If you’re like the majority of Americans, you are glued to your smart phone. You probably rely on it to respond to emails, keep track of the news and interact with friends on social media. In fact, the end of 2016 was the first time that mobile internet use surpassed desktop use, tipping the scales 51.2 percent for mobile to 48.7 percent for desktop.
With that in mind, keep reading for even more reasons to make your business mobile friendly and to learn what type of content is best to use for this forum.
10 Reasons to Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
Just because you have a website, doesn’t mean that it is optimized for phones and tablets. While it might require a little extra design work, these 10 reasons from Webmovement explain why a mobile friendly site is worth it.
- Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites over those that are not in mobile search results. The Google algorithm change that occurred in 2015 tweaked the way Google displays mobile search results. Websites that are optimized for mobile rank better than those that don’t.
- People everywhere use mobile devices to do everything from simple internet searches to purchasing big ticket items and much more. The reason? It’s fast and easy. Consumers in every industry want to connect and get what they’re looking for quickly. If you’re not optimized for mobile, you can’t offer your customers immediate service.
- It helps you build credibility with your customers, clients, and influencers in your industry. With a mobile friendly website, anyone who tries to visit your site on a mobile device will have a proper experience, and that will encourage them to see you as a credible resource for information, products and services.
- It’s becoming a standard best practice. Many websites are mobile-friendly with more and more coming online every day. Responsive web design has made mobile optimization more straight forward and accessible to everyone, and that means users have begun to expect this level of functionality to come standard when browsing on their mobile devices.
- You can reach more customers, faster. Making your website mobile-friendly automatically opens your customer base up to anyone performing a mobile search. And even better, customers won’t have to hunt for your site or type in the exact URL to find it – they can just perform a search to find you quickly and easily.
- You’ll make your customers much When a customer or a potential customer accesses your site to find information or look for something you sell, you want the experience to be nothing short of great. Because many people use mobile devices to access the web, only a mobile-friendly website can promise to offer that experience. Happy customers will return to your site and tell others about how great it is. Unhappy customers will do the opposite.
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Google puts a priority on mobile friendly websites than those that are not; are you at the bottom of a search list?
Because Google wants you to do it. Webmasters know when Google recommends you do something, you should really try to do it. This is the case with making websites mobile-friendly. Google has explained why mobile is so important in their own words, and the number one reason they cite is everyone has smartphones, and they’re constantly using them to search.
- Your website will look great and function well on any device, provided you use responsive web design to build or redesign your site. Why take chances when it comes to mobile optimization? With responsive design, your website will respond to the mobile device a person is using to access your site, and it will render to look and function well, no matter what.
- It benefits your reputation. Not just online, but offline as well. People will take note of a website they have a great experience with – and they will also take note of a website they have a bad experience with. Reputation is everything, and most businesses can’t afford to give people a bad experience – digital or otherwise.
- Your business will be seen as modern and relevant. You might offer some of the most useful, valuable and unique products or services on the market, but if your website’s mobile experience is poor or non-existent, your company will be a digital dinosaur – encouraging people to seek help elsewhere. On the other hand, mobile-friendly websites are contemporary, cutting-edge and legit – they are how you get your foot in the door with anyone that has a smartphone.
Websites that aren’t mobile-friendly are quickly falling by the wayside within our fast-evolving digital landscape. As time goes by, more and more websites will emerge that are mobile-friendly, pushing those that are not even further down the search results page and away from customers.
Creating Mobile Friendly Content
Now that you understand why it’s so important to have a mobile friendly website, here are five ways you can enhance, organize and format your content so it looks great on mobile devices and provides a solid user experience all-around.
5 Ways to Improve Your Mobile Content
Whether it’s simple changes or complex technical adjustments, today we’re looking at five ways to improve your website’s mobile content and make it look the best it can be on mobile devices.
Ignoring mobile optimization is not only a bad idea for SEO reasons, but it can also cause your site to lose countless sales. Don’t worry, though, it’s not hard to make some improvements today.
- Limit (or Eliminate) Pop-Ups
People on mobile devices are far more finicky than those on desktops. As a mobile user myself, I know that I’m always in a hurry trying to find what I need quickly on the go. On smartphones, pop-ups can be a huge mistake if they aren’t done correctly.
On a desktop, it’s usually clear how to close a window that appears, but this isn’t always the case on mobile. Google has said in an official announcement that these mobile ads, known as “interstitials” will be penalized if they damage the user experience
Things that are required by law, like age validation pop-ups, won’t hurt your rank, but annoying interruptions that seek to grab an email or sell a product will hurt your SEO. You should avoid covering the main content while the user is on the page.
- Use Percentages for Width
If you have a mobile-friendly theme, something like this should already be in place, but it’s good to know either way. When you’re using CSS style sheets on a page, you can specify the width of elements like columns or images based on two things: pixels or a percentage.
As an example, if you set the width to 50%, it will make the width half of the screen size that’s accessing the page. This ensures that your users won’t have to scroll horizontally, which is extremely annoying.
If you choose to set the width based on pixels, the width of the elements won’t change with the screen size, in which case you could end up with the wrong size on certain devices. You can use pixel size if you’re also using media queries.
- Make Your Site Mobile Responsive with Queries
Media queries can be used to make your website responsive to mobile devices, but they’re not for beginners. These are techniques used in CSS coding that allow you to not only change things like width, but also the shape of the content and the surrounding elements.
Many professional WordPress themes for creating a blog will have this kind of responsiveness in place, but you can get a little more flexibility if you utilize these types of queries. To break them down a little more, you can think of these things as ways to give your site the ability to stretch or shrink based on the device being used to access it.
These queries can also be used to change how large or small text is as well, giving you the ability to tailor the mobile experience with a high degree of control.
- Get Distractions Out of the Way
You want your users to quickly and easily access your content. To reach this goal, you need to ensure they are not being assaulted by too many elements at once. This is especially true if these elements load at different speeds, causing the page to jump around on mobile devices.
A perfect example of something that can go is the sidebar that we’re all used to having. In a mobile setting, this element is relegated to the bottom of the page. The media queries can be used to remove elements like this when the screen is smaller.
- Look to the Future
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) are something Google has been championing and it looks to be the future of mobile content if they have any say. These pages have a specific framework that improves speed and provides a much smoother user experience overall.
You can get similar results with heavy optimizations, but this provides an easy and accessible way to make your content super mobile-friendly.
Don’t lose out on customers! Use these tips to create content they can devour from their mobile devices.
Future concepts like this will help you stay ahead of the curve, and Google is already displaying AMPs in the search results. Check out this guide on how to make AMP pages to get started. In the meantime, stay on the lookout for other innovations like this one.
Redesign ASAP
Mobile devices are the preferred way to access content online. As a result, search engines like Google are taking notice. Everything from internet browsing to major purchases are taking place on phones and tablets and you don’t want your business to be ignored.
Contact us today for a free consultation to discuss how we can help with your mobile strategy; we can’t wait to hear from you.
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