How to Follow Google’s Guidelines on Mobile Web Design
August 6, 2019 | Category: Digital Marketing, SEO, Web Design
Having your website available to mobile devices is an incredibly important aspect of your online presence. This means more than simply ensuring you have a site that people can view on their mobile phones. The mobile design of your site is incredibly important to how people interact with your business online. Google has standards they expect you to follow to ensure the best experience for your user. If you meet these standards, Google is more likely to show your site higher in their search results.
You have to make things easy to read, view, and access on your mobile site, from making sure that buttons are large enough for fat thumbs to click—there’s nothing more frustrating than attempting to click one link and ending up on the one above!—to loading quickly enough for the demands of today’s users.
So how do you prevent mobile users from bouncing off your site?
There are several things you need to do to make sure your site is mobile responsive as per Google’s guidelines. Here is our list of the top things your mobile-responsive website needs to have to successfully capture mobile traffic.
Your Complete Site Optimized For Mobile
And we don’t mean clicking a button so they can view the desktop site on their mobile phone. In the past, you may have seen websites on mobile that don’t give you all the options and information that the desktop site does, or it’s a completely different site on mobile. This is frustrating for users because they may want something that’s not available on mobile.
A modern mobile site will offer everything that’s on the desktop, but simply optimized for mobile and responsive at any size. Good websites will shift so that they fit onto any screen size. Test it in your browser now by changing the size of your window and see how our site shifts, even when you make it as small as your mobile screen. Or, view some different mobile responsive sites.
Mobile Design Responsive to Every Size
Some people will visit your site from large desktop screens, and others on tablets, or small smartphones. Like we said before, a good site will include everything at any size. As we said before, items will shift into place on your devices as you go down to smaller screen sizes. If it’s not fully responsive, users will bounce because it isn’t easy to use.
Easy to Navigate
Of course, this goes without saying, but how can you make your site easy to navigate on a mobile device? It’s all about understanding that the way people click and scroll through a mobile site is different than how they do this on a computer. Smaller phone screens show less information or content at a time than a large desktop screen. Make it easier for users to get back to the homepage without having to scroll back up to the top of the screen. It should be pretty simple for your users to get anywhere on the site.
For us, a mobile menu works well because people can easily navigate to the pages they need. If you have a lot of pages, for a large number of products, for example, you should use a search bar to make it easy for your customers to find what they’re looking for with an easy search.
Well-Designed Lead Forms
Mobile screens are small. Make sure it doesn’t take too long for the client to scroll up on their small screen to find a Call To Action button. That might be “Contact Us” or “Get A Free Consultation” or possibly just “Shop”. These buttons should be front and centre. Once someone clicks the button, make it super easy to fill out the form. It takes a long time for most people to type on mobile phones, and if the keyboard pops up and blocks half the fields, it can be frustrating.
If you already have some customer information, make sure to autofill the fields that you can. Keep in mind that people are filling out forms on a small screen with a finicky keyboard—if it’s just a number you need, bring up just the number pad. You can also show calendars to make it easy to choose dates on mobile. Lastly, make sure your form is short and succinct. Don’t ask for any more information than you must.
Don’t forget to make it easy to call as well. Some of us aren’t as good with our mobile devices, or simply prefer to click a button and speak to a person.
Fast Mobile Design
Your site should be fast enough to load quickly on a less-powerful mobile device. Lots of people use their mobile devices to find businesses on the go, so a good mobile site design is important. But a load speed of more than a few seconds will cause people to bounce out of—or leave—your site.
The easier and faster the conversion process is on your site, the better. Remember, every extra step your prospective client has to take to purchase from you is a step which they could leave incomplete. Ensure they can take the fewest steps possible to contact you so they don’t bounce out of your site due to frustration.
Following Google’s mobile design guidelines will not just make your website easier for customers to navigate, use, and make purchases (or contact you), it will allow Google to show your website in their search results, which will help you get more organic search traffic. Do you need any better reason to ensure your website design is mobile friendly? Hint: There is no better reason.