Semalt Answer On How To Make A Website Mobile Friendly


Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. What is Mobile Friendliness?
  3. Why is Mobile Friendliness important?
  4. What is Mobile-Friendly Test Tool?
  5. How can you make your website more mobile-friendly?
  6. Conclusion

Introduction

One of the most common topics that arise during discussions is mobile SEO. People are asking what it is if it is that important for SEO, and how to make your website or content more friendly if the second question points towards its importance. This guide is essential to clear these doubts and finally give answers to everything you need to know about mobile-friendliness. 
 
But why do YOU need this information? You can lose viewers, clients, customers, readers, or users if your website or content is not optimized for SEO. Your website cannot also rank high if it is not mobile-friendly. It's just that simple. If you don't know about mobile-friendliness, there is a great probability that your website or content is still not optimized for mobile usability and that could be one of the reasons your website's still where it is. 

Mobile SEO makes it possible for your content to shrink down and fit the screen of mobile devices for better navigation. So instead of your users zooming in and out repeatedly to understand your content, they just simply have to scroll up or down. Learn more about mobile-friendliness below.

What is Mobile Friendliness?

Beginning from the top - the definition; Mobile-friendliness is the measure of how well a website or content is optimized for mobile usage. As it has been earlier mentioned, the 'friendliness' is measured by the degree of how well your page is designed to suit the screen of a phone or a tablet. If the texts are not too big nor too small with perfectly fit images and better navigation, then it is simply mobile-friendly. It is also about making sure that ads don't block your texts. It simply means having content that is fit for mobile browsing. Your users will not be disturbed by scrolling to the left and right trying to read through your page, nor will they have to zoom in or out to see what is on your page. 

There are two ways people achieve mobile-friendliness content or website. You can either create a new website under the same domain for mobile usage. So that when visits come from mobile devices, they are automatically redirected to the mobile subdomain page. Another option is to use a responsive web page design so that your website is created to suit different screen sizes while browsing the same website (domain). 

Mobile-friendliness includes a few things like fast page-loading speed, convenient navigation, larger readable fonts, and great size images.

Why is Mobile Friendliness important? 


Another question this guide aims to answer is if mobile-friendliness is important for SEO? If it is, how important is it? The simple answer is this - mobile SEO is highly needed for SEO and it is even more so important than it ever was. If you don't have any other type of SEO grounded, mobile SEO is a must!

Just too many people use smartphones to browse the internet for you to dismiss mobile-friendliness for your website. With over 60% of the world's population using smartphones instead of desktops daily for browsing the internet, you tend to lose a big chunk of your audience if they can't view your content on their mobile phones. Why else is it so important?
  1. Mobile-friendly websites have higher page views: As earlier discussed, more people use their phones to browse through the internet. If your website is one of those that display amazing and attractive content without the need to zoom too often, then you can lock in more page views. Your viewers will be more encouraged to spend more time on your page because your website is friendly, easy to navigate through, and very readable. (Note that we are going with the ideology that you already have great and optimized content).
  2. Mobile-friendly websites are highly evaluated by search engines: This is the way this works, if a query is asked through a mobile device, then only mobile-friendly results will appear on the result page. Now, remember that more than 60% of the world's population uses phones to browse through search engines. So that means that if your website is not mobile-optimized, then only less than 40% of the world can see your website (not to mention that you might not even be first on the result page). 
  3. Mobile-friendliness contributes to customer loyalty: It is easier to unlock your phone to browse through the internet than switch on your laptop or desktop. People also tend to subscribe to newsletters and website messages faster through mobile devices than desktop. Therefore if you have a mobile-friendly website, the odds of getting your customers to become loyal are higher.
  4. Mobile-friendly websites load faster: This is another great importance of Mobile SEO. Normal SEO already deals with the technical aspect that makes websites load fast but mobile SEO loads even faster. Why? It's because phone users have less patience than desktop users to wait for a site to load. But this is beneficial because the fast loading speed works in your favor when your website is being crawled or indexed. Your ranks will go up for fast loading speed. 
You can always test how friendly your website is using the mobile-friendly test tool. The next section talks a little more about that. 

What is Mobile-Friendly Test Tool? 

A mobile-friendly test tool is a tool that helps calculate the degree of how 'friendly' your website or content is for mobile use. It is very easy to use and completely free. All you need to do is type in your website's URL and the tool will test and see how friendly your website is. The higher your score, the more friendly your website is and vice versa for when you get low scores. The test tool helps you know where your website is, if what you are doing is working, or if it isn't. 

How can you make your website more mobile-friendly?

Now, it is time to take a look at the things you can do to make your website more mobile-friendly. Note that though these things can seem easy to do alone, by yourself, it is always recommended to get professional help with anything website SEO, especially mobile SEO. That is because there will always be a part that will become too technical for you to do except if you are an SEO specialist/expert. Also, the results are gotten faster when the work is done the right way. So what are the things that make a website more mobile-friendly?

 
  1. Create a new website or use the responsive design: This is the first step. You should either create a new website dedicated to mobile users under the parent domain so that when mobile users look for you, they will be redirected to the mobile-friendly site. A responsive design is much easier, more efficient, and overall better. It is when all your sites (mobile and desktop) live on one URL. You can use several tools to create this or simply outsource it to companies that specialize in it.
  2. Improve the SEO: This is the next stage. You need to work on the optimization of your site for mobile SEO. This includes improving your site's speed, optimizing the images, minifying the code, reducing redirects, using structured data, improvement of text and content legibility, increase of tap target sizes, and so much more. Every content shown on mobile devices loads fast (very fast), and the images load as quickly as the text - unlike desktop content. The code also has to be reduced to help the site's speed to be improved. 
  3. Place major priority on UX: UX stands for User Experience and it has to do with how much users enjoyed being on your page. Figure out what your users look for the most and make it readily available to them without having to look for it. Enhance conversations and make yourself reachable
  4. Invest in better web hosting: If you don't already have a good web host (or you are using an over-loaded shared host server), you might need to change it for free-er web hosting. This is simply so that your site can run at a fast speed without being dragged down by other sites and activities. 

Conclusion

When is a website mobile-friendly? When it is instantly understandable for search engines, offers value for mobile users, is easy to navigate, presents content in a readable fashion without having to zoom in or out, loads fast, and helps users get their tasks done quickly and joyfully. To make your website mobile-friendly, make your site responsive, focus on the UX of your site, don't use too many redirects, and most of all, seek professional help. A mobile-friendly website is a key to more page views, more loyal customers, and better search engine ranking.