This month I’m covering all things technical SEO and if you’re following me on social media you’ll know I’ve already been posting about mobile friendliness. Unfortunately I don’t mean being kind to your mobile by giving it a bit of a rest 😉 but ensuring that your website looks and acts as well as it does on desktop computers.
Why is this important?
Back in May 2015 internet searches from mobile devices were higher than those from desktop computers for the very first time. This has only risen and now over half of all worldwide internet traffic comes from mobiles (source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241462/global-mobile-phone-website-traffic-share/).
Google announced in November of that year that is was testing a “mobile first” strategy:
To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and aps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results.
So what kind of issues could a website have on mobile devices?
- Text that is unreadable
- Pictures that are too large to be viewed without having to horizontally scroll
- Content that will not play
- Buttons too small to be “tapped” easily
- Navigation menu not working correctly
Whilst the examples below are pretty extreme (and pretty ugly!) it shows you the vast difference between a website being viewed on a desktop computer and a mobile device if not designed correctly.
Viewed on a MacBook Air
Viewed on an iPhone 6
As you can see, all of the “main” page content is in a frame that can’t be displayed on a mobile.
Anoter site on a Macbook Air
And again on an iPhone 6
The dimensions of this page are so big you have to horizontally scroll left and right to see everything.
In short, PLEASE ensure that you do a full review of your website from a mobile device to make sure it works correctly.
If you don’t have the time, or aren’t sure what to check for we’d love to do it for you – completely free of charge!!