Given the sheer popularity of portable web surfing devices such as Smartphones and tablets, it’s safe to say that mobile design is just as important as web design for desktops. In fact, many would say it’s more important. A huge percentage of people who use mobile to surf end up purchasing something – whereas this isn’t the case with desktop browsing (not as much, anyway).
In response to this growing popularity, SEO companies such as Brown Box Branding have tailored the services they offer at http://www.brownboxbranding.com/seattle/ to meet the demand for mobile-friendly websites. Below, we’ll analyze the essential aspects of mobile design and what they entail.
Responsiveness
First and foremost is the issue of mobile responsiveness. This concerns the underlying HTML and CSS code that causes your site to display correctly on a wide range of screens. Think about what actions you perform when a site doesn’t display correctly on your smaller phone screen. If you’re like most people, you usually navigate away and find a different search result.
Having a website with responsive design, simply, keeps you from losing traffic. In some cases, an SEO company will recommend building two versions of your website – one that displays on a higher resolution desktop computer screen, and the other which is optimized for mobile browsing. The latter is called dynamic serving, and is a proven benefit to many businesses.
It Is Imperative That Your Website Loads Quickly
This is another benefit of proper mobile design. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, then it will often have loading issues. Although it might render adequately on a computer, it will be slowed down significantly on a phone if the background web code isn’t properly structured.
As mentioned earlier, slow-loading sites are a great disadvantage to a business. In fact, there’ve been metrics taken on the matter, and people rarely wait longer than 10 seconds – and often as little as six seconds – for a site to load.
Test your site on several different mobile platforms – particularly the most popular ones as evidenced in your analytics profile. If you don’t get this fixed, you’re literally giving away traffic to your competition. If necessary, have a web designer make a separate version of your site that’s more amenable to mobile.
Mobile is a Ranking Factor
In addition to aiding your site ranking in the indirect ways mentioned above, proper mobile design is actually a direct ranking factor. This means that, for example, websites that have a responsive design actually receive credit from the search engine algorithm, which pushes their ranking up higher in the search results pages – particular in the mobile search results.
Similarly, this translates to social media ranking factors. Your Alexa rank, for example, denotes the frequency of visitors to your website, and if they are navigating away because the load times are too slow, the visitors won’t contribute to the Alexa value.
Overall, the general approach to mobile redesign is to improve the user experience. There are multiple ways to do this, and they all lead to an increased engagement and a better ranking in Google Search. This, of course, means more business for you.