It’s becoming an increasingly common battle for digital marketers- do you make your website web-responsive, or do you design an entirely different mobile site? While both options have positive and negative aspects, choosing which is right for you might hinge on a surprising factor: if SEO is a part of your marketing strategy, you might want to consider a web-responsive website design. Here’s why:
1. It’s Easier to Find (and Share):
A web-responsive website means that there is only 1 URL for the site, and the same HTML throughout, which makes it easier for search engines, such as Google, to index sites and make them available through search. A mobile site, on the other hand, requires a second URL, and different HTML. This means that search engines would have to crawl and store multiple versions of the same site, skewing your SEO results. It’s so much easier, in fact, to have a web-responsive site, that Google considers it industry best practice.
Additionally, having a web-responsive website makes it easier for visitors to share your site on their social media channels. For example, if you have a mobile site, and a visitor shares content from the mobile site on a social media channel like Twitter, that person’s followers would have to also access that shared content on a mobile device in order to have the same experience. If they view it on a desktop, they will have issues viewing the content, as they are on an incompatible device. Had the website been web responsive, it wouldn’t have mattered where the shared content had come from; visitors would have had the same experience viewing the page, no matter how they accessed the site.
2. It Makes Life Easier on Yourself
Having a website and a dedicated mobile site means that you have to create and manage two separate SEO campaigns. It is much easier (and time-saving) to oversee one campaign, as opposed to constantly adjusting a mobile SEO campaign and your regular SEO campaign. While you may be tempted to have a mobile site so you can run a mobile-optimized SEO campaign (for example, using mobile-friendly keywords such as “nearby” or “close by”), it isn’t a requirement. Web-responsive sites can be optimized for mobile SEO as well as your regular SEO campaign. Having one large SEO campaign for a web-responsive site saves you time and energy in the long run.
3. It Makes Life Easier for Your Customers, Too
A web-responsive website means that, no matter what the device type or screen size, the site will always look the same. This makes it much easier for visitors to locate and act on the information they find. This one design makes life much easier for visitors as they switch back and forth from devices. With a web-responsive design, if a customer researches a product on their tablet while traveling, they can then go to their desktop at home and immediately find the product again on the site – they have the same exact positive experience on either device. However, if the site is a dedicated mobile site, when that customer goes back to their computer, they will have to start their search again and re-locate the product – a frustrating experience that can cause you to lose the customer. And now that Google considers user-experience in its search rankings, negative user-experiences can result in a drop in your SEO results.
Here at inSegment, while we have experience in designing and building both mobile-dedicated and web-responsive sites and accompanying SEO campaigns, we love the versatility of web-responsive design. It is an elegant solution for the increasingly important mobile adaptability factor, and we recommend web-responsive design to all of our clients. In the end, not only can web-responsive design help you maintain a positive impression on all of your site visitors, but it can help your SEO results in the long run as well.
Tags: SEO, web-responsive design, web design
