Why Responsive Mobile Site Design is Crucial to SEO Campaigns

About 50% of mobile phone owners use the internet primarily on their phones, so it’s becoming more and more important for the best web design to be optimized for mobile use. Mobile sales have already overtaken desktop sales, and mobile is only expected to get bigger as time goes on.

The debate between whether to design responsive websites, which adjust to fit any platform, or separate mobile websites rages on with no clear frontrunners, mostly because there are costs and benefits to both strategies.

However, if SEO is part of your marketing strategy, the best web design option for your company may be responsive:

Responsive websites guarantee a positive user-experience across many different screen sizes, resolutions and devices. Because you’re planning to funnel traffic in from search engines, this is especially important, because you won’t be able to predict what device they’re searching on.

For example, someone on the go might do a quick search on their smartphone, but decide they want a closer look and bring up the same site later on their home desktop. It’s crucial that they get a positive, consistent experience on both devices so they don’t have to waste time tracking down the same pages on a non-mobile site.

Having one responsive design also allows you to use the same SEO campaign rather than spinning off different ones and splitting your hits. Though having a separate mobile site might allow you to target keywords that are found more on mobile, you can still incorporate these into your responsive site campaign if you think ahead.

Google also recommends that web design services use responsive web design, since consistent URLs and HTML code makes it easier for their algorithms to navigate and index content.

Even if you decide not to go with responsive design, the most important thing is to make sure your site works well. 61% of mobile web users won’t revisit a mobile site if it’s hard to navigate or slow on their first visit, and the threshold for giving up on loading is lower than ever.

Consult your SEO service or web design agency and ask if they think the best web design for your company is responsive or mobile-exclusive. Find out more about this topic here.