Benefits of Responsive Web Design for B2B Websites

With a recent mobile takeover of web surfing activities, it’s important and vital for B2B companies to conform to the trend. However, there’s still a large number of B2B sites that are still not doing anything for tablet or mobile device users. At the same time, traffic from mobile and tablet tends to be much lower than on B2C sites.

It’s the biggest downfall for you company to have a poor user experience on your company’s website. It also represents a missed opportunity for search traffic — sites that are not only optimized for mobile can’t be expected to perform well in mobile search. Creating a separate mobile website may not be a worthy investment, however, using a responsive web design is a cost-effective way to optimize for all devices that will help capture mobile search visits.

Responsive Web Design Overview

If you’re unsure what responsive web design means, here’s a brief explanation of how it works.

Responsive web design is a way to develop websites where the server always sends the same HTML to all devices, and CSS is used to change the way a page renders on different display sizes.

When accessing a site from a laptop or desktop computer, the user is delivered a full view of the website. As the display size decreases for mobile or a tablet, the page retracts and stacks the elements for easy viewing and usability. This creates a user experience that works across all devices without changing URLs or HTML code.

SEO Benefits for Responsive Web Design

Switching to a responsive web design will help capture people searching from mobile devices. One of the big ranking factors for Google is site quality. If a searcher finds a site through mobile search, but the site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, bounce rates will generally be higher. Thus, Google will be less likely to rank that website for mobile. It’s most likely happened to everyone surfing the web with a mobile device — you land on a website from your phone and it doesn’t function correctly or requires a lot of horizontal scrolling, creating a very poor and frustrating user experience.

Responsive web design are better for SEO than mobile sites. One of the downfalls of mobile sites vs. responsive web design is that many developers tend to put mobile versions on subdomains.

Another downfall of mobile websites is that you have to optimize the mobile site separately from the main site whereas a responsive site is optimized across all devices for search. The reason this is a benefit for responsive design is because optimizing a mobile site separately requires a greater investment, which may not be worthwhile for sites that have little mobile/tablet traffic.

Conversion Optimization Benefits of Responsive Web Design

Aside from search and usability benefits, going responsive will also have a major impact on conversion rates from mobile users. Obviously, if a website doesn’t work on mobile or tablet devices, users will be unable to convert.

The more work a user has to do to complete a conversion, the less likely they are to convert. A responsive site can also be optimized for conversion just like a mobile site can. Responsive offers a lot of flexibility in how content stacks when switching display sizes. This flexibility will enable developers to control how conversion elements display on mobile and tablet.

Optimizing sites for mobile, no matter how small the segment is for B2B, is very important for capturing visitors and conversions. A responsive web design is a cost-effective method of optimizing a site for mobile search and users compared to mobile site creation. Instead of creating and optimizing three separate sites for desktop, mobile, and tablet, responsive only requires the creation of a single site that can be optimized for any device.

If your business is contemplating a site redesign, consider going responsive.