The mobile internet user penetration rate is continuing to increase, with an estimated 5 billion global users by 2020. This means your potential customers are more likely than ever to be browsing the web on a mobile device rather than a desktop computer.
For businesses, this presents a huge opportunity to increase visibility and target new audiences who may have previously been unreachable. However, if you don’t take appropriate measures, your website will almost certainly not be seen by mobile users.
In fact, Google search results now display the prevalence of sites that are inaccessible to mobile users as well as providing a warning when searching from a mobile device. With stats like that it’s no surprise that optimizing your website for mobile is so important if you want anyone to see it!
What is Website Optimization?
Website optimization is the process of improving the visibility of your site and its content to search engines and visitors. This includes on-site content, the design of your site, and the way visitors are directed to your pages. If you want your site to be accessible by users on desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones, optimizing your site for all devices is an essential part of a strong SEO strategy.
Why Is Mobile Website Optimization So Important?
Mobile devices now account for more than half of all online traffic, which makes them by far the most popular way to access the internet. With so many people using their mobile devices to view your website, you need to be sure that the experience is both user-friendly and accessible. Your website needs to load quickly and be easy to navigate without a keyboard. Visitors need to be able to see your site without being overwhelmed by graphics or complicated text. Most importantly, your site needs to be easy to find, especially if Google is serving it to mobile users. Read More Useful Content: Negative Reviews
What you should be keeping in mind when optimizing for mobile
Mobile users are impatient. Visitors are unlikely to wait more than 10 seconds before closing your site and moving on to the next one. That’s why it’s super important to make sure your site loads quickly, and your pages are easy to navigate without a keyboard.
Mobile users are often more suspicious. If you’re optimizing for mobile, you want to make sure your site doesn’t look like an ad and is clear that it’s a marketing tool. That means making sure any logos or branding on your site doesn’t overpower the content, and you’re not using any language that could be perceived as spammy.
Why does your site need to be responsive?
A responsive website is the best way to ensure the best possible experience for your visitors regardless of what type of device they are using. With a responsive site, you can rest assured that your visitors will have a pleasant experience and be able to quickly and easily find the information they need.
Your site visitors are more likely to be on a mobile device
The best way to prevent this is to make your site visible only to desktop users. This can create a poor experience for mobile visitors and prevent you from gaining new customers. Instead, take advantage of the fact that many people will be looking at your site on a mobile device and make your site more accessible.
You’ll want to make sure your pages are easy to navigate
You might be used to navigating your site with a keyboard, but it’s unlikely that visitors will be. Visitors will want to be able to quickly and easily navigate your pages without having to hunt for links. Think about how you would navigate your site if you were using only a touchscreen and make sure your navigation is easy to find. Read Other Useful Content: Local B2B SEO Strategy
Avoid long scroll and large click targets
Long scroll bars are often awkward to navigate on touchscreens, and click targets are often too small to hit accurately with a finger. Make sure your click targets are large enough to be easily clicked and that your scroll bars are short enough that a visitor can easily navigate to the content they’re looking for.
Keep buttons, text, and graphics close together
You want to keep buttons, text, and graphics close together to make it easier for visitors to navigate. This is especially important for visitors using a touchscreen.
Text should be easy to read, and UI elements should have contrast
Visitors are often more focused on the content than on the design of your site. Make sure that your text is easy to read and doesn’t have too much of a distracting design around it. A high-contrast design will make your site easy to read, even if someone is reading it in a low-light environment.
What Does Optimized Website Look Like?
It has a clear, concise design. It loads quickly, and it is easy to navigate. An optimized website is easy to read, easy to navigate, and optimizes for the best experience possible. Although there is no set standard for what the perfect optimized website looks like, there are certain guidelines you can follow.
Responsive Web Design (RWD)
RWD, or responsive web design, is a technique for creating a single website that can adapt to be displayed across multiple devices and screen sizes. If you are serious about optimizing your website for mobile, RWD is the best solution. RWD allows you to create a single website that adapts to be displayed correctly on any device including smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers.
Mobile-First Layout
You may have heard of mobile-first design. This was a trend that emerged a couple of years ago with the explosive growth in mobile internet usage and the fact that most people would visit a website using their mobile device. Mobile-first design is all about starting with the mobile experience and then adapting it to be suitable for desktop users.
Your desktop design should be an extension of your mobile design, not a completely different experience that has been cobbled together. This is achieved by following a mobile-first design approach, which starts with designing your website for mobile and then adding in features that are suitable for desktop users once the basic mobile site has been completed.
Fast Loading Time
A lot of businesses mistakenly think that optimizing for mobile means making their site smaller. This is not the case! In fact, you might even want to make your site larger to make it easier to read on a mobile screen. What you should focus on is making sure your images and code are optimized so that your site loads as quickly as possible. This is something you can control without drastically changing your design or content. Focus on making sure your images are not too large and are optimized for the mobile web. This means keeping the file size as small as possible. The same goes for your code. You want to avoid using features that increase the size of your website, as this will make it slow to load.
Easy to Use Navigation
Similar to what we discussed above, customers on mobile will appreciate it if your website is easy to navigate.
Having to scroll through a full-width website can be difficult on a small screen, so make your content easily accessible. Ideally, your navigation should be placed across the top of the screen, allowing users to navigate through the site without having to scroll. This will help people find the info they’re looking for without feeling like they have to click through a ton of pages.
Some businesses choose to have a separate “mobile site” rather than optimizing their full site for mobile. This may seem like an easy solution, but Google is actually starting to crack down on this practice. They’re starting to penalize websites that send visitors to a separate mobile website. Read Other Useful Content: Copywriter or Content Writer
Clear Call to Action
For those with a website, there’s no doubt you’ve seen the importance of having a call-to-action. However, this becomes even more important when optimizing for mobile. While your visitors may appreciate being able to navigate your site easily, what they really need is a path to take action on whatever brought them to your site in the first place.
That’s why having a clear call to action is so important. You want your visitors to know exactly what they need to do to take advantage of the information they came to your site to find. This will help them feel more comfortable with your brand, and it will also help you generate leads.
Responsive Ads and Promotions
Mobile users will appreciate being able to quickly and easily access any promotions or special offers you may have on your site. However, if your promotions are located at the bottom of a full-width site, it can be difficult to find and click on them without scrolling through the rest of the page.
Most business owners place promotions at the bottom of their site to draw attention to them. While this is a good start, you must make sure your site is optimized for mobile. If your promotions are located at the top of your page, you avoid the problem of searching for them.
You also make it much easier for mobile users to click and access them. Keep in mind, you don’t want to over-promote, but having a few relevant promotions on your site is an easy way to generate more leads.
Make Sure Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly
It’s no secret that Google is cracking down on sites that are not mobile-friendly. You can check if your site is mobile-friendly here. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to completely re-design your site; rather, you need to make a few tweaks to ensure it displays correctly on mobile devices. You can do this by choosing a shorter URL, avoiding Flash and using a responsive design. Even if you have a full-width site, you can include some mobile-friendly elements so that your site is easily accessible.
Content That’s Easy to Find and Read
Having a full-width site is fine, but the content must be easy to find and read for mobile visitors. If you have any important pages on your website such as your “About” page, “Contact” page, or “About Us” page, you can highlight those pages on your full-width website.
Doing this will ensure mobile visitors can easily navigate to those pages. For any content that is visible on both your full-width and mobile site, make sure it’s written in a way that’s easy to read on a small screen. This means keeping your paragraphs short and to the point.
This is especially important if you’re in the B2B sector. Mobile users will appreciate being able to quickly and easily find the information they’re looking for without feeling like they have to read through a novel.
Responsive Videos (Not Just Images)
Many businesses choose to replace images with videos on their website. This is a good way to engage mobile users, but you must make sure the videos are optimized for mobile devices. Otherwise, they will be difficult to see and will likely cause your mobile users to click away before they’ve even watched the whole video.
If you decide to add videos to your website, make sure they’re short, relevant, and that you have accompanying text. This will help your mobile users understand what the video is about so they don’t have to spend time watching the whole video to get the point.
Even if your video is shorter than you’d like, a good rule of thumb is to keep it to under two minutes. Anything longer will likely lose your mobile users’ attention.
Optimized Calls-to-Action
For many businesses, their calls-to-action (CTAs) are what generate leads. Therefore, it’s important to make sure your CTAs are clear and optimized for mobile visitors. Depending on your industry, you may have several different types of CTAs on your website.
Make sure each one is clear and easy for mobile visitors to understand. For example, if you have a page on your website about how to fix a broken computer, your CTA could be “Schedule a computer repair.” This CTA is straightforward and easy to understand.
However, if your website is full-width and the “Schedule a computer repair” is located at the bottom of the page, it may be difficult for mobile users to find.
Optimized Images
Images are a big part of any website, but they can be especially important if you have a full-width website. With a full-width website, your images will be the only thing taking up space on your page. Therefore, they need to be extremely eye-catching. Fortunately, optimizing your images for mobile devices is fairly easy. Simply make sure your images are not overly large and are in a file format that is compatible with mobile devices. If you have any larger images on your site, you can use a plugin like WP Smush to compress them so they take up less space. You can also use a plugin like Thumbnailer to make your images more mobile-friendly.
Make Sure Your Site Is Responsive
If you’ve followed all of the previous steps, you’re already well on your way to making your website responsive. However, it’s important to note that the Google mobile-friendly test does not mean your site is responsive. You can check if your website is responsive by conducting a quick test.
All you need to do is resize your browser window, and if your website resizes to fit your window, it is responsive. If your website is not responsive, you’ll likely lose traffic from mobile users.
Don’t Forget About Ads and Calls to Action
If your website is designed solely with desktop users in mind, you’re likely to forget to include important elements such as advertising and calls to action. Remember that the majority of people will be scrolling down the page on their phones, so you need to make sure these elements are placed near the top of the page and are large enough to be seen.
User Experience Is Key
Your website might look great on the latest smartphone and be fully functional, but if the experience of using it is frustrating or confusing, no one will see it. This means that you need to ensure that every element of your site is easy to use and fully functional on a mobile device, from images to links and buttons.
Important information such as contact details, opening hours, and product descriptions also need to be easily visible, as users may not have time to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to find them.
Conclusion
Mobile devices are becoming increasingly more popular than computers in terms of internet usage, which is why it is important that websites be designed specifically for these devices. Mobile devices, however, have smaller screens than computers, and thus it is important that websites be designed to fit these smaller screens.
There are various techniques that can be used to design websites that are responsive and thus designed for mobile devices, such as designing the website based on a modular grid and including CSS media queries. In addition to designing websites that are responsive, it is also important to optimize websites for mobile devices by making sure that websites are easy to navigate and have content that is appropriate for mobile devices. If websites are not optimized for mobile devices, then these websites are likely to be ignored by mobile device users.
Keeping these best practices in mind will ensure that you are able to optimize your site for mobile users and that you provide them with the best possible experience. In doing so, you will also be increasing your website’s visibility to desktop users, as well. By following these tips, you will be able to ensure that all of your visitors see your site and that they are able to navigate it with ease.