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Last week Google announced that they recommend responsive web design for websites that target smartphones. Responsive web design is a technique where the layout and content of a website adapt to the user’s environment, which includes screen size, platform, and even orientation. This type of design is great for making sure users can interact with your site from any device, and according to Google, it’s also great for SEO for several reasons:

Using a single URL for a piece of content makes it easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to your content, and a single URL for the content helps Google’s algorithms assign the indexing properties for the content.

No redirection is needed for users to get to the device-optimized view, which reduces loading time. Also, user-agent-based redirection is error-prone and can degrade your site’s user experience.

Responsive web design saves resources for both your site and Google’s crawlers. For responsive web design pages, any Googlebot user-agents needs to crawl your pages once, as opposed to crawling multiple times with different user-agents, to retrieve your content. This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of the site’s contents and keep it appropriately fresh.

To read more about responsive web design and what it means for your website, check out my previous post Future-Proof Digital and consider whether responsive web design may be right for your business.