Fundamentals of a mobile-friendly website

| SEO

Fundamentals of a mobile-friendly website

With Google’s latest mobile search ranking algorithm change being activated last week, it has never been more important to get your website as mobile-friendly as possible. Here are 3 things you should bear in mind when building a mobile-friendly website:

1. Make it easy for customers

The only reason Google updated their algorithm to boost mobile-friendly websites is because mobile-friendly websites deliver the best user-experience and they wanted their users to be able to find those websites easily.

You need to help your website visitors to complete their objectives. This may be to find your contact information, look at properties or even read your blog. Design your website to make it easier for them to complete these common tasks on a mobile device.

You should think about the potential steps visitors might make and ensure these steps are easy to complete. Aim to reduce the number of user’s interactions to streamline their experience, for example:

(1) A customer clicks on a website after searching for “estate agents in Poole”.

(2) Uses property search function to select the type of property they are looking for.

(3) Finds desired property.

(4) Contacts the estate agent

These steps should be made simple, with minimal scrolling and clicks to ensure this goal can be completed easily and quickly from mobile device.

2. Measure mobile effectiveness

For ease of use a mobile website requires a certain amount of prioritization. Once you have worked out the most important tasks, you have to measure their effectiveness to ensure those tasks are easy to complete. To make your website as easy as possible to use, you should focus on consistency in your interface and provide a unified experience across all platforms.

3. Consistency across all devices

Google recommends using responsive web design over any other as it has a number of benefits. One of the benefits is that a responsive website maintains just one version of your website instead of two which means it is easier to manage.

A responsive website has just one URL and has the same coding no matter what device the site is being view on. Only the display adjusts according to the screen size to deliver the best usability.

 

This is just the first Google mobile-friendliness update and they are likely to make a lot more changes to ensure mobile users are finding the best and most user-friendly websites available. Don’t put off going mobile any longer, otherwise you may find yourself losing a huge amount of traffic.  

Luke Stanley