Nowadays Google is prioritizing mobile-friendly content in search results as a step towards mobile-first. It has never been more important to build mobile-friendly content.
Consumers continue to use more and more hours scrolling through their mobile devices, exposed to more than thousands of ads every day. To find new ways of reaching consumers, it is important that business owners or marketers are including mobile-friendly content throughout their marketing strategy.
In order to stay relevant in this developing digital world, marketers need to create content that is optimized for mobile devices. Mobile commerce makes 73% of the market share within all e-commerce sales. Mobile-friendly content might be the most effective way to engage with a generation of increasing mobile-first consumers.
Desktop content vs mobile content
In today’s digital world, mobile devices create more than 54% of traffic worldwide as users spend time engaging with content through the mobile.
Content marketing is not just a desktop strategy and lots of marketers are putting more attention to creating more types of content through mobile web and apps. Content marketing is a good way to reach consumers while avoiding all the advertising.
Consumers today are expecting an easy and fast user experience; even a few seconds too many on loading reduces customer satisfaction by 16%, conversions by 7%, and page views by 11%. Marketers must ensure that all content that is created will be a great fit for mobile devices.
Since 2019 Google has focused a lot more on mobile-friendly websites compared to desktop-only, which means that mobile-friendly designed websites are ranking higher than those that are not.
Marketers should be making content that fits specific devices their audience wants. For example, over 75% of all video views are played on mobile devices. Video advertising is estimated to count for over 51% of mobile ads that are spent by 2023.
Moreover, Google found that 83% of all viewers are watching videos on mobile, while only 53% watch videos on the desktop. Video marketing is more valuable on mobile as a lot of smartphone users need to watch the videos full-screen on their devices. In that way, they are completely focused on the video.
On the other hand, desktops will normally display video ads in combination with other written, visual, or animated content, which can distract your users from the content. Watching video on mobile is just one of many content strategies, that marketers need to use when following best practices to a successful webpage.
With more than half of the web traffic coming from mobile devices, it needs to be the smaller devices that are the priority when it comes to optimizing your content. User opportunities change all the time. Google research discovers that 75% of all smartphone users assume to get information immediately while using their phones.
Tips to create mobile-friendly content
Now we know the importance of creating mobile-friendly content to improve user experience and your SEO efforts.
To provide the perfect experience for your customers, then marketers need to approach mobile-friendly content as a comprehensive effort and focus on the overall experience that your customers will have when they visit your website.
Here are some of the best tips in order to help strengthen your mobile-friendly content efforts that will engage and convert your customers.
Powerful Introductions
We can all agree that mobile phones are much smaller than your desktop counterpoint. With less available space to communicate your message, you must consider the information that will be appearing at the beginning of your mobile-friendly content.
Most of the time a mobile user will only go through a few paragraphs before scrolling down for more information. This makes your introduction on your site really important, as your most captivating information should capture the reader and make them want more. Users on phones spend on average only 3 minutes or less on a website.
Well, so all you have to do is to create a powerful introduction, avoid unnecessary information and get to the point. Share relevant information in your mobile-friendly content that is related to your niche, which adds immediate value for your visitors.
User reading patterns
The way users read their content on a desktop is different compared to a mobile device. Eye-tracking research indicates that a user on computers and phones screens sites in different patterns. This should be considered when developing your mobile-friendly content.
The patterns show:
- Skips the first words of the line when multiple lines of text begin with the same word or words.
- Reads every word on the webpage, although research shows this isn’t a common pattern.
- Scans headings and subheadings and skips the normal text in between.
- Focuses on one place as they scroll through the page. This happens a lot on phones compared to desktops.
- Skips big blocks of text and scans for specific things. They might look for a link, call to action (CTA), image, or more.
Make a Summary or Highlights
The attention of mobile users is often limited. They prefer to read relevant information to be shown right away.
A way to accomplish this is to write a summary at the beginning of your content. Your summary must highlight a few key takeaways from your content.
So by writing a summary, you will provide the information your readers are searching for including highlighting content that might give you links or other social shares.
Delete Unnecessary Words
No matter if you are writing content on a desktop or mobile, it is always best to keep your content simple and straightforward.
In fact, that is the best formula to determine the readability of your posts drafted on the WordPress platform. An easy reading formula that measures the readability of a text.
To determine the score of the text, the formula looks at:
- The average length of your sentences, which is measured by the number of words.
- The average number of syllables per word.
To get a higher ranking on readability, then you need to make sure to take the following into consideration when drafting content:
- Shorten your sentences: Avoid sentences that are too long, unclear, and difficult to process.
- Don’t use difficult words: Words with four or more syllables are considered difficult to understand.
- Remove unnecessary words: Remove “filler” or “fluffy” words in your content.
- Don’t repeat yourself: Avoid using the same words or phrases that describe the exact same topic.
- Don’t put in extra details: Don’t explain in detail or complicate the message you are trying to describe because of over-explaining things.
Add Images or Videos
Images or videos break your content into different parts, which makes your content more “edible” and easier to read.
Add images throughout your content when and where it is appropriate. It both adds separation between the text pieces and improves it with some graphical components.
Research shows images are processed 600 times faster than text. It means that you can support your users to understand your content better through images as opposed to text only.
Videos can also boost your content. In fact, 54% of consumers want to see more videos within content from all businesses they are interested in. Videos and images can also give you an opportunity to show up in more search results.
High Contrast Colors
To provide you with more readers, your content needs to be easy to read. For example, your font size should be more than 32 points to maintain readability on a mobile device. Another way is to use high contrast colors for aesthetics and accessibility of information.
If you use contrasting colors like white text on a black background, it will increase readability. On the other hand, using low contrast colors, like yellow text on a white background, will be really difficult to read.
Using high contrast colors will advance your mobile-friendly content, as well as create a better user experience for a lot more of your users.
Short Titles
Your title of the content will be the first introduction to your content. It also defines how the title will appear on the search engines.
A few years ago, Google changed and maximized the length of mobile title tags to about 78 characters. Therefore, mobile titles can appear on two lines now.
Despite the different factors, experts decided that page titles should be short and concrete, including to be shown on one line within mobile search results. Nowadays, it is important to keep your titles short, with no more than six words. If your title is short, then your readers have less to absorb and understand.
Another good tip is to feature your focus keyword at the beginning of your title to increase your search engine rankings and discoverability.
View Before Publishing
It is always a good idea to look at your content before publishing. However, we often focus on how our content appears on a laptop rather than mobile devices.
So take a good look at how your content will appear from a mobile reader’s perspective and identify opportunities as well:
- Better break up your paragraphs.
- Add relevant subheadings.
- Identify areas where you may want to add supporting images.
- See where more whitespace should be added, etc.
A second check on the phone will also prevent your content from being published with other mistakes, which can lead your visitors to view your brand as less reliable and authoritative.
Conclusion
Whether you are creating mobile-friendly content from the bottom or adjusting existing content, always keep in mind the above-mentioned tips to improve your potential for conversions and give the user a great experience on your site.
It is important to focus on creating content, not only with a mobile-friendly approach but also with users’ preferences in mind. Consumers spend a lot of time on mobile devices, therefore it will become just as important for marketers and business owners to provide a smooth and personalized mobile experience.
If you are a marketer looking to enhance your mobile campaign performance or build a stronger content marketing strategy, you will need to stand out from the competition with a great strategy, and well-executed content on every device.
