Mobile Website Design is About More than Just Mobile

Mobile website design — everyone by now knows that a business should have it. It’s all about capturing that sweet, sweet mobile search traffic, right? Something like 40% of all search traffic these days comes in from mobile devices, which means the searchers are looking for something right now that’s relevant to their immediate needs, so that search traffic drives far more than 40% of all organic-search-based sales. But the truth is that mobile website design does more than just make your site mobile-friendly.

The truth is that mobile website design has a huge number of SEO elements built into its very principles.

Fast Load Times

Google has said for years that faster pages get better SEO bumps, straight up. Well, guess how fast a mobile-optimized page loads? Given that mobile users tend to be even less patient than desktop users and they’re more likely to have bandwidth caps and other aspects of their plan that make them prefer minimum-sized pages, the answer is damn fast. So mobile web design can help your SEO right off the bat.

Responsive Pages

Responsive websites are the bread and butter of mobile website design — after all, a website that looks great on a 7-inch Kindle Fire screen but useless on a 3-inch Samsung screen isn’t really mobile-optimized is it? Gotta use those media queries and figure out how to show the user what’s important no matter what size your screen is. Except that media queries are good for so much more than just screen size. Properly done, media queries can give you a host of information about your incoming traffic that will help you SEO your webpage even further, including things like what web browser traffic is coming in on.

Ruthless Simplification

Perhaps the single most important lesson that desktop sites can learn from mobile design is the art of leaving out every single thing that can’t be accomplished by a single fat finger tapping three or less times on the screen (and the information needed to explain those accomplishments to the user.) This aspect of mobile website design is the art of supersimplification, and it’s one that nearly every site on the Internet could benefit from.