Mobile-friendly websites will have an SEO advantage

Traffic from mobile devices has been consistently growing over the last few years. It’s a big reason why you should get a mobile solution for your website in place, but there will soon be an even bigger reason to have a mobile-friendly site.

Starting on April 21, Google will start using mobile-friendliness as a factor when determining rankings for mobile search results. This means that if someone is searching from their smartphone and your website is not mobile-friendly, your website will be less likely to appear in the search results.

In Google’s own words, this update “will have a significant impact in our search results”. That’s public-relations-speak for “If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, you won’t be performing well in mobile search results.”

If you’re not sure if your site is mobile-friendly, Google has a handy tool for you to find out.

So what are your options when it comes to mobile solutions for your website?

Mobile Website Options

Small businesses really have three options for making their websites accessible to mobile users: 1) do nothing, 2) build a dedicated mobile site or 3) add responsive design elements to their existing site.

Do nothing

In many cases, mobile browsing applications are able to make non-mobile-friendly websites at least functional when viewed on a mobile device. You’ll be giving your smartphone and tablet visitors a less optimized experience but they’ll still be able to browse around your site.

However, the impending update to Google’s algorithm means that choosing this option will make your website less likely to appear in mobile search results. That will ultimately result in less traffic and less leads.

Mobile dedicated

When browsing on your phone or tablet, you might notice that you are sometimes redirected to a URL like m.example.com. This means that the website owner has created an entirely separate website specifically for mobile users.

This is a perfectly acceptable way to build a mobile-friendly website, but it does come with some pros and cons.

The advantage here is that you can make the experience for mobile visitors much more friendly. Larger buttons and drop down menus make it easier to navigate, and you can decide where and how important content, like your contact information, is displayed so that mobile users will be able to find it quickly.

The downside is that you have to maintain a second website alongside your main website. This essentially doubles the amount of work to make updates. You’re also forced to choose to optimize for either smartphone users or tablet users, but not both.

If you’re not careful, it’s very easy to make mistakes that can negatively impact your site’s performance in search results. Incorrectly mapped redirects and broken pages are common on mobile dedicated sites which Google is not fond of.

Responsive design

By using some fancy HTML and CSS, responsive design automatically changes the layout of your website based on the screen size of the visitor. This means you can have optimized user experiences across desktops, tablets and smartphones.

Learning to build a responsive site takes a bit of skill, but it resolves the issues that you would normally encounter with mobile dedicated sites – there’s only one version of the site to maintain and there aren’t any funky redirects to screw up.

If designed correctly, responsive websites can be powerful and flexible. As with dedicated mobile sites, you can display information specifically for mobile users like a map or phone number.

At Psynapsis.net our team of experts will provide you with all the tools and information that you company needs to generate a 100% mobile-friendly website in very little time.