Every year more and more people use their phones to transact online, browse for information, connect with their peers, order food, and so much more. The app-centric nature of our world has made it so that businesses have to prioritize mobile users and take on a mobile-first approach.
We spoke to the experts at hosting platform one.com about their experience in the field and how it has shaped their approach to how they design their website builder.
Mobile optimization explained
It can be easy to get mobile-friendly and mobile-optimized mixed up. What’s the difference, you ask? Well, with a mobile-friendly site, it simply means that the website can show on devices other than desktops and laptops, but it only goes so far in catering to that market.
Mobile optimization goes further and sees developers create a website that reformats itself to whatever device you want to access it on. On one.com, for instance, the website builder produces optimized websites that are easier to navigate and displays with consistent quality across varied screen resolutions and sizes.
What do you get out of optimizing for mobile?
Apart from the obvious reason of capturing and maintaining a large audience, optimizing for mobile presents benefits for your customers and business that includes:
Improves user experience
Most people want the convenience of mobile to never run into friction. That means the way your website displays, as well as its layout and navigation, should be seamless and indistinguishable from the desktop experience.
Improved website speed
Optimizing your website for mobile means that people accessing it aren’t loading an adapted desktop website on their small phones, but rather accessing a bespoke and flexible website that knows what device they’re on and responds in ways optimized for it. It loads much faster, which reduces the bounce rate.
Boosted user engagement
If people can access your site faster and have an easier time moving around it, they will likely engage with it better, look around more, and click on CTAs or even get in the comment section or forums if you have those.
Increased time on site
To add to that point of user engagement, we have an important metric that measures how long users stay on your site. The longer they spend on your site, the more likely they are to convert or come back for return purchases.
Better mobile SEO
Not too long ago, mobile SEO would not affect your rankings. However, with the algorithmic evolution of search engines and their focus on user intent, you now have to optimize your site for mobile searchers. Google factors a website’s mobile SEO into its overall SEO guidelines, and failure to optimize could actually be detrimental to your visibility and marketing campaigns.
Local SEO
Mobile SEO affects local SEO. Many people perform searches that look for specific businesses (this is what informs user intent). Most of them are ready to buy or will be ready to buy soon, and missing out on this demographic will hurt your business. Poor mobile SEO often means less effective local SEO, which hampers your ability to capture this demographic.
How do you optimize for mobile devices?
Here are some tips to get you started:
– Start by creating a 100% responsive web design
– Use behavior analytics tools to find out where friction occurs
– Build mobile-friendly website features
– Create accelerated mobile pages
You could have a dream marketing team that may be leveraging the best SEO tools to get traffic to your site, but you also have to prepare to turn that traffic into conversions with a responsive design. It is also recommended that you implement a strategy that leans on continuous informed improvement to ensure that you keep up with industry changes.
2024-09-03 15:07:18