Boost Google ranking with responsive web design

Do you have a responsive website but the Google ranking isn’t what you’d like? Is your website in the same position as sites developed for desktop only? Google has made progress when it comes to search on mobile devices.

From April 21st Google will make changes on its search algorithm. Finally, websites with mobile-friendly labels will be indexed better than websites that are developed for desktop only. Google said this change will have a significant impact on user’s search results namely the google ranking. This is a great move from Google and it will change the way we see websites on mobile devices a lot.

Google isn’t kidding about this. Prepare yourself and your websites for this change. Now is a good time to find out what makes a ‘mobile-friendly’ website. With these quick tips you can improve your Google ranking.

1. Use Bootstrap – Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web. Its grid will help you to develop mobile first projects better and faster.
2. Improve your page loading speed – Minified scripts and images will improve your page loading speed significally which is important when you want to rank well in mobile search. Use tools such as compressor.io for images and refresh-sf.com for scripts. Don’t let your users get stuck with a large website on a poor 3G signal. To check how quickly your site loads, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
3. Don’t use a separate mobile website – Why? Firstly, separate mobile websites have a different URL which can make it harder for users to interact with website. Secondly, a separate mobile website requires more maintenance. Also Google does prefer responsive design because the Google bots have less pages to index. This means it’s easier for the search engines to crawl your site.
4. Test it on real devices – Finally you have to test everything. It’s important to test your website on real devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops etc.) because sometimes you’ll not be able to see errors on a big screens and emulators. Also you should test your website in Google Chrome device mode and mobile friendly testing tool.

Conclusion

It is very important to ‘think’ responsive. The number of smartphone users is supposed to reach around 1.85 billion in 2015 and more than half of digital traffic online now comes from mobile devices. Be ready and make your websites easy to use on every device on the market.