This article is created by Lucru Marketer. Lucru Marketer is a performance marketing agency in Singapore with 15 years of experience and has served more than a thousand clients.
How many times do you access internet from your desktop in a day?
Now, how many times do you access internet from your phone in a day?
Even if your answer states that you spend more time in the former, majority of people prefer the latter.
In 2015, Google announced that mobile searches has started to outnumber desktop searches. And this sure changes the game. How?
The glory of the Internet started with PC which makes it understandable that a lot of people – a lot of agencies focused their time on building the technology that could make online experience in desktop more comfortable over time. Now that the habit of users has changed, there also needs to be a quick change of lane to optimize the “buildings” in the cyber world to be more mobile-friendly.
One of the major aspects that need attention is SEO.
As you know, SEO is highly important in digital marketing practice to gain organic traffic and survive the always-heated competition in search engine. With the changing nature of searching experience, SEO should also support the mobile searching.
How different is actually mobile SEO and desktop SEO?
Desktop and mobile SEO are not entirely different. There may be a shift in the use of the medium, but the goal stays the same: to drive traffic to the website and gain new leads and customers – which will eventually convert to sales. The elements are the same. The little detail, however, needs some tweaking.
First of all, the screen width of desktop and mobile phone is different, which means there is limitation of what people can see on mobile compared to the former. Reading what seems to be a normal paragraph on a desktop can be overwhelming on mobile view.
Second, the way people use a website on desktop and mobile is obviously different. With mobile phone, there is this unspoken demand that everything has to be simpler, more seamless, yet does not reduce any of the information required. There is no mouse attached to a mobile phone – sometimes people even use only one hand to operate, yet user still needs to be able to get what they want as if they were using a desktop.
If you are not sure whether your website has been mobile friendly or not, you can simply check on Google.
Why should you do mobile SEO?
If the facts above do not convince you enough as to why mobile SEO has become essential, here are some other reasons to digest.
Google Mobile-Index Search
Earlier this year, Google just proclaimed his love for mobile searching by announcing that there will be no longer indexing from desktop site. Previously, Google indexed separately for mobile and desktop sites, but now indexing is only taken from mobile sites. This means that whether you search from desktop or mobile, the result will come from the mobile index.
What could this do to you?
Lower site rank
The answer is that, be prepared to experience an extreme drop in SERP if you do not apply mobile-friendly features to your website.
How to do mobile SEO?
To prevent your website from suffering the side effect of Mobilegeddon, we recommend you to quickly renovate your website into mobile friendly site. If your website uses WordPress, chances are it is already mobile friendly, but if it is still not mobile friendly, here are some ways to do it.
Responsive Website
As mentioned earlier, the screen size of desktop is different from mobile, which means they have different resolutions. Imagine opening such wide screen website on a mobile device that is ¼ smaller, it will not be convenient at all. Users will have to zoom in to see what is written on the website, even just to see a clearer view of the pictures.
On the other hand, a WordPress website, for example, will run without worry on mobile devices because every website will be automatically responsive to a mobile format.
The advantage of having a responsive website is that you do not have to create a separate website for the mobile audience. It’s just one website, having flexibility regardless of the medium used to see.
But there is also one disadvantage; having your website design gone. The design of a desktop website can be as sophisticated yet complicated as possible, yet it may not show completely on the mobile responsive version. It may even turn into a mess. The key to this is to always think of the mobile view perspective whenever designing a website.
Separate Mobile Site
A mobile site is the mobile version of your website with different url – usually started with an M or ‘mobile’. As opposed to the responsive website, creating a separate mobile site means that you may have two different layouts for the desktop and mobile audience.
One easy example is Twitter. If you open Twitter on desktop versus when you open it on mobile devices, the look will be completely different. If you open on mobile phone browser, you will notice that the url is also slightly different; from the common www.twitter.com to mobile.twitter.com.
Mobile site creates a chance for web developers to be free to design the UI and UX for the mobile audience, without having to worry that it will ruin the desktop site design.
Mindful Content and Execution
The first two are more technical, this one is more into user-centric. With concern that mobile devices run differently from desktop, everything posted into the website should also be adjusted to encourage users’ convenience. For example, the scale of images should not be too big to maintain site speed and the text size and arrangement should be readable to make readers comfortable.
Lucru Marketer believes in harnessing creativity into creative solution. Ever since being founded, Lucru Marketer has continued to help their clients thrive in the digital world by adapting unique marketing methodology for each client. For further information, they can be found on their website and facebook.
Also published on Medium.