Search Engine Optimization is a dynamic field. Marketing professionals all over the world sometimes find it quite difficult and challenging to keep up with the ever-changing trends and latest updates.

With Google updating its algorithm hundreds of times every year, it would not be an exaggeration if we say that you need to change your strategy every day to stay abreast with the latest trends and patterns.

Plagiarism has always been a major problem in the field of article promotion, internet marketing, and, in the field of education. There are many valid reasons for using a high-quality plagiarism checker like https://searchenginereports.net/plagiarism-checker regardless of what your job is.

Adding to the same, what if we told you that even though you may be doing most things right from an SEO point of view, your website may still not impress the search engines because it provides a poor experience to the user?

If you’re thinking: “How”?

Well, you never know what browser the user is using to access your website and you need to be sure that it does well on all of them (okay, a majority of them for practical purposes). Add to it, Google’s mobile-friendly algorithms and you would see where you are lacking. Thus, ‘Cross Browser Compatibility’ is what you need to add to your website if despite all of your best efforts it is not performing well on the SEO front.

Search Engine Optimization and Cross Browser Compatibility although seem distant yet are closely related. One of the most fatal mistakes that a lot of web developers and marketers commit is that only keyword optimization and content is all that they need to think about while working towards an SEO friendly website.

Today’s world is a dynamic one. We deal with a lot of content formats like videos, infographics, graphs, GIFs, and images. Adhering to that you may have designed and developed an awesome and interesting website but what if your website offers a poor user experience?

What if people cannot access your website because it takes too long to load on their mobile devices?

Or in the worse case possible, it doesn’t work at all in mobile devices?

It is a busy world. No one has got the time or even the patience to deal with the poor user experience. Rarely does anyone uses a laptop or a desktop to access the internet. People are always on the go and busy on their cell phones. Add to that an overwhelming number of browsers and operating system combinations available today. And if someone can’t open your website on their device or browser, they will surely not switch the browser rather, they’ll just leave your website and search for alternatives!

Yes! It is that bad.

Google Favors Responsive Design

It is a well-known fact that a website’s responsiveness is one of the most important factors of good Search Engine Optimization considered by Google. Google loves the responsive design of websites and thus, it is imperative to make sure that your website is not only desktop friendly but works responsively on tablets, mobiles and on all screen sizes.

The usage of mobile devices for surfing the internet is significantly rising.

According to a study, more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the U.S. and Japan.

Data Source – https://www.statista.com/statistics/284202/mobile-phone-internet-user-penetration-worldwide/

The graph above shows the mobile phone internet user penetration worldwide from 2014 to 2019 and we can clearly see that it is on the rise! No wonder Google has taken note of the same.

An important factor of testing your website for cross browser compatibility is to check if it performs well on all the mobile devices or not. On the other hand, Google has made it mandatory for a website to have a responsive design that is being mobile friendly if it wants to have a spot in the top Google search results! Relatable enough? Well, it definitely is!

Google has of late been focusing a lot on mobile devices. And it absolutely is justified –

The number of people preferring mobile devices for accessing the internet to desktops has been on a constant rise. Thus it is not at all surprising that for quite a while now, Google has been relying on artificial intelligence to assign ranks to web pages. Google calls this signal as RankBrain. Apart from mobile friendliness, the signal involves some other factors too which drastically affect the SEO rank of your webpage. These factors are –

  • Click Through Rate – Click Through Rate is essentially the share or the percentage of the users who actually click on the link appearing in the Google search results to visit your website.
  • Bounce rate, especially pogo sticking – Bounce Rate is the number of people who bounce away again. This indicates the number of people or the percentage of users who were not satisfied by the website.
  • Dwell time – Dwell time is the time period for how long a user stays on your website after they’ve arrived.

Since the day Google’s mobile-first index has become a reality, cross browser compatibility has become one of the most crucial factors for SEO. Thus, if you have been skipping cross browser compatibility, you may lose out on a lot on the SEO front as well!

Tools like LambdaTest can be of great help here. No longer do you need to depend on emulators or virtual machines to make sure your website is cross browser compatible. Just sign up on the platform and get instant access to more than 2000 real browsers and operating systems online. You can perform cross browser testing of your website or web application on desktop and mobile devices.

User Experience

Google declared three years ago that user experience is going to be an important factor for SEO in the coming years. Three years later that is in 2018, it actually has become a reality! User experience has become a deciding factor for SEO these days. With the leading search engine updating its website ranking factors recently, the traditional SEO with keywords and all those techniques is not enough anymore.

Talking about the term ‘UX’, users (and even Google) are no longer ignorant about it. Google Trends shows that the term UX is almost at the breakout point. This crudely means that searches for this very term have gone up by 5000% in the last couple of years.

Data Source – https://www.semrush.com/blog/4-ux-analysis-principles-for-seos/

Let us have a quick look at what else an enhanced user experience can do to your website –

  • Accessible – A website which is more accessible to all sections of the society is more crawlable. These days, accessibility is not just linked to a website being accessible to the differently abled. Cross browser compatibility is also an important aspect of web accessibility known by cross browser accessibility. The more number of browsers a website is compatible with, the more number of people it is accessible to.
  • Usable – A good user interface leads to a more usable website that will encourage returning visits and thus improve SEO.
  • Findable – UX drives on-site traffic in complement to SEO on-page traffic. Thus, it makes the page more ‘findable’.
  • Valuable – An amazing UX aims at fulfilling the visitor’s queries and questions, thus resulting in an improved SEO score.

You need to appeal to the users and cater to their needs at a more basic level. Cross browser compatibility is an essential part of user experience as you never know what browser your user is going to use. Does not matter what browser they are using, your website must perform well. This enhanced user experience will improve your SEO score.

Thus, it can be concluded that cross browser compatibility holds an important spot in SEO. Google prefers those websites which are compatible with mobile browsers and offer an amazing user experience. Likewise, User Experience also fits into SEO as more or less, both of them share common goals. In contrast to the traditional SEO, modern SEO aims at solving the queries of the people and providing them with better overall user experience. Thus, if SEO helps to lead a person to the content they need, the UX aspect makes sure that the purpose is served well.

Author

Sumit is a Tech and Gadget freak and loves writing about Android and iOS, his favourite past time is playing video games.

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