SEO Benefits of Responsive Website Design

Smartphones and tablets are becoming more popular to browse the internet. Therefore, it has become increasingly essential to create a website that works across multiple platforms. After exploding onto the scene in early 2012, responsive website design is now firmly established as the best way to create a website mobile visitors love. It also has become a central feature of the modern website design landscape. However, when it comes to SEO, can a responsive website design increase the chances of a website’s success? We will discuss some of the many SEO benefits of responsive website design.

SEO Benefits of Responsive Website Design

Valuable to Google

Search engines don’t like content repetition. But with multiple versions of the same site, you are promoting content repetition. As a result, search engines are likely to demote your site if you have different versions for desktop and mobile.

Google has suggested responsive website design when optimizing a website for smartphones, which is reason enough for SEO’s to jump on the bandwagon and follow the design approach. Simply put, search engines such as Google favor responsive website design because it makes their lives easier. Before this design approach was relevant, maintaining optimal user experience meant an additional website versions were necessary for the content to translate well on mobile devices and tablets.

One Website = One URL

One thing to be cautious of when considering mobile websites and SEO is that Google recognizes sites specifically for desktop or mobile and divides them accordingly in search results, depending on what device you are searching from. This means a website for mobile typically won’t rank as well in a desktop.

Creating a mobile version for an already optimized website requires starting an SEO strategy from scratch. This is because mobile websites have a different URL and html code, and as such Google will treat their page authority separately. All the authority accumulated from the original website pages won’t carry over to the mobile version. Therefore, this is a disadvantage when consider backlinks and social shares. Responsive website design, however, eliminates that issue as you only have one URL for that content. Therefore, no separate optimization campaigns are necessary to optimize for different devices.

Helps Combat High Bounce Rate

The goal for search engines is to guarantee that its visitors reach the answer of their search query on the first search results page, so a high bounce rate on a website will ultimately lower its rankings on search engines.

Desktop users can accidentally go to the wrong site version and not be able to find the information they need, thus resulting in dissatisfaction and leaving the site to continue their search. Frustration can also occur for websites that do not have proper mobile optimization.

Responsive website design can solve these issues by presenting content in a functional way without compromising what you choose to display on what device. Presenting all your content to visitors in an approach that is easy to view will ultimately keep users on your page.

Enhances the User Experience

To really gain success in SEO, you need to think about the big picture. The Internet’s purpose is to easily share information on a single platform. Making search queries easy to find is not only what search engines want — it’s what users want.

This is where both user experience and SEO acknowledge the benefits of responsive website design. Responsive website design places a strong emphasis on UX and the needs of the user. For example, automatically adjusting content to fit a specific screen means a satisfied experience and less work for the user to navigate. Keeping the user in mind is why Google and other search engines encourage people to use responsive website design.

 

These are just a few of the many SEO benefits of responsive website design. Contact Centennial Arts with the link below for more information or to get started on your responsive website design today!