Nowadays, your site content must be rendered in an easily readable, navigable form no matter the screen size. Responsive Web Design (RWD) ensures your SEO efforts are noted by Google’s analytics for mobile and desktop sites, and without RWD, your SEO strategy will likely fail. So why is RWD so important, and how can you make sure your site is responsive?

Google Bots Mean Business When It Comes to RWD

Although RWD made its debut several years ago, a considerable number of websites continue to operate in two versions—mobile and desktop. Since Google bots and other search engine bots consider simple page hierarchy a plus, the concern is that sites without neat page hierarchy or those with duplicate content will lose out. Having multiple versions of your site also eats up time for the bots to index all pages, and Google will respond by lowering your rankings.

Responsive design is valuable for SEO strategies precisely because of its unified code base. Since RWD relies on a single URL and code base for all platforms, it increases your chances of better page rankings by allowing faster indexing, and it eliminates the dangers of duplicate content.

Mobile Behavior

Responsive web design is a serious factor in User Experience Design (UX), and it is a marker that Google looks for in its ranking algorithm. By measuring the bounce rate for both mobile and desktop sites, Google can ascertain whether a website is mobile-friendly or not. According to Google, over 60% of web visitors will move to a competitor’s site if your site is not mobile-optimized. If you have high bounce rates, search engines assume your content is not relevant to your keywords, and will reduce your site rankings accordingly.

The Mobilegeddon Update

Google added weight to its stance on mobile responsiveness with its recent update, now dubbed Mobilegeddon. Unlike other updates, Google announced this update in advance, solidifying RWD as a major component in search engine optimization. Once in effect, the update had an impact on over 40% of mobile search queries, an unprecedented amount compared to effects from other updates. Google claims to receive over 50% of its search queries from mobile devices. To help web developers keep up with the trend, the company provides several tools to test the mobile-friendliness of their websites. The most popular tool is Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test page, suited to testing a few pages of your site. The wise developer makes use of these tools.

Is Your Site Responsive?

Now that we’ve established the importance of RWD for your SEO strategy, let’s look at a few techniques you can implement on your site to make sure it’s responsive.

Responsive Theme – Start with a platform that offers responsive themes. WordPress supports thousands of responsive themes, providing you with powerful RWD from the get-go.

Utilize Responsive Plug-Ins – Leading Content Management Systems have responsive plugins to customize the mobile experience, both by rendering content effectively and by offering additional features helpful to mobile designs. JetPack and WPTouch are the best plug-ins for a WordPress site, while JoomlaShine and Responsivizer are available for Joomla. Look for MobileTheme and ThemeKey if you’re using Dupral for your platform.

Fluid Layout – Innovative web designers have used fluid layouts for years to solve issues around multiple viewport sizes. Fluid layouts are created fairly easily by replacing static widths with percentage-based values in the CSS. This small change can yield powerful results.

Rely on Mobile-Friendly Technology – Know your platform and keep in mind its limitations with different mobile technologies. For example, iOS will not support Flash, so don’t make your entire website reliant on Flash if you plan to market to the Apple crowd. Stay away from scenarios that tempt you to make a special mobile version of your site to accommodate a certain technology.

By now, you should see the benefits of having RWD implemented on your site. If you are planning an update, audit your site before ensuring you’re adding responsive web design and making the right changes.

########

Planet Media is an eco-friendly and sustainable creative agency specializing in branding, UX/UI design, web development, ecommerce, and digital marketing solutions. We have extensive experience in developing, promoting, expanding, or reinventing your web presence.

Contact our Denver, Colorado office for a no-obligation, project cost analysis.