generate leads?What does Mobile-First Index Mean? It means that Google now uses the mobile version of online media ranking and indexing. When it first ranked for content, the index was used mainly for the desktop’s performance of page content when evaluating the relevance of a page’s content to a user’s query. Now that most users Google Search via a mobile device, bots will crawl and index pages with the smartphone agent. According to a medium post published by Dave Sloan, “30 of small businesses have mobile-friendly websites.” While this was published in 2016, there is little doubt that most businesses fail to take advantage of these trends. In the COVID era, businesses and marketers cannot afford to ignore these trends. This blog post will go through how everyone can apply this new model to their businesses.
Responsive Design and SEO
As mentioned in the previous post, responsive web design allows a business to have a single website. They no longer have to maintain separate mobile, tablet, and PC versions of their site. Instead, the site will adapt to any size screen that it’s being displayed. Your company’s content will see all that you have to offer. Partial-content versions of websites are a thing of the past. Let’s go through all the benefits responsive design has for SEO. has the following SEO services:
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- Increased Usability: The most important principle for SEO is to make a website that Google wants to send visitors to. The worst-case scenario is if searchers navigate to your website and immediately return to the SERPS. This is known as a bounce rate. It’s the percentage of visitor s who navigate away from the site after viewing one page. Responsive design will improve your website’s usability by giving your visitors all the content they are looking for while giving it to them in a format they can read.
- Rank higher in mobile searches. While stating the obvious, it is important to emphasize this point. Google itself has said it prefers responsive design when it comes to mobile searches. Since mobile searches are increasing with no end in sight, responsive design is a must for SEO strategy.
- Link Building: One of the strengths of responsive design is that a link to your main website is also linked to your mobile website, which means it will have the backlinks of the original website. This gives the business that uses a first-mover advantage. As anyone familiar with SEO would know, link building is among the top three SEO factors. Think of link building as a form of voting when a more reputable website links to your website that is a vote of confidence from Google’s perspective. That means your website will rank higher in the SERPs.
- Page Load Time: Among the most factors for a ranking website is the page load time. The faster it takes for a website page to load, the better it will be for the website rankings. Those that are mobile responsive will load much quicker than those that are not. To give you an idea of the scale of the challenge that webmasters face when it comes to keeping users happy, 40% will abandon a website if it does not load within 3 seconds. Always make sure you test the speed of your mobile website. One way to do it is to go to Ubersuggest and enter your URL and scroll down to “site speed.”
How do Responsive Design the Right Way
For all the benefits that SEO offers, you need to make sure that is done the way. If not, it could ruin your website. The biggest mistake is redesigning without any goals in mind.Do you want to If, for example, you want to generate leads, you will need to generate awareness through increasing traffic. To do that, you need to consistently blog and share your content on the social web. But if you are more concerned with generating sales leads, the content and user experience must align with the customer journey. That turns your visitors into leads. Here’s a list of best responsive design practices for your website’s SEO:
- Avoid Flash and pop-ups: There’s a good chance that the flash plugin will not be available on the user’s phone. That will lead them to miss out on all that you have to offer. This will guarantee a high bounce rate. Also, don’t use pop-ups. Those can be annoying and difficult to close on a mobile device, which will not help with your bounce rate.
- Always Capture your benchmarks: If you are in the position that you need to design your website, then establish metrics that are based off of your current/or old website. Here is a great blog post by Mike Wolf on SmartBug that will walk you through on how to establish the right metrics. These benchmarks can range from time spent on-site to visitors, sales conversions, and total traffic.
- Choose the right Content Management System (CMS): Make sure to do your research before choosing one to host your website. Does it all allow you to adjust the website and add the proper meta-tagging or schema that the SERPS are looking for? What about analytics? Does it provide built-in functionality?
- The images are correctly scaled: There are way too many websites out there with ideas with a high resolution. The ideal size is to upload then at 2X their intended display size. This will go along way in keeping the size reasonable while pleasing the end-users.
Conclusion
Responsive Design and SEO have become interchangeable. Webmasters and businesses that can implement the two will have a massive advantage over those that do not. Thankfully these trends are still new, so there is still time to adapt in the Covid-19 era. Businesses will be conducting more and more of their operation online; knowing how to balance SEO and responsive design is ever more critical.
