In this technology world, you need to update your marketing strategy with the advancement of new platforms. In 2009, Morgan Stanley, one of Fortune 500 company, made a prediction of rise in popularity of ‘Mobile Web’ compared to ‘Desktop PCs’ by 2014. Being in a competitive market, you should keep your website responsive and mobile friendly.

If you are still not considering mobile web traffic in your analytic data, you are losing significant revenue (for sure). Although mobile web technology hasn’t overtaken the desktop, according to comScore data, there is significantly mobile traffic increase in 2014 compared to 2013. You should keep your eyes from where new customers are approaching your website – it may be from tablet or smartphones or Desktop etc. So be prepared! Now let’s learn more about responsive web design and how it will benefit your online marketing strategy.

What is Responsive web design?

Matt Cutts (Head of web spam team at Google) provides a great, non-technical explanation: “Responsive web design just means that the page works totally fine whether you access the website URL with a desktop browser or whether you access that URL with mobile browser,”.  Matt Cutts also said – “Things will rescale, the page size will be taken into account.”

There is no separate version of mobile sites, tablet or Desktop versions in Responsive web design. Website should open flexibly with any respective device. Responsive web design allows any visitor to access website with best readability on all their favorite digital devices. Also it gives amazing control and creativity to apply for your website.

With Responsive web design your whole website remain same except CSS code it will change as per device browser.

User-friendly content management system (CMS ex: wordpress) is quite helpful for responsive web design. There are many ready-to-go designed templates available, which saves your time / money compared to [unlike] custom design.

Smartphones, tablets & many more devices have changed the approach toward design and user experience. Users now interacting with websites on smartphones and tablets are not the same as doing that on a desktop computer monitors. Id Website opens as desktop view having to zoom in and out to find the content you’re looking for it give bad user experience. While, content is king and discoverability of content are foremost success metrics.

User experience is one of the main reason to go with responsive web design. Now let’s talk about SEO benefits of Responsive Web Design!

1) Google Recommendation

Google recommended responsive web design as website will be common on mobile / traffic / PC. This is best way to focus on web as well as mobile users. Also, Google favors mobile friendly website for mobile search. It helps in achieving keyword ranking in mobile search.

2) Usability:

Google want to deliver best and relevant results for their visitors for any of the search term. Google will make note of immediate return to their SERPs, considering no useful or relevant information on the website. In this case, bounce rate of the website increases and your ranking will drop.

Visitors will read and share all the content they want and on whatever format they are accessing with a responsive web design

3) Duplicate Content:

There is no chance to get hit by Panda algorithm for the duplicate content in desktop, tablet or mobile version of website. There is only one URL for any webpage in all digital devices.

4) URL Structure:

Responsive websites have common files/folder for all the digital devices (mobile, tablet or PC). This makes easy for Google to index the webpages as there will be only common set of pages/files. As per the user experience is concern, this design works best with all devices and Google trust value increases.

5) Mobile Search Ranking:

There is a special preference for all devices compatible websites in the new mobile ranking strategy of Google.

With the increase in smartphones usage, there is a prediction of increase in mobile search. It may overtake desktop search queries in 2015 as according to BIA/Kelsey analysis. Responsive web design will help in achieving this.

6) Link Earning:

With responsive web design, back links are common for mobile version and desktop version of website. So the link juice from one URL to another will flow same in all formats of Digital Devices.

7) Local Search Benefits:

Smartphones have facility of Maps and phone call number. Visitors searches on web browsers for the local shops as per their need. This helps increase in shopping or inquiry about your product and thereby mobile traffic and ranking.

8) Bounce Rate and Trust Factor:

A responsive web designed site solves the problem of high bounce rate by showing same content on the desktop / mobile / tablet site. Google will interpret high bounce rate as like visitors are not interested in the content of the website. This leads to reduction in Google Trust as well as ranking drop.

9) Reduced Page Load Speed:

Page load speed is one of the keyword ranking signal in Google Search Engine as it impacts user experience. Visitor searches something on Google Search engine and if the clicked link takes time to open – it is not best for business.

Responsive web design have CSS media queries that work on respective different devices. It helps in reduction of loading time as per device.

10) Awesome User Experience = Natural Social Signals:

Responsive web design allows visitors to read and share the website content in any digital devices. Anyone can see the same shared content on social media on any of the digital devices with almost same loading speed. This helps in earning great number of social signals for your website.

Conclusion:

Going for Responsive web design for your website is a big challenge. But it will definitely put you one step ahead of your competitors. Increase in mobile traffic is a bonus. This is the age of smartphones! Keeping your website updated with latest technology will help you in your online business.

Notwithstanding how attractive and responsive your project is, you’ll definitely need quality web hosting to locate it online. This is where Softsys Hosting solutions come into play. Choose from the extensive selection of shared, VPS and dedicated hosting services and take your website to the next level of performance.