Over the past year there have been many blog posts, articles, webinars and infographics on what responsive design is and why a business needs it for their website. As the year is coming to a close, Biznet decided to look at a few of the facts as to why responsive design is so important going into 2014 and the future in terms of customers and visitors to a businesses’ website.
Mobile Usage Soon to Pass Desktop Usage
Currently 87% of American adults have a cell phone, of which, 90% use their phone to go online. Of these numbers 31% go online mostly using their cell phone rather than a computer or other device. Expect this number to only grow as more and more buy and sign-up for mobile-broadband subscriptions (currently, there are 2.1 billion subscribers!). In a report by Statista, and-what-you-can-do-to-improve-your-mobile-site/”>blog post, mobile SEO is now a factor within the search algorithm for Google in order to improve their search results for mobile users. By having a completely responsive website, along with avoiding a few simple mistakes, such as adding videos that are unplayable on mobile devices, businesses can help improve their chances of appearing higher than their competitors within mobile search.0
Pay-Per-Click Purposes
Along with the SEO advantages of having a responsive website design for businesses, they can also utilize the site in their PPC campaigns. A while back Google implemented new features within their Adwords platform that allowed users to increase budgets for certain devices, mobile being one of them. In some cases, businesses have yet to realize this, and the potential for lower keyword costs on mobile searches is still available. By utilizing a responsive web design in correlation with a mobile-optimized PPC campaign, businesses could see a large increase in return on investments over the traditional desktop website and campaign.
So why is responsive design so important? Because of increased mobile device ownership, better presentation for site visitors, SEO and PPC purposes. While all sites may not need responsive design given their Analytics and where users find them, it is important to at least consider the change within the next year, as more and more competition begins to reap the benefits of changing to a universal responsive web design.
