Last month, Google announced that it will further strengthen its mobile-friendly ranking signal. According to the search giant, it will launch an update in May that is designed to increase the effects of the mobile-friendly ranking signal. This is to make it much easier for users to find pages that are mobile-friendly and relevant to their search query.
With less than a week before May, have you taken the necessary steps to ensure that anything you put up online is mobile-friendly? If you haven’t, Neil Patel of KISSMetrics offers some helpful tips on how to ensure that your web content is optimised for mobile devices and how to get more traffic in the process.
1. Go from pixel to percentage
According to Neil, all HTML elements have some for sort of width assigned to them. You can see it by clicking on a web page and choosing “inspect element” (on Google Chrome). Clicking on an element in the left window of the panel brings out the corresponding CSS values. There, you will see a value for the width specified, which can be set in terms of pixels or percentage.
If you have hired competent developers, then setting the appropriate width is not a problem. But if you’re the one who designs your landing pages, you should specify the width as percentages. Neil said going from pixels to percentages can make a big difference.
2. Be careful with pop-ups
While pop-ups can help you collect the email addresses of potential customers, they can be a double-edged sword, especially when not used properly. They could ruin the user experience on mobile devices. To remedy this situation, you can either get rid of them or simplify them to make your site more mobile-responsive. You can also use them only when a visitor spends a certain amount of time on your site.
3. Get rid of the distractions
According to Neil, one of the things that annoy mobile users is being swamped by dozens of web elements gunning for their attention once a web page loads. What’s worse is that sometimes, these elements don’t load at the same time, causing the page to keep shifting around.
[Tweet “To make your web pages more mobile-friendly, remove the web elements you think are unnecessary.”] One example is the sidebar, which is pretty much useless on mobile. Give your pages a clean and uncluttered look. Not only will this make the page load faster on mobile, it also prevents your audience from getting distracted.
