Why You Need A Mobile-Friendly Site

Mobile friendliness just isn't optional any more

· SEO

One thing that is essential for good digital marketing in 2018 (and beyond) is having a website that is mobile friendly. From an SEO perspective, getting mobile right is crucial.

Most studies place the % of mobile traffic (that's smart phones and tablets) at between 50-60% and growing.

If your site doesn't work well on mobile, that means you are potentially making it harder for 50-60% of your target audience to buy from you.

What's more, Google is now transitioning towards a "mobile first" ranking algorithm. Long story short? If your site doesn't work well on mobile, you won't rank as well for keywords that could drive new leads and customers for your business.

So how can you tell if your site is working well on mobile devices?

Start by using the free Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool here: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

If your site passes, you're probably in the clear for now (however, depending on when and how your site was built, there may be many "usability" fixes you can implement that make everything work better on mobile).

If your site does not pass, then you really need to get on to this ASAP.

In my opinion, most business sites should be built with a view to it looking and working well on mobile first, and then desktop second. This is in contrast to recent practice, which has tended to be desktop first, mobile second.

Issues I tend to see on sites that aren't very mobile friendly are:

* No responsiveness (i.e. the site just loads the desktop version on any device)

* Navigation menus that become clunky to use - often hover navigation is bad on mobile due to requirement to double-tap.

* Popups/popovers

* Embedded content, such as videos, pushing out the width of a page.

* Pages that are too busy and hard to comprehend on mobile.

* Slow loading (this is super important as many people are out and about searching on their 3g/4g data - if your site loads slowly this will put many people off).

If you want any advice or help, just comment below.

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