Why optimize your site for mobile searches

 

You may have noticed that we hear more and more about optimization for mobiles. Today there are a myriad of screen sizes, configuration types and devices that one can use for surfing the internet. Providing visitors with the best possible experience regardless of the device they use can be a real challenge and, yet, it is now an essential step in any good digital marketing strategy. But, basically, why do you absolutely have to optimize your site for searches on mobile devices?

 Why is this so important? 

 The proportion of Internet users who now surf the Internet from a mobile device (smartphone or tablet, for example) has only increased in recent years. In 2019, it even exceeded for the first time globally the proportion of Internet users who use a laptop. The objective of optimization is of course to ensure that your site is visible to as many Internet users as possible, so it is quite logical that we now give more importance to optimization. for mobile devices. 

 And Google in all of this?

 Google has of course also decided to follow suit and adapt its algorithms to this new trend. Now, when Google crawls a website, it crawls more and more the mobile version before the computer version and this mobile version plays a key role in determining rankings. It's a transition that Google has been making smoothly for the past few years, but 2020 will be a pivotal year. Indeed, from September 2020, Google will always explore the mobile version of the website before switching to the computer version. 

 What do I risk if my site is not suitable for mobile search? 

 Now let's take a quicker look at what this transition involves. The first important point is the ergonomic nature of the website. You have certainly already happened to consult a site from your smartphone and come across the classic version of the site. The problem is that this version was designed to give the user the best possible experience on a computer, but not on a smartphone or tablet. Race results? The text is not readable and navigation is extremely complicated from your phone screen. Faced with this situation, more and more Internet users simply have the reflex to leave the site to find the information they are looking for on another page.

 Where to start ?

 It is therefore imperative that you think about creating a mobile version of your website. The good news is that all CMS today offer the possibility of creating a version of your site suitable for tablets and smartphones. This is called "responsive design". 

 Bring your personal touch

 All modern CMS worthy of the name today offer the ability to create, customize and check what the mobile version of your website looks like. You just need to find these options in the menu of your CMS. Remember to do this, this is very important, as the images are often displayed differently depending on the version you choose and therefore a perfect layout on a computer may not necessarily be on a smartphone. Worse yet, the mobile version could be completely or partially unreadable, which could severely affect your rankings. So remember to control the mobile version of your site and make the necessary adjustments. 

 Push all the buttons

 In addition to the text, your site naturally contains a menu and buttons to allow Internet users to navigate from one page to another. As touch screens have become widely used on mobile devices, it is important to think about adapting your buttons. It is indeed not as easy to navigate on a website with its index as with a mouse and nothing is worse for a user than not being able to click on the button he needs. It is therefore vitial to pay particular attention to navigation on the mobile version of your site. 

 Always go faster

 Another thing to consider is your site's loading time on a mobile device. Remember that in general, Internet users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load . If you want to know the loading time of your website, know that Google provides you with a free analysis tool that you can find on this page .   

 The photos, images and videos embedded have a decisive influence on the speed at which the website loads. Why ? Well, quite simply because media content requires the transfer of more data than just text. The larger an image or video, the slower it will load your page. If you want to improve the loading speed of your website, then you should first ask yourself if all the graphics on your page are necessary and relevant or if there are some that you could remove. Then try to see if it is possible to reduce the resolution of some images. Even if you risk losing a little in quality, this will reduce the loading time of your page.