So the finance niche is a seriously competitive arena for any digital business. Your website can literally make or break your success in this arena. Since Google has launched the Google First Index, it is crucial that websites have a fully responsive element to their design. Being mobile focused does to some extent depend on what industry a website operates in. For example, a builders merchants supplying aggregates online would possibly expect to be serving more people in a desk based environment (architects or building project managers) and would potentially lean towards making the user experience as strong as possible on desktop while also being good for mobile.
How to get mobile ready?
Well, the best place to research how your site looks on mobile is on a mobile device. It is best to have an array of devices to test as they can all view slightly differently based on screen size, operating system etc.
For sites in the finance industry, a very mobile centric experience is vital. This is because over 55% of traffic on average to finance and loan sites is from mobile or tablet devices. Having a strong UX for mobile visitors will mean a lower bounce rate and a better click through rate (CTR) which essentially means that website visitors are interacting with your site and enjoying the experience on it.
Technical Factors for mobile ready
Much depends on what platform the site is based on but we are dealing with wordpress for the purposes of this article, as it is such a well-rounded and popular platform. This strategy can be adopted for a site that is built on any other package, or if it’s a custom site. Things that a webmaster needs to ensure is that their WordPress theme is fully responsive and looks great on all devices. You can check this by using Google insights and viewing how your site scores in mobile and desktop friendliness.
The next stage is to go to Google Webmaster tools and go to ‘crawl’ > ‘fetch as google’. From here you can render the page as Googlebot sees it in mobile format. You can then see what errors or visual issues you have , both on mobile and desktop versions. You need to run the test twice, once for mobile and again for desktop.
AMP? So what is AMP? Accelerated Mobile pages are a web standard designed to provide highly optimised pages specifically optimised for mobile; essentially AMP strips out any unnecessary elements and thins the page down to an almost text only version. This has pros and cons and the cons outweigh for the pros in many cases. This is because by removing all interactive content, and making an admittedly very fast loading mobile page, the user experience suffers heavily. This is even more valid with the advent of 4g mobile internet, which can provide very high download speeds which negate any difference that a user would experience between a well optimised normal mobile page and an AMP page.
Finance sites – Best practice
The leading players in the finance niche are ahead of the game in adhering to Google mobile first indexing and if you want your finance site to rank well, you need to follow the leaders so to speak.
Looking at UX we can see that sites like Money.co.uk and best loans have a very mobile responsive design. Both sites render fast on mobile and their user scores under Google insights are both very good at over 75% score.
Delving a bit deeper we can see that sites like moneysupermarket.com and moneysavingexpert have a solid mobile experience too, although the long form content on moneysaving expert could be said to detract from the UX significantly. Moneysaving expert edges moneysupermarket out with the scoring though, showing 72% on Google insights Vs 68% for moneysupermarket.