Mobile Optimization

In March 2015, Forbes published an article announcing that as of April 21^st Google will begin using mobile-friendliness as a ranking metric in its search results. Websites that transfer seamlessly between laptops and phones will be closer to the first page following a keyword search than those web sites not modified to work as a mobile app. Whereas many of the modifications to Google’s search engine have only a low-weight impact, the effect of this particular change is significant.

In the present, sites that are only mobile-compatible versus mobile-optimized are behind the power curve. It was last year when phone internet searches surpassed those on desktops, and the shift is not slowing down. More than half of online purchases are made via mobile apps and with smartphones reaching 86% market penetration in the U.S. and U.K. the number of customers making their purchases with their smart phones is at its highest level yet. With so many options at a phone user’s fingertips, if the site they pull up is not functioning correctly it has become easier to open another site selling comparable products and complete the intended transaction there, than trying to make a malfunctioning one work. A mobile version of a website does not even have to have an actual error; If the site is loaded in a different format from the version the potential client saw on a laptop it could change their minds about making a purchase from that site.

There are a few ways to create a mobile-friendly website; responsive design, AMP, dynamic serving and mobile URLs. Responsive design is the method preferred by Google and therefore yields the most benefit because many of your potential clients are using that as a search engine. It carries no SEO risk, if anything, it benefits the site’s ranking. It is also cleaner to implement and update. Responsive design is compatible with other methods and is the one most commonly utilized.

Proper mobile optimization starts with a great website that can be viewed from any device without losing any functionality. The image of the site viewed with a smartphone is simply a miniature image of the website as it appears on a larger laptop screen. Statistically, mobile users consume a much larger amount of visual data, most notably, short video images. Adding short videos to websites that didn’t have them before is an important step in mobile optimization. SEO911 keeps on top of the latest online marketing news and any new techniques that may be applicable to our customers websites and overall SEO services. When a new trend in customer preferences becomes apparent, SEO911 analyzes the impact it could have and if it could benefit the client, if it can, then we make the necessary modifications to our customer’s websites.

SEO911 makes your Website Visible to over three billion mobile users. The mobile internet medium is slowly growing out of its infancy and an increasing number of businesses benefit from designing their websites to be accessible via mobile phones. As the number of smart phones is increasing, so is the number of websites that are compatible with mobile internet devices.