The Importance of Mobile-Friendly Web Design for SEO

Caring for your SEO involves taking the user experience into account.

Why Mobile UX is Your SEO Secret Weapon

SEO and user experience go hand-in-hand. Building out a comprehensive SEO plan for your website also means making it better for the user journey. Whether you’re exploring your internal linking strategy or developing a better user experience, it is all about your customers.  

When you’re competing against businesses with their own SEO strategies and high rankings, you’ll need to think a little outside the box. Your website UX, specifically for a mobile user, doesn’t only make your site more accessible but it can even improve your SEO ranking when done right.  

Mobile usage in the UK

In 2023, there were 59.25 million people in the UK using a smartphone. With this expected to increase to 62.53m by 2029, making sure you’re ahead of the game on mobile-first UX is vital for your SEO strategy. Both as a short-term improvement for your customers, as well as a long-term ranking strategy, developing your site for better UX across both desktop and mobile phones is a must to give your customers what they need.  

With this rise in mobile phone popularity, more people than ever are searching for their queries with their handheld devices. Whether it is a quick search at the beginning of their user journey or they’re looking more intently, being able to meet your customers in the online space that they use most is important. If your website isn’t optimised for a mobile-friendly UX, you’ll run the risk of losing vital conversions.  

Why does mobile UX matter for your website? 

Mobile UX design best practices matter, as the majority of your customers are likely to be searching for queries and interacting with your website on their mobile phones. As the ways in which customers can interact with your website expand, with everything from mobile searches to voice searches, being able to optimise your site for the best performance in these areas is a must.  

Customers don’t want to be waiting for your site to load, have difficulty finding the answers they need, or struggle to simply navigate through your site. Making sure you’re building your website with the user journey in mind is a must to gain the attention, and trust, of your customers. After all, how often have you done a quick search and been let down by not finding your answer within a couple of seconds?  

Other ways focusing on a mobile UX design strategy for SEO can benefit your business include: 

Improved SEO ranking 

Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Safari all respond to good user experience designs. As more people start to use mobile phones for their search queries, these search engines add their own metrics for authority based on the user experience and journey.  

By developing a strong mobile UX strategy, you not only open your website up to your customer base, but search engines are more likely to rank it higher. This is due to mobile-first indexing. Search engines tend to prioritise websites that are optimised for the mobile phone user experience and are more likely to boost your website’s rankings if it is accessible and mobile-friendly.  

Ensuring that you’ve got a mobile-first design strategy is important to gain that competitive edge within your business and rank higher for the search terms you’re optimising your site for.  

Page responsiveness

Another reason a mobile UX design is important is that it can improve your page responsiveness. This means that your website can adapt and fit whatever screen your customers are viewing it on. Have you experienced searching a site that is only built for desktops and struggled to navigate it?  

Poor page responsiveness can be off-putting for your customers, who will likely click away from your site to find a more easily navigable one. In this way, ignoring page responsiveness could be causing your customer base to seek answers they should be getting from you from your competitors instead.  

A responsive page design, which is easy to navigate and offers your customers the same great website experience from their mobile phones, will keep your customers on your page for longer and reduce the likelihood of them dropping off.  

Better engagement metrics

Engagement metrics are vital for any business looking to improve its SEO strategy and onsite conversions. By implementing a mobile UX design, you’ll be able to improve these metrics. One metric you might be struggling with is bounce rate. If your page isn’t optimised for a mobile UX design, it might not be responsive enough for your customers, be difficult to navigate, or simply load too slowly.  

Not only can high bounce rates suggest that your customers aren’t sticking around, but they can also signal to search engines that your website isn’t giving them the answer they want. This can severely harm your SEO and ranking value as your website will lack authority and trust from the search engines, ultimately impacting your ranking.  

These factors can contribute to your customers clicking the back button and finding their answers elsewhere. It is our role to ensure that your website is best suited to both desktop and mobile so that your customers get the best experience with your company from the first click.  

How to improve your website’s mobile user experience

Improving your mobile UX design involves understanding your user journey and considering the individual elements on your website that either attract or put off your customers. Some fixes could include: 

1. Responsive design

As discussed above, a responsive design is a must for the mobile UX experience. Not only does this mean your customers can better navigate the page, but it also improves the consistency across your sites. A responsive web design will ensure that your customers are having a similar experience across all search platforms, limiting confusion and making it easy for your customers to understand and explore.  

Responsive web designs should include all text, images, and banners, among other elements. This way, your users aren’t missing out on anything. If you have text running off the screen or find that your images aren’t loading on mobiles, then you could have a poor mobile UX, which could be harming your SEO strategy.  

2. Simplified navigation

Simpler navigation is another way that you can quickly improve the mobile UX of your website. This means that your customers will have an easier time finding what they need. To do this, you might consider using a hamburger menu, prioritising important sections, and including a visible search bar.  

This way, your customers can easily find what they need without being overwhelmed with an unresponsive navigation section sitting heavy at the top of the page.  

Improving your internal linking strategy is another way to encourage better navigation, enhance your mobile UX, and support your SEO strategy. By linking your pages to relevant pages and content, your customers will be able to navigate to further information they might need with ease, as well as making those pages crawlable and passing authority across pages within your site for the benefit of search engine algorithms.  

3. Improve readability 

Readability is important for both your user experience and SEO. Poor content, linking, and structure not only make your page difficult to read but it can also impact your rankings. Your onsite content should be legible, relevant to the search query, and targeted to the right audience.  

Not only will improving your onsite content make the page more accessible to your specific customer base, but it can also make the page easier for search engines to understand, help it rank higher, and create better opportunities for internal linking.  

4. Testing 

No new design comes without appropriate testing. What will work for one industry won’t always work for another – that is why working with a trusted designer and developer is important to make sure that your site works for you.  

Testing your mobile UX designs is a must to understand what works for your users, user journeys, and offerings. With plenty of customising options available, improving your mobile UX experience can look different for everyone. One way to test your changes is to get feedback through A/B testing.  

5. Benefit of user experience-based SEO strategies 

SEO strategies shouldn’t simply be about your rankings. It is important to understand the user journey and ensure that your customers are having the best experience possible on your website. This way, you can improve the time your customers are spending on your site and even create conversions from successful user experiences.  

Search engines are looking for websites with good user experience as a ranking factor. If your website has a poor user experience, it will impact your chances of competing in those high-volume searches. With more people using their mobile phones to search for answers, being able to meet your customers at this point is important not only for their experience but also to make your website appealing to search engines.  

To find out more about how we can improve your mobile UX experience, get in touch with us at [email protected] or contact us via our website.