Smartphone and tablet users are increasing at high speeds and the need of mobile friendly websites is skyrocketing!
Mobile sales have overtaken desktop sales and mobile internet usage is about to overtake desktop this year. It is obvious that mobile search will overtake desktop search in the near future. Having a mobile website is essential and your digital marketing strategy should adopt to this need. Businesses that rely on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should switch to Responsive Web Design (RWD).
This is a wise move for the following 3 reasons:
Google recommends Responsive Web Design
Having 70% of the search market share, you should listen to what Google says. Google states that RWD is its recommended mobile configuration.
The reason is that with RWD you have only one URL and the same HTML code, regardless of the device you are visiting the website. It is quite handy for Google to crawl, index and organize content of only one URL and not multiple versions of the same site.
Sharing content across different devices
Having two different sites for desktop and mobile can have a bad result on user experience.
Take for example a smartphone user who shares content from a mobile site with a friend on Facebook, who uses a laptop. The result is a stripped down mobile site on the desktop screen, creating an overall bad user experience. Google also places user experience as a ranking factor, so it is essential to take this into account for SEO reasons.
SEO campaigns and easier management
Having seperate desktop and mobile websites requires having seperate SEO campaigns. Managing one website and one SEO campaign is obviously easier than having to manage two websites and two SEO campaigns. A mobile specific SEO strategy can be incorporated into the responsive design, despite the fact that the same URL is a desktop version of the website too.
That said, there are only advantages in responsive web design regarding your digital marketing strategy.
So, do the right thing for your business and adopt the new standards in your online presence.
