Why Being Mobile Friendly Matters in Today's Market
Everyone is on their cell phone, which means your data is being consumed on a tiny screen that is in everyone's hands. So how do you make sure that your content is being effectively digested? Being mobile friendly is about so much more than looking good on a screen. Here's why it's important and how to achieve the ultimate goal!
With the penetration of smartphones and the democratization of high-speed internet, it is no longer safe to assume that people are only using laptops or desktops to surf the web. Therefore, traditional websites and layouts that overlooked the smartphone aspect of marketing, currently find themselves unable to render a smooth experience on mobile devices.
In fact, it’s been four years since the combined traffic from mobile and tablet devices tipped the balance at 51.2 percent vs. 48.7 percent for desktop access, for the first time. And the narrative has been shifting in the same direction ever since. The evolution of the Internet over the years, has also seen a drastic shift in the way that users access the Internet.
With technological problem-solving at an all-time high in this highly digitized world, it makes perfect sense to not cut corners when it comes to providing a seamless online experience to the end user, irrespective of the device he/she might be on.
On that note, let’s dive deep and understand why being mobile friendly is crucial to survive and thrive in the modern market.
Benefits of Mobile Compatibility in Today’s Market
Responsive web design that adapts and flows to accommodate devices such as your iPhone, Android or Blackberry, as well as iPads, makes for a streamlined online experience. And with mobile visitors increasing exponentially, compatibility of websites to hand-held devices can be crucial for traffic, sales and eventually, overall growth.
Some of the glaring benefits for mobile compatibility are as follows:
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Search Engine Page Ranks: When it comes to search results by leading search engines like Google, mobile-friendly websites are prioritized over the others. Ever since April of 2015, Google has expanded the use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This was done to ensure that users get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices. This directly points to the fact that if your site isn't fully optimized for mobile devices, you were/are likely to see a noticeable hit to your ranking on mobile searches.
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Expanded Reach: Making your content/website/blog mobile-friendly automatically helps you to tap into the massive consumer base performing regular mobile searches. When a wide majority of customers will stumble upon your mobile responsive page and leave with a positive experience, word of mouth will drive more traffic in the near future. This will create an appealing online presence for your brand/persona and eventually lead to offline credibility as well.
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Riding the Digital Wave: The post-pandemic world has seen Digital transformation leading business in this new phase. Advanced digital marketing techniques are taking over and more transactions are being carried out online and through mobile devices, than ever before. If your business/product/brand offers a seamless experience across all devices, it is bound to make the digital leap and successfully leverage the power of the internet.
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Content Management: Now that mobile apps are projected to generate more than 900 billion dollars globally by 2023, it is imperative that you incorporate a mobile-friendly CMS (Content Management System) into your workflow. This would be pivotal for marketing and IT decision-makers in actuating growth in today’s omnichannel, mobile-first world.
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Meeting User’s Expectations: Responsive design is the need of the hour. With more and more websites becoming mobile-responsive every day, the benchmark for user experience has shot up drastically. Users are now constantly expecting this level of functionality as an accepted standard when browsing on their mobile devices.
Grabbing the Attention Span of the Online Crowd
With heavy digitization offering a plethora of choices in all facets of life, people are now experiencing shorter attention spans than ever. Mobile friendly sites load briskly and prevent the user from clicking off in a heartbeat. And in this day and age of multiple choices, you can’t afford to have a website that takes longer to load.
Faster browsing and navigation keeps the end user hooked for a longer time and increases the chances that they visit again. Something as simple and intuitive as site navigation, easy-to-read text and appealing layout on smaller screens, can make a huge difference in the long run.
Even an average increase of a few seconds in the session time of visitors on your site can have far-reaching merits for your brand's identity and business’s overall revenue.
Mobile-First Indexing by Google
After approximately two and a half years of Google experimenting with mobile-first indexing, the technology giant Google finally decided that it would be enabled by default for all new websites previously unknown to their wide scale search engine.
The collective decision that all the new websites are being considered ready for this methodology only means that Google will continue to crawl each site and measure its responsiveness to both desktop and mobile versions to ensure the site's compatibility.
This was a landmark move for businesses trying to make an impact online. And in the aftermath, marketing strategies have had to pivot in order to include mobile-compatible resources. The aforementioned shift in search algorithms only underlines the importance of being mobile friendly in today’s market.
Conclusion
It is not rocket science that everything from internet browsing to major ecommerce purchases are taking place on phones and tablets. And in this era of Internet marketing, you wouldn’t want to miss out on traction of that magnitude.
Even though there exists different types of mobile website options that you can customize to fit your business needs, responsive websites offer the most mobile-friendly alternative. This is primarily because they are designed to display content across all devices in an aesthetically pleasing and easy to read format.
Improved user experiences, faster loading speeds and improved mobile search result rankings, all of which are direct results of responsive websites, keep businesses ahead of the curve. Although the online world is notoriously known for its unprecedented changes and updates that can throw a website off track, hosting a responsive design can help keep your business afloat in the long run.