Having a mobile-friendly site is crucial to the success of SMB’s in today’s smartphone-centric world.
But what factors help you to ensure a great user experience for mobile users?
Why You NEED A Mobile-Friendly Website For Your Business
The list of things we do on our smartphones gets longer with every passing day.
If we’re hungry, we search “best restaurants near me.”
If a pipe breaks in our house, we google “best plumber in town.”
If we’re looking for a place to stay, we look up “hotel reviews in (City).”
Businesses need a website that caters to this shift in the way society operates because the resulting increased reliance on hand-help devices has a direct effect of their bottom line.
In fact, 61% of searchers are more likely to contact businesses with mobile friendly sites, and 50% of consumers who conducted a local search on their mobile phone visited a store within a day (Hubspot).
Small businesses that do not respect the way people use their smartphones to pursue services are at risk of losing an enormous amount of business. If your site is one of the first results to pop up when people conduct a search, but it is not optimized for mobile users, it can be extremely frustrating for the customer, and you.
Important Mobile SEO Factors
There are six main factors that determine how well your site is optimized for mobile users (SEO Clarity).
1. Legibility of Content – Your website’s content must be structured in a way that allows for ease-of-reading. We’ve all struggled to read pages on a website that contain weird breaks or tiny text. Don’t be one of those sites!
2. Page Speed – If your site doesn’t load fast enough, searchers are likely to exit out and continue to the next search result.
3. Access To All CCS or JavaScript – On some websites, Google bots are blocked from accessing files that do not help Google index a page. This is especially harmful to mobile crawlers because some CCS and JavaScript contain code that lets Google know that your site is, in fact, mobile friendly.
4. Hidden Content – Instead of bombarding your visitors (and their small smartphone screens) with all the information they would find on your desktop site, it’s important to add things like “Read More” buttons so they can select what they would like to see without being overwhelmed.
5. Search Behavior on Desktop Vs. Mobile – Google uses different lengths for mobile and desktop meta descriptions. In order to provide the best user-experience possible, your SEO strategy must account for this.
6. Local Information – If your business is location based (meaning you serve customers in a particular area) then your mobile web pages should feature information that helps users in your specific area find you.
Not sure if your SEO provider is incorporating these factors into your SEO strategy? Maybe it’s time to start looking elsewhere – Here’s 5 Things To Look For When Choosing an SEO Provider.
Next Steps
It’s important that you assess your website to see if it is optimized for mobile use. Luckily, this tool from Google makes it easy to check the mobile compatibility of your site.
Or, if you would prefer to talk to a human, the staff at CreoLogic would be happy to take a look at your site and evaluate how you can increase web traffic though mobile and other SEO best practices. Contact them today!
