With mobile searches driving over 60 percent of all internet searches, mobile-friendliness is no longer a luxury but a necessity.
Whether you're building a new website or already have one, if it's not mobile-friendly, the chances of it ranking on top in SERPs is slimmer than either of us winning a lottery.
Google has recently shifted to a mobile-first indexing approach, meaning it prioritizes mobile-friendly websites when indexing and ranking websites based on quality, relevance, and engagement.
So, if you have a website, make sure it is designed and optimized to offer a seamless user experience to mobile users.
In this article, we will delve deeper into understanding why having mobile-friendly websites matters and the best practices for assessing website’s responsiveness.
Why Mobile-Friendliness Matters?
In 2023, the number of people connected to the internet through mobile phones passed 5.35 billion.
The sheer number of people using mobile phones to access the internet is what makes having mobile-friendly websites a priority for Google and for website owners.
If the users are forced to pinch, poke, and frustratingly tap repeatedly to press a tab on your non-responsive website, what do you think will happen? These users will immediately leave to visit your competitors, resulting in a sizeable loss of revenue.
And once a prospect leaves your website with a bitter impression, it will take a lot of effort and marketing dollars to get them to visit you again. Moreover, if you're crushing your ad campaign with killer ads and driving tons of traffic, but your website is poorly designed or not mobile-friendly, the conversion rate would be disastrous.
On the other hand, Google says that 79% of users are more likely to visit your website and even share it with others if it's mobile-friendly.
Having a mobile-friendly website is not only great for a seamless user experience but is an absolute must in today's world to build a loyal base of repeat customers, visitors, and followers.
It helps enhance your brand's value, reduces your marketing spend, boost conversion rates, and helps achieve your business and revenue goals.
User Experience & Mobile-Friendliness Are Intertwined
Offering a seamless user experience is one of the core reasons why building responsive websites matters. When a user has a positive experience browsing your responsive website, it translates into higher engagement rates, increased sales, and improved search engine rankings.
Some of the critical factors you can't miss out on when assessing the user experience of your website are –
Responsive Design
Your website should be optimized to adjust automatically to the user's screen size. This eliminates the need for separate versions of your website for mobile and desktop.
Responsive Elements
Ensure the elements embedded in your website, including tabs, buttons, and links, are big and touch-friendly. Don't exceed the minimum touch target size of 48X48 pixels, and always prioritize adequate spacing between various elements.
Readability
Use legible fonts for your website's content and ensure appropriate font sizes for easy readability. The font and text size should be easily readable on small screens without having to zoom.
Easy-To-Navigate – Integral SEO Optimization Technique
Your mobile-friendly website should be easy to navigate and follow a simple and intuitive structure. Optimize your website by integrating a hamburger menu or other patterns conducive to building mobile-friendly websites.
Content Prioritization
Mobile users are often in a hurry and looking for answers fast. This is why it's essential to prioritize and present important information first. De-clutter your website of unnecessary details and elements.
The ‘responsive’ quotient of your website improves drastically by focusing on these UX elements, ensuring a captivating and engaging experience for the users.
Avoid Pop-Ups
While pop-ups serve a number of purposes for desktop versions of websites, they're certainly not a good idea for mobile versions of websites. It can be annoying and block important information, possibly impacting your SEO negatively.
Implement AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
Google has developed a specialized framework to create fast and responsive landing pages.
These pages are designed to load instantly on mobile devices, enhancing user experience. Implementing this on your website can potentially also boost your website's search engine rankings.
Technical SEO Optimization For Mobile – Enhancing User Experience
Apart from focusing solely on the UX elements of your mobile website, it's essential to optimize your website for search engines. Technical SEO optimization plays a crucial role in ensuring your website drives traffic and engagement by ranking higher in SERPs.
Here are some best practices you should focus on –
Mobile-First Indexing Compliance
With Google focusing on mobile-first indexing, it's the mobile version of your website that's used for ranking in the search engines.
Make sure the mobile version of your website has all the data your website's desktop version has, including structured data, Metadata, etc.
Keep a close watch on your website through Google Search Console for any issues with your website, including broken links, duplicate content, missing content, etc.
Optimize Mobile URLs
Most websites prefer using the same URLs for desktop and mobile versions. But, some websites do have different URLs, such as m.example.com.
If you choose to have separate URLs for mobile and desktop versions of your mobile, optimize it appropriately by implementing proper redirects, hreflang attributes, canonical tags, etc.
This is critical for proper SEO optimization and avoiding issues like duplicate content.
Utilize Structured Data For Mobile Pages
If you want to rank for rich results in SERPs, it's essential to have correctly optimized structured data. This is essential for search engines to understand your website's architecture and content.
Remember that the structured data on your mobile and desktop websites should be the same to avoid issues with search engine indexing.
Enhance Mobile Crawlability
Periodically check Google Search Console for any issues with your website to monitor and fix crawl errors if and when they arise. Don't fill your website with unnecessary jargon and technologies that don't support mobile interfaces, such as Flash.
Monitor Mobile Traffic & User Behavior
Google Analytics will help you closely monitor user behavior trends and mobile traffic. Metrics such as high bounce and low conversion rates on mobile devices hint towards issues that should be fixed to make your website more mobile-friendly.
The data available on Google Search Console and Google Analytics should be used strategically to boost your SEO Optimization efforts, helping you better cater to mobile users.
On-Site SEO Optimization
There are several best practices to improve and build a highly mobile-friendly website through on-site SEO, including using mobile-friendly HTML code. While it is not the only way to design your mobile website, it certainly has an advantage.
Implementing AMP framework, optimizing images, and using mobile-friendly content management systems like WordPress and Joomla are also highly preferred to make your website more friendly for small-screen devices.
Mobile-Friendliness Assessment Tools & Techniques
Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is not a one-time thing.
You need to constantly monitor your website as you update it, publish new content, add new media, and so on to ensure it offers users a seamless user experience.
From ensuring content's readability to checking the technical SEO aspects, test your website regularly to find areas of improvement.
However, fret not, as there are tools that can help you with this, including –
Google Mobile-Friendly Test
It is a tool developed by Google that does site-wide analytical audits to tell if your website is mobile-friendly or not. Some of the issues it checks are –
- Text Size and Readability
- Content Width
- Clickable Elements Spacing
- Viewport Configuration
GTmetrix
This tool primarily checks your website's speed and does site audits to highlight areas of improvement.
PageSpeed Insights
This is another tool developed by Google to check your website's speed and provide recommendations for improvement.
Mobile Usability Report – Google Search Console
You can avail yourself of a mobile usability report on Google Search Console highlighting mobile-specific issues and providing insights to improve your website’s responsiveness for small-screen devices. Some of the critical problems it can help identify are –
- Less spacing between touch elements
- Content unfit or too wide for the mobile screen
- Issues with Viewport
- Font size too small
Manual Testing On Real Device
There's no doubt that tools and emulators help a lot in getting key insights quickly to improve your website's responsiveness. But there's no alternative to testing your website on an actual mobile device yourself.
- Test your website on different handheld devices (mobile, tablet, laptops) with different screen sizes.
- Verify your website is cross-platform compatible by checking your website on both iOS and Android devices.
- Test your website in different orientations, including Landscape and Portrait mode.
- Test how your website performs with different networks, including 3G, 4G, and slower connections.
Take notes of issues you see, make the necessary rectifications, and re-check your website until all the errors and problems are fully resolved.
Final Takeaway
These are the few best practices for mobile-friendliness assessment and implementation that can ensure a superior user experience for your audience.
Remember that building mobile-friendly website is not only about SEO optimization but also about offering your users the value and convenience they seek.
Mobile usage has grown rapidly in the last decade, and the trend will only increase further. To gain a competitive advantage and offer your users with a seamless mobile browsing experience, understanding the mobile-friendliness assessment and techniques is crucial to your website's success.
Focusing on making your website more mobile-friendly will not only gain you higher traffic, better engagement, and more customers; it can certainly help with higher placement in SERPs.
Prioritize integrating mobile user experience in your SEO optimization strategy, and see your business going places.
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