On April 21, 2015, Google announced the release of a new ranking algorithm that would give mobile-friendly pages higher rankings on search results. This algorithm came to be known as Mobilegeddon, and has since changed the way online businesses build their websites.
If you have a blog or a business site and hope to be competitive in the cutthroat environment, here are the reasons why you should incorporate a mobile-friendly website design:
How Important is Mobile Traffic?
Nowadays, mobile phones are faster, smarter, and cheaper, and can perform most tasks, just like a computer. It is therefore not surprising that mobile users made up 61% of all web traffic in 2018, according to Statista. Google also reports that a whopping 78.17% of all searches from September to October 2018 were from mobile phones.
What’s more, mobile browsing is not even close to its peak yet. According to analysts, mobile internet usage will account for 79% of total usage by the end of 2020. Simply put, only 2 out of 10 visitors will be looking at the desktop version of your site.
Further, according to Google, 61% of mobile browsers don’t return to a site that proves problematic to access. Additionally, 40% of users will visit your competitor’s website if they have problems accessing yours, which means loss of business if you’re an entrepreneur.
Analyze Your Audience
Even though mobile browsing is becoming increasingly popular, a significant number of people (48% of internet users), still connect to the internet from their desktops. As such, you are advised to do some research on your market or target audience before making a final decision.
How one uses the internet depends on, among others, their age and location. For instance, middle-aged and the elderly predominantly prefer web browsing to mobile. Young people, on the other hand, prefer to use their smartphones to browse the internet.
In terms of niche, service-based industries are better placed to benefit from mobile responsiveness of their sites. For example, someone looking for emergency car repair services on a highway will most likely search for the same using their phone or tablet.
Mobile-Friendliness and Google Rankings
Mobile usability is the third most important thing that determines where your site appears on Google search results after content length and quality, and freshness. Furthermore, since Mobilegeddon 2 was released, Google algorithms now crawl mobile versions before the web versions of websites. Thus, having a fast, responsive, and well organized mobile site version will do you a lot of good. Of course, don’t forget to spruce up your desktop site as well – there’s nothing wrong with going for two birds with one stone!
Mobile-Friendly Website Design
Any decent web designer knows how to create a responsive web design. With a responsive design, your website display will automatically adapt to the size of the mobile device being used. This may involve auto-resizing the text and content therein or even drastically changing the site appearance to include simplified content that loads faster.
Depending on your niche, you may find that your responsive website version is not guaranteed to provide optimal user experience to each of your mobile visitors. This is because mobile devices are not homogeneous, and use different operating systems which differ in quality or are made by different manufacturers. In that case, developing a mobile app would be the best option for you.
Notably, it may be expensive and time consuming for a small business owner to maintain optimized versions of mobile and desktop sites. So, go through your traffic analysis to see what platform your visitors/customers use more before budgeting for mobile app development.
Mobile-Friendly Content
Auto-resizing and optimization of existing content will only be effective if supplemented by mobile-friendly content. While writing content for your mobile-friendly site, keep in mind that the screen size is limited and hence you need to pay more attention to the text rather than images.
Moreover, aspire to be concise and authentic, and learn to use headers and callouts to catch your readers’ attention, and inspire them to take action.
Therefore, the only way to succeed in e-commerce, is to create content for humans, and not the search engines!
