Not Just a Pretty Face: Responsive Web Design Can Improve Your Site’s SEO

As more of your customers and clients turn to smartphones and tablet computers to access your website, you need to make sure your website’s design caters to all mobile devices. A responsive web design can enhance the user’s experience by providing easier navigation and allowing users to access all sections of the site with a few screen taps and clicks. These websites are not only mobile-friendly but can also improve your site’s search engine rankings.

Here’s a closer look at how responsive web design can improve your site’s SEO:

Key Benefits of a Responsive Web Design

If you’re ready to update your website and want to ensure a user-friendly experience, consider revamping the site with a responsive theme that adjusts to the site visitor’s screen size. Since many of your visitors will be using an iPhone, tablet, or other mobile device to access your site, you want to make sure all images and site components are easy to view within seconds. A fully responsive website caters to this need by adjusting the content to fit different screen sizes. Users can zoom in and out of the site with ease and all of your images, content, and media files will display properly.

Some of the key benefits of a responsive web design include:

• Easy to update. You only need to update one site to add or edit content, upload images, or post video content. If you are maintaining a mobile version of the site in addition to a desktop version, you may need to resize images and modify the content for each device. With a responsive web design, you need to format and size content for only one site and the pages will adjust to accommodate different screen sizes automatically.

• Improves SEO. The URL structure stays the same across all devices so there is no risk of duplicate content. We discuss this in more detail below.

• Higher conversion rates. Whether you are running an online storefront with a shopping cart or a site that sells services, providing a better user experience may increase conversion rates. Think about how many site visitors may have ended up abandoning a cart or simply clicking off the site before making a purchase because they were fed up with slow-loading pages or couldn’t navigate through the site easily. A responsive website caters to the user and may prompt more purchases via mobile devices.

• Increases credibility. Maintain a professional web presence by publishing and maintaining a site that caters to more users. Taking the time to redesign your site with a more user-friendly format and adding fresh content to the site can increase credibility and attract more visitors. You can increase your reach to all tablet and mobile audiences without an additional monetary investment.

• Keep better track of analytics data. Performing a site analysis on just one site will make it much easier to identify user habits, patterns, and trends. When you are maintaining multiple sites to accommodate for mobile and desktop users, you may not have accurate or current information about users’ habits, patterns, and trends. You can consolidate all of your analytics data with a single responsive website.

• Save money. It can be costly to maintain two or three different sites that cater to different types of users and you will may need to pay development costs just to keep each site up-to-date. Having just one responsive website can reduce site management costs.

SEO-Friendly Components of Responsive Web Design

Many people wonder why it doesn’t just make sense to maintain a dedicated mobile site instead of redesigning the site with a responsive web design. There are some downsides to having a mobile site that complements the main site. In most cases, search engines will find duplicate content on both the mobile and desktop versions of your website. You may also run into problems with a mobile site appearing properly on a tablet device. Some tablet computers won’t display a mobile site in the same way as a smartphone and users will have to resort to the desktop version to find what they need.

A responsive web design has many search engine benefits because it is structured in a way that is easily accessible by search engine spiders.

Some of the key SEO benefits of a responsive web design include:

No duplicate content. Every piece of content on your site will be assigned its own URL so you won’t run into issues of duplicate content.

Opportunity for faster ranking. All incoming links and social network activity will be housed on a single site instead of across several sites linked to each other. This can power up your rankings and may even speed up indexing.

Easily accessible on all mobile devices. Your site will be easily accessible on tablet computers, smartphones, and other mobile devices. Site visitors can click through to your site from the major search engines without restrictions.

Google Recommends Responsive Web Design

Google has already stated that web masters should consider responsive web design as their first option and that the bots can handle crawling these sites. You’ll find some tips and guidelines for responsive web design fundamentals on the Google Developers site here. You can choose from several layouts and patterns that work well across both mobile and desktop devices. The most common layouts for responsive web design include: mostly fluid, column drop, layout shifter, tiny tweaks, and off canvas. All of these patterns can house a variety of different types of content and the page will expand or shrink depending on the screen size.

A responsive website offers many benefits beyond its aesthetic appeal. You can attract more site visitors with a professional layout and also boost your search engine rankings with minimal effort. Consider revamping your website with a design that’s optimized for all mobile devices and is easy to navigate with a few swipes or screen taps. You can choose from a variety of different themes and layouts to complement your business or personal site and find it easy to maintain for the long-term.