How does mobile-friendliness impact search rankings?
In the earlier days of the Internet before the dawn of the iPhone-saga, mobile-friendliness wasn’t considered essential. As smartphones and other mobile devices have become increasingly popular over the years, so too has the importance of having a website that accommodates smaller, touchable screens.
With most modern Internet users now searching on a mobile device, mobile-friendliness has become one of the key considerations for a successful SEO strategy. But how can you ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, and how can you identify the aspects of your website that are negatively impacting your search ranking? [Hint: read on to find out].
What do we mean by ‘mobile-friendliness’?
A mobile-friendly site is designed to provide just as valuable a user experience as its desktop counterpart. Searchers are able to access the same high-quality content they’d expect to find on a desktop site, except the mobile version is readable on a much smaller screen, video content plays and there’s no frustrating scrolling lag.
How does mobile-friendliness affect your website’s SEO?
Mobile-friendliness is one of the main ranking factors for search engines such as Google. You could have the fanciest desktop site with all the state-of-the-art animations, but if your website doesn’t provide the same high-quality experience on mobile, it will negatively impact your search engine ranking.
So, it makes sense that Google rewards those domains that offer a mobile-friendly design by boosting their ranking in mobile search results, including indexing that favours the mobile-rendered version of a website.
How to make your website mobile friendly
You can achieve mobile search engine optimisation by following these steps:
- Make sure your website is mobile responsive
- Improve your site speed
- Don’t include too many redirects
- Minimise the use of pop-ups
- Use structured data
- Allow JavaScript, HTML and CSS code.
Make the most of mobile SEO tools
The Google Mobile-Friendly Test is a means of determining whether your website provides a positive mobile user experience. It’s designed to test how easily a visitor can access and navigate your website on a mobile device [or how likely it is that they’re closing the tab].
To see how your website performs on the Mobile-Friendly Test, simply enter your URL here. You’ll then be given guidance such as:
- Whether your page is or isn’t mobile-friendly
- If your clickable elements are too close together for a mobile user to accurately click
- Whether your text is too small to read
- If your content is wider than the screen and mobile users have to scroll horizontally to view all your website’s content
- If your website uses incompatible plugins for mobile browsers.
Other helpful mobile SEO tools include Google Search Console, which also provides a Mobile Usability report to help you optimise your site for mobile devices, and Google Test My Site, which reveals how long your site takes to load on mobile.
Ready to reach the search ranking summit with Ketchup’s SEO services?
Outsourcing your SEO services from our dedicated team of specialists means you’re leaving your website [and search rankings] in safe hands. Allow us to optimise your site for mobile and desktop to create an incredible user experience your visitors will love.
Take a look at our SEO services and let us know how we can help here.