How Does Responsive Web Design Benefit Your SEO
Mobile internet accessibility and usability are increasing with each passing year. More and more people are turning to mobiles to browse the web. And with this shift, it is self-evident that websites need to fulfill the user expectations for a seamless and suitable experience.
Plus, this year, stats show how relevant mobile devices have become in people’s day-to-day lives amid the whole pandemic situation. Still, have any doubts regarding the importance of having a responsive web design for your site’s SEO in today’s world?
No worries! In this blog, we will discuss the five excellent ways in which a responsive web design works in favor of your website’s SEO and helps boost its performance in search results.
1. Website Usability
Mobile internet users are typically running out of patience, yearning for immediate solutions to their problems – which in no way implies that desktop users are fond of wasting their time. According to the search engine giant Google, more than half of the mobile site visitors will bounce off a web page or URL that doesn’t load within three seconds. That’s the attention span they come with to your website!
Websites with faster load times manage to remain competitive within a highly competitive market while the others are open to traffic fluctuations or inconsistencies because of ranking drops.
Responsive web design optimizes your site for mobile search, improves its functionality and usability by scaling its content to various users’ devices without them having to pinch the screen to adjust the layout. This, in turn, helps offer a steady user experience across all devices.
Google’s primary focus is to provide the users with the most accurate results for their search queries; therefore, it will endorse and push those websites towards better ranking positions that are offering a positive user experience without fail in terms of content, design, and functionality across every device.
Needless to say, website traffic drops hurt conversions and, therefore, overall sales. In short, an unresponsive, non-mobile-friendly website is losing out on great windows of opportunities to capture potential customers and encourage them to convert.
2. Faster Page Loading
Back in 2018, as Google’s Speed Update rolled out officially, it was revealed that the search engine would finally consider mobile page speed as one of the many ranking factors in mobile search results.
The updates Google introduces are aligned to user behavior. A surge in mobile device usage means a transformation in the way Googlebot crawls, indexes, and presents results in the SERPs to meet users’ needs and expectations while encouraging customer satisfaction.
With the advancing and innovating technology, it is safe to say that we have now stepped into a mobile-centric world, and here a mobile responsive web design is an essential component of an effective SEO strategy. Responsive web design will help you rework your website’s layout as well as content in order to offer a seamless user experience across all devices, including laptops, desktops, tablets, smartphones, etc., without any variations.
If you still fail to do so, not only your SEO efforts will be weakened, but also a traffic drop is predictable without a doubt. Moreover, desktop-only and m.dot sites will no longer be indexed by Google after March 2021, as announced by the company itself, which makes it all the more necessary to have a responsive web design.
3. Lower Bounce Rate
Bounce rate reflects the total percentage of visitors who land on a page and decide to leave the page without taking any action like purchasing, subscribing, or visiting other pages on the site. Google considers it for weighting how relevant a particular web page is to the stated search query.
A high bounce rate reflects thin, poor-quality, or irrelevant content or an abysmally designed site, which will eventually lead to a rankings drop based on the low user interaction.
While content still continues to be the king, staying updated with the latest tech insights, it is also true that it will only be the king if optimized for all devices appropriately.
Even high-quality content will only do so much if not backed by an engaging design. Responsive web design serves the purpose by modifying the page’s layout, presenting the content in the same manner across all devices.
4. Increased Social Shares
Although social media isn’t a ranking factor, it is still equally valuable when it comes to your comprehensive marketing strategy. It certainly plays an influential part in SEO campaigns, complementing one another and enabling you to leverage your site traffic fully.
Responsive web design makes content sharing available across all social media platforms and thus helps expand your audience.
Wondering how it does that? – It makes it easier for people to access the same content across different devices and share it with their friends and acquaintances and across various social networking sites. This unveils notable windows of opportunities to reach a broader audience.
The more traffic you get, the more chances you have of converting your visitors. Responsive web design has become all the more so the fundamental element that makes it possible for you to increase your conversions and sales. Otherwise, imagine a desktop-user sending your site’s URL to a mobile user, but when they try to access it, they find your website unresponsive. What if the poor web design makes it so hard for the visitors to find the share button that they give up and leave your site? This will make you miss out on great opportunities for expanding your target market and acquiring more traffic.
5. No Duplicate Content
As mobile device usage continues to grow, many website owners decided to build an individual mobile version of their site. But this tactic most often leads to duplicate content issues.
Wondering why?
If the same (or highly similar) content shows up on more than one web page, then you are most likely to face duplicate content issues. This is because the duplicated nature of your content confuses Googlebot, which can’t figure out which content version they should index or, most importantly, which version they should rank for a specific search query. Even though the chances of Google penalizing you for this is relatively low, that doesn’t mean your site rankings will remain unaffected.
Since with a responsive design, you will be using one URL only, which will adjust the page’s layout and content to fit different screen sizes smoothly, this will resolve your duplicate content issues and help you offer a more pleasing and steady user experience across all devices.
Conclusion
In this search engine world, Google says, and SEOs do.
If Google releases an update in the algorithm, we simply follow. If Google labels an activity as a violation of its guidelines, we stop practicing it. Similarly, if Google advises having a responsive web design for a seamless transition to a mobile-first index, which will also benefit your SEO and overall website performance in various great ways, there’s no point in not implementing it.
So go ahead and get your responsive web design in place to make sure it complements your SEO efforts and helps you stand out from the crowd and grow your business online.