Even though a lot of businesses have been online for some time and have been using SEO in the Bay Area, they may not be aware about the importance and potential of SEO for mobile devices. If this is true of your business, keep reading to learn more.

According to recent studies, over fifty percent of consumers use their mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) to search and browse for products and services. Nearly half of these consumers made a purchase during the six months prior to the study. It’s undeniable that mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets form a huge portion of the market, so providing an excellent mobile experience for users is no longer an option, it is a necessity if you want your business to thrive in today’s market.

There are a lot of ways to provide excellent SEO experiences for mobile users and potential clients. You may create an app (or have one created for you) or optimize a responsive website. The former approach is more difficult, and more costly, so let’s go with the latter — optimizing a website to be responsive. In other words, making a website more mobile-friendly.

The inclusion of built-in responsiveness in several templates and content management systems (like WordPress) has made it easier to create a mobile-friendly website. But even without these improvements, it is still possible to optimize a website for mobile devices. Best yet, it’s not really complicated at all.

The first step that you should take is to make your website visible to potential clients. Reduce your website’s entire page to fit the screen of the smartphone or tablet. This is a default method to make your website more responsive. However, shrinking your web page to match the size of a mobile device’s screen will obviously cause the text to become too small to read. You can use style sheets to adjust the text size; this is a simple step but it can create a big difference in how your website looks on mobile devices.

The second step is to ensure that your website loads as quickly as possible. You may want to consider designing an entirely different site made specifically for mobile Internet users. You may notice that a lot of companies use the “m.domain.com” which serves only mobile devices. Again, using style sheets can be used to modify a mobile website as well as one accessible by computers. Keep in mind, though, that having the same site on web and mobile, and having both of them to load quickly, is not considered absurd at all. For instance, if you would like to share a video, you may prefer to choose the video’s URL link over the embed code used on a computer-sized website as the former is considered faster to load.

The third step is to make sure that your website’s navigation is accessible and easy to find. If your website is not easily navigable, users and potential clients may be turned off by it and complain that they cannot find what they are looking for on your site. More likely, they will lose interest in checking out your website further. Make sure that relevant information is on the top of the page and it should be the first thing that users see without the need to scroll down the page. If your business has a mobile website, make sure to do the same thing on the mobile page, instead of putting a pop-up ad which obstructs the content the users are seeing.

The last but not the least step is to provide quality content to your mobile website. Mobile SEO is quite similar to desktop-based SEO. Be sure to provide fresh and original content to both websites. Make sure also that your business’ location and contact details are included on your mobile website. You want to have your site optimized for mobile devices but do not having a clue on how to make it happen? Don’t hesitate to contact Bay Area Online Marketing to learn more about mobile SEO in the Bay Area.

Beginning April 21, 2015, Google changed the rules regarding the mobile-friendliness of a website, which can tremendously affect its search engine results ranking. To website owners in particular, it means that if their current website is not considered by Google to be mobile-friendly (or “responsive”), then chances are its rankings will drop. If you experience this on your website, perhaps then SEO in Danville will help some. It may not be enough to raise it back to its previous high ranking.

You can assess your website’s mobile-friendliness thanks to the addition of Google’s “mobile-friendly” label which has been added to the search results for mobile-friendly sites. That particular label only changes things when the web chooses a different website. Now that it’s after April 21^st, your ranking itself may be affected.

Being “mobile-friendly” is an example of a website that is well-designed particularly for mobile devices such as smartphones, but also tablets, e-readers, and some gaming devices. These devices have smaller screens compared to those of desktop or laptop computers. For this reason alone changes have to be made in order to make the websites more viewable on smaller screens. However, when these “mobile devices” are used, they mostly refer to smartphones that run on iOS, Android, and Windows. They also have default browsers with orientation that is typically vertical (as opposed to horizontal on desktop PC’s and laptops).

There are many methods to increase a website’s mobile-friendliness, such as using a content management system (CMS) or you may choose to use third-party software such as WordPress. These methods are remarkably different to use to make a site mobile-friendly than using plain HTML. Most CMS, as well as third-party software, feature mobile-friendly templates that are readily available. This allows users to make their website more mobile-friendly by changing it to a responsive template. You may need to create completely different pages in HTML if the site is built upon the basic HTML5 code.

Another method to make websites to appear properly on mobile devices is to use a meta tag called “viewport.” This tag sets the width and scale, depending on the devices being used. It also alleviates problems website owners may face when a redirect to mobile formats are erroneously attributed which leads to a mobile website that looks (and is actually) frustrating.

One way for Google to determine that a website is properly optimized for mobile devices is to access it. Therefore, it is wise to ensure that the components are not blocked from Google’s bot. Make sure also, that the website’s mobile version does not use Flash which doesn’t work well on mobile devices.

SEO in Danville is important and will help sort out some problems, but maybe not be enough. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool that will analyze your website’s mobile-friendliness. This tool is very easy to use and provides you results in just seconds. If the results indicate that your website is indeed mobile-friendly, then all is well and good. But if it’s not showing as mobile-friendly, it’s time to make some changes to your website.