Few aspects of digital marketing are as important as driving traffic to your website and landing pages, which means you need to rank well on Google and other major search engines. By optimizing websites and content, businesses can improve their search engine results page (SERP) rankings. This is known as an organic search strategy and can be particularly effective.
As more and more Internet traffic comes from mobile devices, Google has shifted its focus to mobile-friendly website optimization. What makes a mobile-friendly website so important and how can you improve your rankings? Read on to find out.
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How to make your website mobile friendly
Depending on how much work your website needs to be truly mobile friendly, you may want to hire a web developer. However, there are some steps you can complete yourself. Google suggests the following ways to improve your site’s responsiveness and user experience on mobile devices:
Visit Google mobile friendly sites guide. This page offers several ways to make your site more mobile-friendly, including choosing a responsive web design that automatically adjusts the display to fit different screen sizes. Mobile compatibility test to see how optimized your website is for mobile viewing. You can test a single page on your site or multiple web pages and see exactly how Googlebot sees the pages when determining search results. Use Webmaster Tools to generate one Mobile Usability Reportwhich helps identify any issues with your website when viewed on a mobile device.
When the mobile version of your website is complete, it should fit perfectly on the screen of any mobile device, be it a phone or a tablet. The design of the site must also adapt to typical user activity on that device, which usually requires using a separate design from the desktop version.
You can also consider offering a mobile app. If your company’s goods or services are a good fit, an app gives users a mobile-specific way to interact with your brand and creates new opportunities to engage mobile visitors. [Read related article: Do You Need an App for Your Small Business? ]
Why mobile-friendly websites affect search engine rankings
For years, Google has prioritized mobile page load speed as a key metric when determining a website’s search results ranking. If your mobile website is slow or unresponsive, it carries a heavy penalty to your overall ranking on all devices. Therefore, investing in website optimization must include mobile optimization. [Read related story: Google for Business: A Small Business Guide]
“Businesses with slow mobile sites may see a decline in mobile organic rankings on Google,” said Tony Palazzo, Logical Position’s vice president of administration. “Speed has always been a ranking factor, but previously it was based on the desktop version of your site; now, it will look at the loading speed of your mobile site.”
How do you know if your website is mobile friendly?
Google has made it easy to check how your website loads on mobile devices with a tool in the Google Search Console. Simply plug in your website’s URL and Google will tell you whether or not it’s considered mobile-friendly based on their current algorithm. Alternatively, you can plug in your website code to test whether a newly developed website is mobile-friendly before you start.
“While Google says slower sites that still have great content can still rank well, it’s a clear push for businesses and developers to emphasize performance and user experience in mobile platforms,” said Sean Brady, former president of the Americas at Emarsys. “Companies must select the right technology and use the right strategies to deliver both relevant personalized content and mobile performance.”
Google has made it easy to check how your website loads on mobile devices with Google Search Console. Simply plug in your website’s URL and Google will tell you whether or not it’s considered mobile-friendly.
Mobile optimization and user experience
Mobile optimization isn’t just about ranking better in the SERPs; it is also critical to capture traffic. More users than ever access websites through mobile devices. As with desktop websites, mobile users who encounter slow and cumbersome websites are likely to leave and never return.
Beyond that, your mobile website should also be easy to navigate. If you’ve ever come across a website that clearly wasn’t designed with mobile devices in mind, you know how frustrating the experience can be. Designing a mobile-specific design (think lots of vertical scrolling and easy-to-press buttons) will ensure that when users land on your page, they stay on your page. Lots of horizontal scrolling, small checkboxes and drop-down menus will likely frustrate a mobile user.
The impact of mobile devices on a broader digital marketing strategy
Optimizing a website for a mobile device is an important aspect of a larger digital marketing strategy, but it is far from the only element.
It’s also important to create a cohesive brand message across social media and email channels, tailoring content to suit each channel to target your audience where they’re most active.
Creating a holistic digital marketing strategy can also help you retarget customers who have previously visited your website, improving converting traffic and building brand loyalty.
Brady said the return on investment for email marketing is nearly double that of mobile, social media and other digital marketing platforms. If you’re concerned that your website isn’t ranking well, develop other marketing channels to increase your ROI while you work on retooling your site for mobile devices. An omnichannel strategy is not an alternative to a mobile-friendly website; is part of the same effort.
“Google’s focus on mobile directly impacts brands’ omnichannel marketing strategies, especially since millennials, on average, use 4.5 devices when interacting with a brand, forcing developers to continue to focus se in the mobile experience,” said Brady. “In the competitive e-commerce industry, marketers must continue to provide consistent and personalized content across channels to ensure their content in those channels is built to perform as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
Load time, design, font size, a mobile app, and optimized content all contribute to improving your rankings.
When building your website, think mobile first
Mobile optimization is crucial to maintaining or increasing your SERP ranking. Load time, design, font size, a mobile app, and optimized content all contribute to improving your rankings. Additionally, a mobile-optimized website can fit into your larger digital marketing strategy and support remarketing efforts.
In the age of mobile, your small business cannot afford to ignore mobile users. Whether your site is already mobile-friendly and you want to improve it even further, or you’re playing catch-up when it comes to capturing mobile traffic, staying on top of the algorithm approach is essential from search engines to mobile websites.
Sammi Caramela and Tejas Vemparala contributed to this article. Some source interviews were conducted for an earlier version of this article.
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