Mobile SEO Checklist: Optimising Your Site for Smartphone Users
For many people in New Zealand and worldwide, smartphones are the primary way they gain access to the internet. In fact, it’s estimated that over 55% of all online website traffic now comes from mobile devices. What does this mean for you? It means that every business owner needs to consider mobile optimisation for their websites to improve their SEO in Auckland.
Why Optimise for Smartphone Users at All?
If your site is not optimised for mobile devices, you’re seriously missing out on a lot of traffic and heaps of potential customers. If over 55% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices, that means that 55% of people have the potential to visit your site on their phones, seeing that it’s not optimised for mobile usage, and immediately leave in frustration.
A site that’s not optimised for smartphone usage can leave a seriously bad impression on mobile users, and that’s certainly not the first impression you want your business to have on your users. Not only is poor mobile optimisation bad for companies, but it’s also bad SEO for websites as a whole.
Mobile optimisation is also important because it’ll improve user experience. User experience, or UX, is one of the most important parts of any website because it’s all about how pleasant a site is to use. Mobile-optimised sites are often easier to use and navigate and offer a better experience to your visitors.
A Useful Checklist to Use While Making Your Website Mobile-Friendly
It’s very clear that optimising your site for mobile usage is a must for businesses that want to improve their SEO and their sales, but it’s not exactly as simple as changing a few things on your site. You’ll want to have your web developer team fully optimise your site for different devices to increase the chances of leads and improve your brand’s reputation.
There are a number of things you can do to optimise your site – here’s a useful checklist of some of the most important things to consider:
Create A Responsive Design. Having a responsive design is one of the most, if not the most, important things when creating a mobile-friendly site.
A responsive site design means that your website will automatically adjust its layout and buttons to fit the screen of the specific device it is being accessed from. So, regardless of whether your visitor uses a small smartphone or has their laptop connected to a flat screen television, they’ll be able to use your site easily.
The internet is accessible from all sorts of different devices now, so a responsive design can make your site usable from so many differently-sized screens. This improves your site’s ease of use and is great for boosting your SEO.
Use Mobile-Friendly Images On Your Site. Images are a great way to break up big blocks of text and make your website more visually appealing. After all, due to the fast-paced world of the internet, many of us have lowered patience and shorter attention spans when it comes to reading blocks of text on the internet. You might be tempted to stop reading if all you see is a massive text wall. But, if that text wall is broken up with fun and visually-pleasing images, you’ll be tempted to keep reading to learn more about those lovely photos.
However, using images can have drawbacks for your site, especially concerning SEO and user experience. Large images, or too many images, can slow down your site’s loading speed on mobile devices.
Your web design team should optimise your site’s images by using smaller file sizes and using them in an appropriate way. Images can be compressed to reduce their sizes without losing any quality, so be sure all of your images are optimised.
Minify Your Code. Minifying your code means removing unnecessary spaces and characters from your HTML, CSS and JavaScript code. This can significantly help you to improve your site’s loading speed on desktop and mobile devices.
Who wants to sit around waiting for a site to load? If your site takes too long, your guests may abandon it and look for a competitor.
Use A Content Delivery Network. A content delivery network, which is also commonly known as a CDN, is a network of geographically delivered servers that deliver your site’s content to your users from a server that is closest to them.
Using a CDN can improve your site’s SEO and mobile optimisation by enhancing your site’s loading speed.
Ensure Your Site Is Easy to Navigate. Users should be able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Try to make sure your website’s design is as intuitive as possible, meaning that your users should be able to know where things are without much frustration instinctively.
For example, it’s common for websites to have their navigational bars either along the top of the screen or along the side of the screen. Most users automatically look to these areas for navigational buttons, even if they’re visiting a site for the first time.
Your website’s mobile version should also have large buttons that are easy to read and click.
Test Your Site On Mobile Devices Yourself. Don’t only rely on coding and numbers to tell you if a site works well; try it out yourself! Experience your website through the eyes of a guest and try to examine its SEO yourself.
It’s important to test your site on a variety of different devices to make sure that it looks good and functions properly. Think about using different kinds of smartphones that are a variety of sizes, tablets, desktop computers and other devices you can think of.
One Easy Way to Make Sure Your Site Works Well On All Devices
All of this may seem confusing, especially if you don’t have much experience with website design. But don’t worry; you don’t have to worry about implementing these changes yourself – you can just trust us at Kiwi Website Design. We’ll be happy to have a look at your site to see what we can do.
Would you like to speak to us about our services? We’d be happy to chat! Give us a buzz on XXXX to reach us.
Kiwi Website Design: Web development that you can trust!