and leads.
These advancements in technology have also resulted in mobile-friendly websites being the expected new norm. The ability to view your website, research your products or services, and complete the entire purchase process easily from a smartphone, is now a baseline for website functionality. Without these things, your website may also appear less credible and outdated. Due to the high expectations and standards of customers today, they are more likely to bounce from your website if it is hard to use, navigate, or if anything else arises as a pain point. With your competitors a few clicks (or taps on a touchscreen) away, optimizing your website for mobile is crucial for your business’ success.
What Makes a Website Mobile-Friendly?
So what makes a website mobile-friendly? It needs to be responsive, readable, and easy to use and navigate. Responsive design is when a website is built so that it responds to the screen size it is being displayed on, and adjusts accordingly. In other words, this means that your website adjusts its font size, image size, and layout for every screen size variation, including all desktop monitor, phone, and tablet sizes. Therefore, having a responsive design will already make your website significantly more readable and easy to use than websites solely built for desktop use. If your website is built on WordPress, that means it already has a responsive design and is on its way to being fully optimized for mobile. Learn why WordPress is the best CMS.
However, there are additional tweaks you can make that will maximize how mobile-friendly your website is. Avoid large blocks of text, simplify your navigation options, and minimize user input. Even with a responsive design that caters to any screen size, giant walls of text are overwhelming and difficult to read. Similarly, a navigation menu with an excessive amount of options is overwhelming to look at, but also hard to use on a small touch screen. Lastly, breaking down forms that require user input into bite-sized chunks or reducing the overall amount of information required, will make users more likely to fill them out, especially when they have the constraints of reading and typing on a small screen. Mobile-friendly website design simply caters to the needs and challenges of a person browsing your website while they are on their mobile device.
How Does a Mobile-Friendly Website Affect Your SEO?
Just in case you are unfamiliar, SEO is Search Engine Optimization. In regards to websites, SEO is essentially designing the structure and content of a website to align with metrics valued by Google. Google then rewards these websites by making them the top search result when users search for related keywords.
Google now operates on a Mobile-First Index. This means that every Google search will prioritize and show you results from their inventory of completely mobile-friendly websites, with more mobile-friendly websites appearing as top results. In other words, Google now considers mobile-friendliness an extremely high-value SEO metric, even when the search is being performed on a desktop device. Due to these changes to how Google operates, having a mobile-friendly website has become a top priority, even when it comes to improving SEO.
As a business owner, you need to take care of a lot of moving parts to remain successful and competitive. But what should you prioritize? Due to today’s consumer habits, it does not matter if you have a great product or service if nobody can find your business through a Google search. Especially if your website is not mobile-friendly. If you are looking to make your website mobile-friendly and improve your SEO to get the website traffic and sales your business deserves, contact us today!
