Mobile optimization is a critical element of any successful website today. Consider that mobile traffic now accounts for nearly 60% of all website traffic, and you'll understand the importance of reaching these audiences.
In this post, we’ll go over some of the crucial features of how to optimize your site for mobile to help provide customers with a quality mobile experience.
Optimizing Your Website for Mobile
While you may know how crucial mobile optimization is for your business, you may not know how to optimize a website for mobile devices. Here are the critical features that help websites perform better on mobile devices.
Ensure Your Website Is Responsive
One key element of a mobile-friendly user experience is responsiveness. This component applies to a website's appearance on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. The screen size should match the device the site appears on, adjusting as needed to ensure users see everything they need to when browsing and create a seamless, consistent experience when switching between them.
Today's web development tools make it easier than ever to put together a mobile-responsive site with automatic adjustments based on the device. Modern web development tools and platforms have this built-in, making it easily accessible with good design choices.
Prioritize Web Loading Speeds
Web pages should also load fast on mobile devices, preventing people from dropping off shortly after visiting. Slow web loading speeds translate into high bounce rates, which could negatively impact SEO and its ability to attract customers.
If you want to keep users on your site and minimize your bounce rate, ensure your web pages take no more than one to two seconds to load. Any longer, and you risk a significant dropoff in user engagement.
Try to balance aesthetic appeal and efficiency, engaging users while providing them with a smooth experience.
Optimize SEO for a Mobile Experience
You must also optimize your website for SEO on mobile devices. This process will entail adhering to best practices for mobile-first indexing, helping you appear in customer searches. For example, you should target local keywords to ensure your website appears for results in your business areas. You should also properly separate desktop and mobile URLs with rel="canonical" tags and rel="alternate" tags, respectively.
In addition, providing users with a mobile-friendly and smooth experience can help you get on Google's good side, as user engagement sends signals to search engines that indicate a site is worth ranking.
With a well-optimized mobile site, you'll help people find your website when searching for your products and services.
Invest in Mobile Ads
A mobile ad campaign is another area you should focus on for your mobile website. Customized display ads can appear across the web and draw more traffic to your mobile website to supplement your SEO efforts.
To get the most from your mobile ads, align your content with your site, including the visuals and messaging you use. A high-quality mobile ad campaign will help you target keywords that may be difficult to rank for with SEO alone, letting you expand your reach beyond search engines.
In addition to ads that connect with audiences at the top of the funnel, you can launch retargeting ads that connect with users who've already visited your site. In the process, you'll boost brand recognition and encourage more people to return to your site after their initial visit.
You should also establish clear, attainable goals for your ads, whether that entails increasing brand awareness or your click-through rate. Also, choose a specific audience you want to target with your ads to reach the right people at the right time, which will further help you get the most from your digital ads.
Monitor and Adapt to Changing Trends
The requirements for mobile optimization continually change, as with any other type of digital marketing strategy. As the landscape quickly evolves and transitions, you must be equally quick to adapt and make any necessary adjustments to your strategy.
Regularly check your campaigns' analytics and gauge performance as you keep up with the digital marketing landscape. Determine how your pages rank on mobile devices and measure the results of your ads against your goals. See how long users are staying on your pages and test loading speeds.
You can make key changes based on performance to keep your site performing optimally and adapt to changing needs as your customer interests and business needs develop.
How McClatchy Can Improve Your Mobile Optimization
Want to fully optimize your website for mobile devices? You may know what it takes to develop a mobile-friendly experience, but you may also benefit from the help of experts who know how to put together the perfect strategy. As the country's second-largest local media company, we can help you maximize your reach and results with campaigns made just for you.
To learn more about how the team at McClatchy can help you effectively target mobile users with your digital marketing efforts, reach out to McClatchy today. Depending on your individual needs, we can create a tailored strategy that helps you reach your target audiences across all platforms.
