It isn’t enough to have great content on your website. It isn’t even enough to have that content optimized for search engines! As part of your marketing strategy, you should also take the design and fuctionality of your site into consideration too. Here are 5 ways a responsive web design can improve your SEO.
In 2016, 80 percent of people were using smartphones, according to a study published by Google. Imagine, then, how much that number has increased over the last two years.
A few years ago, mobile responsive web design was innovative. Today, optimizing your website for mobile devices is a must. Unless you’re happy to risk alienating potential customers, that is!
Apart from simply improving the experiences of users, mobile responsive web design can improve your site’s SEO, too.
In this post, we’ll review not one, but five ways a responsive web design can benefit your SEO.
Let’s get down to it, shall we?
1. Better Site Usability
When it comes to your SEO rankings, the amount of time a user spends on your website plays a key role. And if your website isn’t easy for users to navigate, chances are they won’t stick around for long.
Improve the web design of your site and ensure that it’s easy to use on any device, and your usability scores will improve dramatically. A decent usability score is essential if you want to increase conversions and encourage repeat visits.
2. Improved Page Load Times
Another crucial factor that will affect your ranking are your page load times. Websites with long page load times aren’t exactly favored in Google’s search results.
Good SEO website design will include pages that are optimized to load quickly, which will keep visitors around longer and may even help to boost your ranking as well.
3. Reduced Bounce Rate
No one likes a slow website. If your website loads quickly, users will be a lot more likely to stick around than if pages take a long time to load.
And Google pays close attention to the bounce rate of websites, too. It’s one of the factors that determine how your website ranks, so try to keep it in check.
4. Fewer Duplicate Content Issues
Having a mobile site with a different URL from its desktop counterpart raises the issue of duplicate content. For both websites, you have to tell Google what content is important and should be indexed.
Not doing so will result in Google making that call for you, and it’s going to hurt the rankings for your mobile website.
Finding a quality responsive web design tutorial that you can use for both desktop and mobile will eliminate concerns about duplicate content.
5. Increased Social Sharing
Part of the importance of responsive web design is to make social sharing easier for users.
And while it won’t impact your rankings directly, getting more shares can increase traffic and expand your audience, and those things can help to improve your rankings.
Make sharing easy!
Understanding the Importance of Responsive Web Design
By now, it should be pretty clear how important it is for your website to have a responsive web design.
You’ll improve the user experience, page load times, reduce your bounce rate, have fewer issues surrounding duplicate content, and boost social sharing…all while improving your Google rankings, too.
What more could you ask for, really?