SEO involves optimizing websites in a variety of different ways. One of the most effective ways to perform mobile seo is by creating a mobile version of your website by using something called responsive design. As approximately 15% of all traffic on the internet today is mobile traffic and approximately 30% of website sales come from mobile users, it’s more important than ever to ensure that your website is reaching its audience.
What is responsive design?
Without getting too technical, responsive design involves resizing a website to suit the device that people use to view your website. The site will adapt to the screen resolution of the device and font sizes, navigations, and image sizes will change, rearrange, and make the site useable on any interface. A now dated practice, creating a separate mobile site will harm SEO efforts in the long run as the mobile version of a site is just duplicated content.
How will responsive design help my site?
Have you ever actually tried to look at a full website on your smartphone? If you haven’t, it’s kind of like looking at one of those paintings on the head of a pin—beautiful, but not recognizable as anything without a magnifying glass and possibly some explanation of the subject matter. This experience is not conducive toward making a sale.
| Pretty much, responsive design turns this: | Into this: |
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Just by implementing a responsive design on your site, website owners can generally expect an improvement of conversion rates and sales numbers.
My site already does that. Do I still need SEO?
Yes. While implementing a responsive design can aid in a site receiving a higher Google rankings in the SERPs, this is due to shorter load times and easier accessible CTAs. Unfortunately just because a responsive design is implemented doesn’t always mean that all the elements of a site are functioning properly on a mobile device. Here are a few ways to check to see if your site is operating correctly on a mobile device:
- Open your site in a mobile browser. Does the site load? If so, great; now check how well it loaded. Did all of the information on the page load or are there empty place holders? Mobile browsers can’t handle code like Flash or Javascript and images can be too large to download over a mobile data connection, so it’s imperative that your website have all of its important information as text.
- Run a site search on a smartphone or tablet. Go to Google.com on a mobile browser and use the search term site:domain.com, replacing the domain.com with your website’s URL. Google will then list all of the pages of your site that it’s aware of and will return upon search results.
- Make sure the site is crawlable. Ask your web design house to run a crawl on your mobile site. They will then analyze the site and let you know if Googlebot is able to access the site on a mobile platform.
If you don’t currently have a web design agency or would like help assessing your site, feel free to contact AWG for assistance.
