Mobile First Design: What is mobile web design and how does mobile web design affect SEO?

More and more people are looking through mobile devices and that is why new scenarios require new strategies; this is why the Mobile First design was born: the new mobile ‘philosophy’ that will improve your SEO and make your Web adaptable to mobile searches. Web Designers Galway developed Mobile First Web design, often seen as a philosophy rather than a design in itself, marks a before and after in how search engines perceive and rank a page.

Adapting a website to be Mobile First is a good decision. In fact, it is the best decision that can be made in these times when statistics show that searches for mobile devices have increased astronomically (currently over 60% of total searches), and will continue to increase. Cliqued Media Web Design agency is full aware of the changing trends in development and is always trying to find the innovative ways to make the websites responsive and engaging. 

Betting on Mobile First design is extremely beneficial for your business as it improves your website’s SEO and will make you “fall in love” with the search engines. Web Designers Galway keep a deep eye on this perspective to develop optimized websites.  

A Mobile First web design is all about giving preference to mobile devices over traditional desktops when creating a web page.

This is a process that should be led by experts in web design and SEO and, if you are interested, Cliqued Media Web Designers Galway has indicated that we only design web pages with Mobile First technology, from the early stages of business development.

So that you have a clear idea of ​​what it means for a website to be adaptable to mobile phones, I will tell you what Mobile First is and why it is so important for you to take it into account in your SEO strategy.

What is Mobile First Web Design?

In general, Mobile First Web design is a new philosophy that has emerged to meet the increase in research on mobile devices, so that users can have a pleasant experience while visiting a web from a mobile.

To fully understand this concept, I invite you to analyze two important aspects:

Responsive web design

Responsive web design is a concept that you should be familiar with already, as it has been coding in the market for quite some time, and is nothing more than designing a page to be multi-device, that is to say, to adapt to any type of device.

However, this type of design limits some user operations while browsing and makes both the information of the web and its structure to be flexible and simple.

“Progressive Improvement” and “Elegant Degradation”.

These two concepts were introduced before Responsive Design and both are emerging as an initiative for web pages to be viewed on both computers and mobile devices.

Graceful Degradation, as the name suggests, degrades the functions and content of the web page as the device it is accessed from becomes smaller, so it quickly follows that it leaves a poor and incomplete mobile website experience.

Indeed, the web page is first designed for computers, then adapted to run on tablets or mobile phones, but without taking into account the changes induced by each mobile device, but only ensuring that the web “works.

The incremental advancement has been a bit more efficient, as it starts its web design with mobile-friendly consideration at first, and then from there expands it to laptops and desktops.

This option allows the user of mobile devices to have the basic functions of the web, as if it were a computer, and therefore provides a better user experience from any device and platform.

Mobile First is a variation of progressive improvement and this web design methodology allows you to add newer and more complex functions to a “basic” design, completely usable and accessible from mobile devices, and to make it 100% functional for the user accessing from a desktop computer.

Instead of subtracting features like it is with Graceful Degradation, Mobile First adds them and makes them available to all web users, isn’t that great?

This type of concept prevents Internet users from being constantly frustrated to see that a page works for a computer, but that it is distorted for a cell phone or a tablet … What headaches we webmasters had before popularization from Mobile First! Now all customers know their website has to pass the mobile experience.

Differences between mobile web design first and responsive web design:

The main difference between responsive web design and Mobile First web design is that responsive web design starts with the user accessing it from a computer, so the web page is designed with the resolutions of the web page in mind. Maximum screen, loading speeds, scrolling and web zoom, among other aspects of this type, suitable for searches carried out by this type of user, that is, for those who search from their computer.

Responsive web design first thinks of the user from the desktop while the Mobile First web design first considers the user accessing from a mobile device

Mobile First does the opposite, thinking first of the user accessing from mobile devices, which currently accounts for 60% of internet searches. This web design method is more efficient at integrating mobile searches and traditional searches, taking into account the user experience and without having to violate or alter the integrity of the web, which occurs to limit its functions. , modify the structure of the design or cut the displayed information, for example. Keeping both the aspects in mind, mobile first and responsive web design, Cliqued Media Web Designers Galway develop the SEO optimized websites. 

Why is “Mobile First” so important when designing a website?

Mobile First represents the present and the future. Today, searches from mobile devices are higher than a year ago, but statistics show that this type of search will triple next year, so it is worth betting on a Mobile Web First right now.

The great efforts of Google and other search engines to be at the forefront of what the user wants, encourage websites also care to improve the user experience and make their life easier.

Mobile First is not a lonely ranger that appeared out of nowhere; rather, it points in the direction of what the statistics show. For example, starting in 2017, in some countries, such as the United States, the set of web pages improved in loading and browsing speed because users had more access to their mobile phones to search the Internet. that from their computer and, of course, no one wants to wait long for a web page to load, and what about smart phone sales! These have greatly exceeded PC sales year after year.

In addition, Mobile First will help you create an approach that is ideal for you based on your audience type, starting with the most basic (in terms of design) and being able to improve or add more features in order to so you can build brand loyalty and gain authority on the Internet.

Mobile First and SEO; Mobile First Indexing:

Mobile First or Mobile First Index appears when Google decides to reward web pages optimized for mobile devices.

Before Mobile First, Google categorized a website by its desktop version and displayed the website in search results when a user accessed it from a mobile phone, only if the website had a version for mobile devices.

Today, thanks to this new “philosophy”, the Web obtains a good position in the list of results when Google browses it and determines that its content and other aspects are completely suitable for the mobile version.

As Google goes through the pages, it creates what we call “page indexes”; these indexes contain information about each website and, with them, the search engine determines the ranking it will give to the site based on its content and its desktop and / or mobile version.

With Mobile First Index, Google first considers the mobile optimized version of the website and not the computer version.

Thus, with the Mobile First Index, the mobile version is no longer considered as an additional version to the computer version, and is only useful in certain cases; it becomes the main version that Google hopes to find.

Obviously, getting good search engine rankings has to do with SEO. But it’s not only SEO and ranking that allows Mobile First to come into play, but also improves the usability and user experience of your website, which helps reduce bounce rate, optimize loading time and prolong the presence of users on the site, in particular.

All of these factors that I have mentioned are essential to achieve better web positioning and without a doubt Google will not ignore these efforts to get you to rank in its results list.

In addition, you should also take into account that mobile devices share the greatest amount of information to and from social platforms. For example, Instagram alone (a platform created just for mobile devices) has over a billion monthly active users, are you going to let all that potential slip away in your advertising?

Conclusion: Mobile First will strengthen your SEO and avoid penalties:

A lot of online business owners don’t know what Mobile First is and that’s why they are behind in the results page (SERP), because they still don’t understand that their business needs to have a design. Mobile Friendly to get higher rankings on the Internet. This is the only way to avoid gaining a penalty, because now Google only has one classification index (the Mobile First Index) and has already confirmed that, from this year, will penalize those who have pages with slow loading speeds.

Mobile First will boost your SEO, gain you more web traffic, make your target audience happy, and make search engines drawn to you and not penalize you, you can’t ignore it anymore. Mobile optimization! It is now a question of conquering mobile search engines or of being forgotten.

Did you find this article useful ? I hope so ! So don’t hesitate to share it with your friends so that they too can adapt to the Mobile First design and improve their positioning on the Web.