How to build a Mobile friendly site
In today’s business world, having a website is no longer enough to meet the growing need and demand for business visibility. People today access the Internet on mobiles more often than on computers. You should be able to meet your current and potential customers where they are which is on their mobile devices.
Bottom line: Your business website needs to be mobile-friendly. That is, it needs to work well on smaller screens.
What you will learn
When people search for businesses, they are quite likely to be searching on a mobile device. Search engines are adapting to this new approach, and businesses need to adapt as well. In this article, you’ll learn about:
- Search engines and the mobile searcher
- How to build a mobile-friendly website
- Characteristics of a Mobile friendly site
- What you should consider for mobile SEO.
Search engines and the mobile searcher
Let’s start with this scenario
Imagine your birthday is next week and you wish to invite your friends and loved ones to come to celebrate with you, now it dawned on you that you will need a reasonable size of food to cater for the appetite of your invitees – which is quite a huge task for you and your siblings, and you also don’t want to go to a clubbing house in order to accommodate the underage. Ok.
So, you grab your mobile, and search for ‘Caterer near me’. The search results show a few options, including several businesses just a few streets from your flat. One of the options has a clickable phone number. so, you click to make the call. And you scheduled a meeting with the catering company.
This scenario is a perfect example of how many of your potential customers are using mobiles. They’re often on the go, pressed for time, and using search engines to look for quick answers. Search engines offer people results that match their search terms, and location. They can also tell if a site is mobile-friendly.
Read also: The evolution of mobile device
What do we mean by mobile-friendly?
Mobile friendliness means being able to work effectively on smaller screens. Your viewers/customers should be able to access your website on mobile and the experience should also be user-friendly.
How do you build a mobile-friendly site?
There are many options available to build a mobile-friendly site, but most search engines prefer something called “responsive design.”
A responsive website adapts itself depending on the size of a viewer’s screen. When you have a responsive site, you don’t have to create separate sites for computers and mobiles. So, you save yourself a lot of effort.
Characteristics of a mobile-friendly website
- A well-designed mobile site is usable on the smallest mobile screen.
- Fonts and buttons should be bold and easy to read and click on.
- Easy to navigate: Navigation should be clear and simple to use. Visitors should immediately understand their next possible steps, and how to take action.
- Despite the smaller screen size, website visitors should be able to complete common, important tasks.
- Crawlable and indexable by search engines: Once you’ve created a mobile-friendly site, you’ll want to help search engines find it, understand it, and hopefully show it in the results.
- Mobile SEO: includes the same factors you’d consider for standard websites, like relevant content. But what’s crucial for mobile site optimization is performance and usability.
- Relevant content means the content on your website must be relevant to what people are searching for, your content must solve their needs, and your content must also be grammatical error free!
- Performance is how quickly a site loads, and this can be impacted by many things, such as overly large images and file sizes. You can check your site speed at pagespeed.web.dev
- Usability refers to a visitor’s experience using your site. Generally speaking, if your site has a good mobile user experience, it will be more likely to appear in mobile search results. For example. Some video and content formats can’t be viewed on mobiles. So, if that’s how your site is built, it won’t offer a great user experience.
You can do a quick mobile check-up of your site by visiting Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
You can also read: 8 tips to design a website that people will love
Conclusion
It’s important to make sure your business’s website works well on mobiles.
A mobile-friendly site can bring you more site visitors, give them a better experience, and bring in more business.