Focus on Mobile Devices

As time went by, technology and their devices maintained an inverse relationship, and technology kept growing bigger while the mobile devices kept growing smaller. As such, everybody has access to whatever information they might require on the internet on their phones.

Most of the people who seek information on the internet do so with their various mobile devices. Gone are the days when without a computer, you can’t have access to so many things on the web.

Knowing your potential visitors are more likely to access your website via their mobile phones, it is only logical to design and have a web page that would be compatible with their mobile phones and easily accessible by them. There are so many web pages on the net that can’t be accessed at all or can’t be accessed with ease on a mobile phone, and this is bad for business.

Mobile is Continuing to Grow: 2018 was the first time mobile surpasses desktop traffic, and growth is expected to continue in the coming years.

Why Is It Important?

It is important for many reasons to build and design your website in a way that can be easily accessed on mobile phones.

One of such reasons is traffic. What grows your website, improves your SEO ranking, and possibly gets you paid is the amount of traffic generated towards your website and with a mobile-friendly website, you are more likely to create tons of traffic. Websites that are not mobile-friendly would prevent mobile users from being able to access your websites, thus leading to you losing traffic to your competitors.

A mobile-friendly website would also help make other SEO strategies work better. For one, it has been established that most of the local searches are done on mobile phones.

This is because desktops are mostly kept at home or in the office. Mobile phones, on the other hand, are carried around everywhere and it is easier to do one-off searches with them.

To give an analogy, not having a mobile-friendly website can be likened to an ice cream man opting to focus on selling to the 42% of adults who still enjoy ice cream rather than the remaining 58% of the market that comprises young people.

So, for making your website mobile-friendly, the primary technique for creating a website easy to access on mobile phones and tablets is called Responsive Design.

AMP technology is taking great protagonism also.

There are some other important elements to keep in mind when designing a mobile-friendly website, for example:

• Your website should load fast, especially on mobile phones. The reason for this is straightforward: users do not always have a perfect connection on their smartphones, so the more we facilitate access to information, the better it will be for them.
• Make sure all the elements (menu, buttons, text...) are easily readable and usable.
• Try to adapt vertically elements that are usually horizontal, an example of this can be the home slider
• Make sure all the functionality is working on different devices and mobile screen resolutions. Also, test your site in older smartphones.
• As a general rule: in mobile, the simpler, the better.

Top 5 SEO Tools for optimizing your site in mobile devices

• Google’s Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool (Free): looks like a simple report but actually has precious features once you explore it. Carry out tests to determine how easy it is to access your page via mobile devices. Your page will be assigned a score which can be viewed by entering your URL.
• HubSpot’s Marketing Grader (Free): Hubspot's Marketing Grader is built with the capability of analyzing the responsiveness of your site while giving users the liberty of getting to see how their websites perform on mobile devices. Previews can be done for rotated versions.
• BrowserStack (Free): BrowserStack gives you quality and premium screenshots which will help you to see the look of your site on a wide range of devices. It can serve as good support for the recommendations that you get from other related tools.
• W3C mobileOK Checker (Free): this tool gives you a comprehensive analysis that has a lot of details and is more technical. You'll also get recommendations which will help you improve your site standards and mobile-friendliness. Every finding comes with a severity rating.
• SEMrush (Paid+Free): SEMrush is extremely superb when it comes to organic search as well as paid search capabilities. It comes with a wide range of SEO charts as well as SEO graphs which will give you insight about how your website performs.

Top 5 WordPress Plugins for optimizing your website for mobile

• Jetpack (Free+Paid): It comes with Mobile Theme which helps you optimize WordPress websites for mobile and also has contact forms usage capabilities, Image galleries transformation using carousel, customized CSS, etc.
• WPtouch Mobile Plugin (Free): This plug-in comes with Infinity Cache which helps improve the speed of your website with the use of mobile caching. Use CSS to scale images while having images that are optimized for mobile devices.
• WP Mobile Detector (Free): now you can meet the load request of virtually any kind of page regardless of the origin of the request. This is where WP Mobile Detector comes in to play.
• WP Mobile Edition (Free): you can easily use this plug-in to optimize your website perfectly for mobile use on Android as well as iOS and Windows.
• WordPress Mobile Pack 2.0 (Free): with this WordPress Mobile Pack 2.0, you can package content with the ability to share them across various platforms as well as operating systems. You can also share to different devices

Did you know? You can easily know how mobile-friendly your web page is by taking the Google mobile-friendly test. This tool will help you to optimize your site with a mobile perspective, giving you tips and suggestions to improve its performance.

Expert’s suggestion: The slower your sites load, the more visitors and revenue you’ll lose out on. Faster loading pages lead to a better overall website experience, hence Google’s move toward making it a mobile ranking factor” – Anna Crowe (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/top-ranking-signals/240803/)