Responsive Web Design: SEO Benefits

Having a user-friendly website that works across multiple platforms, such as tablets, laptops and smartphones, is now more important than ever due to the huge increase of traffic hitting your website from mobile devices.

Responsive website design is now considered the best way to create a website that all your users will love. Responsive website design for estate agents simply means that the website will resize itself depend on the device you are using, ensuring that the website is easy to use regardless of the devices size.

Before, the solution to mobile traffic was to create a separate mobile website, but now for anyone serious about their online presence, usability and SEO, Responsive is the only way to go!

Why is responsive web design great for SEO?

It is favoured by Google

Google recommends responsive web design and they say it is the best way to target mobile users.

Separate websites for desktop and mobile means you have two separate URLs and coding, whereas responsive sites only use one URL and coding making it easier for Google to crawl your website and index content.

Unified website

Having a separate mobile website isn’t a bad thing and generally speaking works very well but for SEO its starting your website from scratch, meaning it won’t rank as well as it could do.   

A responsive website will enable you to maintain all of your websites authority and backlinks, not only this it means you will be able to focus all of your SEO efforts to one website rather than two, giving responsive websites a boost.  

Lowers bounce rates

You can be ranking page one, position one for all of your search terms but if your website isn’t user-friendly on mobile devices, you may find your mobile users leaving pretty quickly which in turn will lower your rankings.

A mobile website isn’t necessarily a solution for this either. If you have stripped down your website too much or make it too different from the desktop site, it may suffer.

Google will interpret this high bounce rate as an indication that your website isn’t offering your users what they need, making it less relevant and lowering your rankings because of it.

A responsive website will display the same content found on the desktop site but the site will just function in a different way.

The best user experience

Having a user-friendly website will make it easier for your audience to find, take in and read the content. A responsive website is completely designed with the user in mind and user experience is a huge ranking factor (which is why Google encourage responsive web design).

Responsive website are as modern as you can get, estate agents that have a wide audience viewing their website via all kinds of devices and want to give their users the best user-experience possible should make the switch to responsive design. It truly is the most effective way to get the most out of your mobile audience.