Mobile-friendly websites boost SEO. Having a mobile-friendly website helps boost your website’s on-page search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is important for websites that want to attract organic website traffic through search engine results because ranking higher in search results pages, ranking more often in search results pages, and ranking for more searches increases the volume and velocity of people visiting your website. More people visiting your website means more opportunities for you to do business using your website.

In an of itself, a mobile-friendly responsive website doesn’t guarantee you better search engine results page rankings, but mobile-friendly websites do improve your website’s SEO. In relation to search engine rankings, being mobile-friendly ensures your website is competitive — not an instant win, but outfitted to compete. Assuming you’re doing everything else right, a mobile-friendly website could put you over the top in the dog-eat-dog arena of organic search ranking for your business’s niche, services, or operating location.

In practice, SEO is a fickle beast — a crap-shoot and never-ending battle of trial, error, and continuous improvement, result measurement, innovation, and adaptation. SEO is often a slow-roller marketing strategy — meaning results build up and compound over time — but organic website traffic tends to create longer-lasting results than quick-hit paid advertising campaigns. And whether SEO is easy or difficult, fast or slow, long-term or quickly fading, you cannot win at organic search engine rankings if you are not playing the game.

via Gfycat

It’s a fact if you want to rank higher, more often, and for more keywords in search engine results then your website needs to be mobile-friendly.

Google Uses Mobile-First Indexing

Since July 2019 Google has been indexing websites mobile first. When your website is mobile-responsive, mobile-friendly, and mobile-fast-to-load it’s going to be scored better and ranked higher by Google — and other search engines following Google’s lead. In simple terms, having a mobile-friendly responsive website means Google likes your website better than if you didn’t.

Starting July 1, 2019, mobile-first indexing is enabled by default for all new websites (new to the web or previously unknown to Google Search). For older or existing websites, we continue to monitor and evaluate pages […]

–Google

Mobile-first indexing means Google evaluates the mobile version of your website instead of the desktop version of your website for deciding how to rank your site within their results.

Your website could be amazing and load fast on a large screen, but to affect your website’s SEO it also needs to be amazing and load fast on smaller less-powerful devices too. As a mobile-friendly website, more people on more devices from more locations are able to access your website, so you’re helping to foster superior user-experiences, as well as increased inclusivity. Generally speaking, both are positives for growing a brand, business, blog, social network, online community, etc. online.

Mobile-Friendly Websites are a Necessity

Having a mobile-friendly website is no longer a competitive advantage. Instead, it’s a qualifying necessity to compete in an increasingly saturated digital marketplace. As such, if your website is not responsive and does not adapt to changes in screen size or the size of the device a person is viewing it on then you cannot expect to appear in organic search engine results for much more than your unique brand name or business name.

Mobile-Friendly Websites Do Not Guarantee Search Engine Rankings

Although having a responsive website is a necessity to compete in search engine results, being a mobile-friendly does not guarantee your website a spot on page 1 of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). There are a lot of moving parts and continuous improvement efforts that go in to SEO and being competitively served in search results. That said, unless your website is a completely unique stand-out-individual of a website — like a magical purple unicorn in a pasture of Clydesdale work horses — you will be hard pressed to rank above other similar websites without a responsive website.

Mobile-Friendly Websites Help Search Engine Results Rankings

Having a mobile-responsive mobile-friendly website is not the end-all-be-all for SEO, but it is a foundational building block you can’t afford to ignore if you want to compete with other similar websites for spots on coveted search engine result pages — especially for popular keywords and longtail search phrases with larger search volume that subsequently bring in more people to your website. Even though a mobile-friendly website doesn’t guarantee you better search engine results rankings having a mobile-friendly website definitely helps you get them.