2021’s fourth quarter saw mobile devices (tablets not included) account for over 52% of worldwide web traffic. While these numbers are staggering, they’re a call to arms for ecommerce business owners.
The stat above means you risk losing half of your potential customer base without a responsive mobile site. Poor user experience for mobile visitors will drive them away. Worse, it can affect your search engine rankings.
The good news is you can make your website mobile-friendly and boost SEO rankings by following proven optimization strategies. Here are 9 of them.
Make the Website Responsive
A responsive site is the best method to create an ecommerce website that works optimally on mobile and desktop devices. A responsive site includes the same information and content across different devices. But, it responds to the viewing device, optimizing its visual appearance to fit the screen.
The arrangement and design of website elements will change with the screen size. Say a featured image is beside a text block on a desktop screen, a smartphone user will see that image beneath the text block.
A responsive design makes your website accessible to mobile users across the spectrum. The best part is it offers this accessibility without omitting any information for mobile visitors. And, while it may mean a little more work,Google endorses this strategy.
Optimize Your Website Content
Identify the primary goal of each page on your website. Then, work to make this message prominent in the simplest way possible. You can also tweak font size and text placements to ensure a mobile visitor will quickly see the main message.
You’ll also want to avoid big chunks of text on a mobile page. Huge text blocks can seem daunting to the average smartphone user. They may get disinterested and leave your website. Instead, use short sentences and limit paragraphs to 1-4 sentences.
Thanks to Google’s recent page experience update,making the web content mobile-friendly will boost your search engines rankings. However, keywords are the ultimate decider.
Ensure you’re incorporating relevant SEO keywords in your website content. More importantly, these keywords must sound natural within the text. Proper keyword optimization will improve your search engine rankings, organic traffic and increase conversion rate ecommerce.
Make Crucial Information Accessible
Customers make search engine queries on mobile phones because they need specific information. This info can be a customer service number, business address, or answers to questions about a product.
Start by identifying the answers and information visitors to your mobile website want. Then, make the content as evident as possible on the mobile homepage.
Of course, it’s impossible to load all this information on the homepage. Just make sure the route to accessing this info via a mobile device is easy to navigate. A dedicated FAQ page that answers customers’ common questions can also come in handy.
How fast your customers get the information they need can also influence your workflow. For instance, it can be hard to get your sales and support team to collaborate effectively for improved customer experience. But each team’s contribution becomes easier when they have a direct line to the customer — and the customer can easily find it.
You can always identify what mobile visitors want from your site by reviewing the numbers from analytical tools. For example, you can leverage the mobile traffic feature present in Google Analytics’ behavior panel.
Make the Website Faster By Optimizing CSS and Images
The heavier your website, the slower it’ll be on a mobile device. And, Google is clear about its stance on website speed as a prerequisite for search engine rankings — slow websites will always lose out to the competition.
Imagine having to watch each page element load slowly on a mobile device. That doesn’t sound anything like responsive, does it? It’s a frustrating experience and a turnoff for mobile website visitors.
You can make your mobile website faster by compressing images before uploading them. Doing so will reduce their size without affecting visual quality. Thanks to hybrid cloud architectures, your team can work from anywhere, orchestrating a coordinated effort to remove heavy images on your website.
For videos, it’s better to host them on a third-party service and then embed them on your site. This way, the third-party service has to deal with the video’s size.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a functional framework that can quicken load times for your mobile website. Your web hosting provider can also impact loading speed. You want to ensure you’re using a credible provider to handle your website traffic seamlessly.
Don’t Use Flash
Flash is useful for creating animations on a website. While its use is still passable for a desktop site, it’s a huge red flag for mobile websites. Using Flash on your website will make it less mobile-friendly. It slows page loading time and can be bad for crucial SEO rankings.
Worse, neither Apple nor Android devices support Flash. Therefore, the odds are high that it doesn’t load on a mobile website. Say an animation on your home page is a crucial part of your plan to pitch ecommerce personalisation and AR to prospective visitors. Designing it with Flash will mean mobile users can’t view it, thereby contributing to a poor user experience.
Evaluate Button Placement and Size
Making your website mobile-friendly involves tweaking website elements to ensure a mobile visitor can use the page optimally. One area that requires special attention is the buttons on your mobile website. After all, customers will need these buttons to navigate the website, fill forms, and link to other pages.
A button can be bad for mobile users if it’s an improper size or in the wrong location. Any button that a user can’t reach with their thumbs while holding the device is likely to be a pain. Therefore, think about how you hold a mobile device when deciding where responsive buttons should go on your website.
The way your website design utilizes space can affect user experience.
Remove all Pop-Ups
Most mobile users won’t bother to find the tiny “X” that closes pop-up ads. Instead, they’re more likely to close the page and find an alternative option. This means zero tolerance for pop-ups or ads that block page content will boost your website’s mobile friendliness.
We do understand that some situations call for a pop-up ad on your website. The easy solution here is to ditch them for mobile visitors. Alternatively, you can set the ad to appear after the visitor scrolls to the bottom.
Use Large, Legible Fonts
Evaluate how a font size looks on different mobile devices before making the eventual decision. The unofficial minimum font size for a website is 14px. While this font size may be great for a desktop, it may turn out too small for a mobile device.
Another way to make your site mobile-friendly is using easy-to-read fonts. A creative spark can prompt an experimental font choice. And, there’s nothing wrong with creativity, as long as you’re not sacrificing readability for it.
Bold, clear fonts are the go-to for mobile devices. Your visitors can read it clearly and will find it easier to navigate the website.
Contact center shrinkage is how long customer service agents spend in-office without taking a call. This shrinkage is a non-issue with a lead conversion page. The internet is always on 24-7. Therefore, you should prepare to accommodate visitors at all times.
This courtesy extends to nighttime visitors using dark mode on their mobile phones. Your choice of font type and size should remain easily readable on a mobile screen, even in dark mode.
Make Mobile Testing a Norm
Testing the website on multiple mobile devices is the best way to ensure you’re still providing a great experience to mobile users. A web design team with a BYOD policy will find it easy to leverage this strategy.
Different people can browse the website on their devices, noting difficult actions and interactions. Regular testing will help you identify those small, pesky problems that can be a big deal for a first-time visitor to your website.
The intervals between periodic testing sessions should be minimal. After all, catching issues fast and fixing them is the only way to truly deliver mobile-friendly experiences to customers.
Plus, you can always leverage technology to your advantage. Google offers a free testing tool that determines how mobile-accessible a page is. Here’s what it looks like:
Cater to Your Mobile Customers
The strategies above will make your website more accessible to mobile users. And as long as you follow SEO best practices, they’ll improve your search engine rankings alongside. The sooner you start incorporating them, the better for your online business.
Authored by:
Grace Lau – Director of Growth Content, Dialpad
Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, an AI-powered cloud communication platform for better and easier team collaboration. She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies, partnering with SEO, cloud PBX for small business,and Ops teams to build and nurture content. She’s written for websites like Premio.io and Mailmunch. Here is her LinkedIn.
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