Top 3 Reasons Why Responsive Design is Important for SEO

Responsive Design is Important for SEO

As I am sure you know by now, the internet is becoming more and more a mobile environment. So the importance of a mobile-friendly website is greater than ever.

In fact mobile Internet usage has already overtaken desktop Internet usage and continues to grow.

It is estimated that approximately 67% of Internet users have stated that they are more likely to make purchases from a mobile-friendly website.

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) should be a key component of your online marketing strategy, and therefore having a mobile-friendly or responsive web design has become critical.

Now some may proclaim that a separate mobile website is the best approach, others will choose a single responsive website. They each have their advantages and disadvantages, and you must weigh your options to select the best solution for you.

My focus here is how SEO factors into this decision and why a responsive web design is the best option for mobile SEO.

1. Google Recommends Responsive Design

The search engine giant Google has formally stated that mobile-friendly sites will score better than those that are not and the configuration that it recommends is a responsive web design. They even went on to call responsive web design an industry best practice.

The dominant factor for their position is the fact that responsive design websites have one consistent URL that delivers the same page to users no matter what device they are using.

Plus it is more efficient and easier for Google to crawl and index. Compare that to the separate mobile domain where an entirely different page is delivered to a cell phone user than to a desktop user. It is less efficient, requires more work for Google, and has greater potential for black hat tactics to be used.

Google also prefers responsive designed websites due to the fact that links are shared among users on the Internet that are on a variety of devices.

For example. Mary is using her phone and shares content from a mobile site with her friend Sally on Facebook who opens the link on her desktop. She sees this skinny page that was scrunched down top be viewed on a mobile device. It was never intended to be viewed on a desktop. Needless to say this is a less than optimal user experience. Google now places a great deal of emphasis on the user-experience as part of the ranking factor in their algorithm.

2. Great User-Experience

Responsive web design delivers a great user-experience no matter the device. You don’t always know what screen size (or viewport) a user will have when they reach your site. Mobile devices come in a huge variety of sizes now and the trend is toward even more different sizes. A fixed mobile site could potentially be sized completely off for a particular mobile device, perhaps too narrow or too wide for the screen and be very frustrating that the mobile site doesn’t fit this mobile device.

The difference is even more exaggerated going between mobile and desktop. When viewing the same URL on each device the responsive designed website will render a consistent and positive user-experience each time. However viewing the URL designed for the other device will be consistently frustrating, and the user likely need to find the domain for their device.

What is even worse is a site designed only for desktop viewing. These sites can be terribly frustrating as the user is constantly needing to zoom in and zoom out.

3. Smoother SEO

By having to double your efforts you also have more opportunity to let something slip through the cracks. A separate mobile and desktop site does require that you have separate SEO campaigns as well.

It simply is a huge advantage to employ a responsive web design as part of your SEO strategy.

Though there one key advantage to employing a mobile specific strategy and that is optimizing for keywords that are searched more when on your smartphone.

Conclusion

Responsive web design is the method preferred by Google, it delivers a consistently great user-experience and is much easier to manage as a single SEO campaign.

Weigh all your options before deciding on a mobile strategy, but there are some significant advantages to using a responsive web design.