If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, you are putting yourself at risk for lost leads, unprofessional looking posts, and unfortunate search results in search. With studies showing that over 70% of visitors likely to return to mobile websites, 67% of users more likely to buy from a mobile-friendly website, and 61% likely to leave a non-mobile-friendly website; you need to improve your mobile impact today. Why must you have a mobile website? How do you effectively leverage mobile web? Read on to learn more.
3 Reasons to Have a Mobile Website
If the numbers in the opening paragraph didn’t surprise you, here’s one more. That was a 2012 study. Before the tablet market took off and the United States had a more mobile devices active than citizens.
1. Google Could Penalize You (Or at least Harm Organic Search)
Google recognizes that you don’t need a computer to surf the Internet. Many sites, however, still use content, images, and navigation structures that just don’t work well on mobile devices. If a particular website isn’t mobile friendly, Google will recognize that and be less likely to display it as a legitimate search result.
2. Your Customers Demand Mobile
Even if a good deal of your customers still search for information on a desktop or laptop, an increasing amount of users demand mobile friendly sites. If you don’t give customers what they want (easy visibility and navigation so they can browse and shop while mobile), they’ll go someplace else. Mobile phones have smaller displays and will often distort visuals on regular websites. Pare your mobile friendly website down to just essential features, with content that includes links to secondary information pages. You should also enlarge interface elements for easy touchscreen navigation.
A mobile website must impress mobile users the moment they visit it. Most people will just close a website and forget about it the moment they are faced with a problem while trying to access it from a mobile device. Building a good website that works easily on a mobile device leaves a good impression on customers and encourages them to come back.
3. Not Having Mobile is Hurting Short-Term and Long-Term Business
You’ve probably already seen a decline in business if you still use only a standard website. If not, go mobile friendly before you do. Most aren’t yet completely ditching their desktops or laptops for their mobile devices, but an increasing number are.
Mobile friendly websites are an ideal way to stay ahead of your competition. A lot of businesses have not embraced this trend, yet. By getting your mobile website going right away, you will definitely stand out in your niche. Your customers will appreciate it when pages load quickly and easily, so that they can find the information that they are looking for right away, with a minimum of hassle.
Improving Your Mobile SEO
Now that you know why you need a mobile site, we would like to share with you how to improve search engine optimization (SEO) on mobile websites, thanks to Business to Community article 6 Steps for effective SEO with Mobile Marketing.
1. Responsive and Mobile Friendly Design Rules
Any design element that slows loading speed on a mobile device or otherwise negatively impacts the mobile user’s experience of your website should be jettisoned right away. This means ensuring that navigation is quick and user-friendly, while eliminating unnecessary design features like flash, large images, fancy fonts, etc. You don’t want users to wait for a redirect to load on their device. Also, a single URL enables users to share the content they find on your site through social media. Finally, with a single site, every link points to that one URL, enhancing its value to Google.
Users favor websites equipped with a responsive design (including images, navigation, content, and text size) that adapts automatically to their mobile device.
2. Understanding Mobile Keyword Search and Content Digestion
Focus on creating content that’s short and to the point, and most likely to answer a customer’s questions on-the-go. The longer someone has to search for the content they want, the less inclined they are to stay on your website. Remember–people are viewing your site on a small screen. What good is your great content if they can’t quickly and easily scan it?
Customers searching for information on a smartphone frequently use different (and fewer) keywords than those conducting a search on their laptops. Research and incorporate shorter keywords as part of a mobile SEO strategy.
3. Prepare for Semantic Search
Mobile users are becoming more accustomed to the use of conversational and voice searches, which can affect the keywords chosen for SEO purposes. A conversational search often involves asking an entire question, rather than typing in a word or phrase, so incorporate these new search methods in your mobile marketing strategy.
What’s next for Mobile in Your Business?
As we work toward developing a leading website optimized for mobile, we wonder what’s next in mobile marketing. Will responsive design hold true? How can you market for the upcoming Google Glass revolution? Our friends at IDeas BIG have a recently renovated site that is artfully designed for mobile success.
Modern Marketing Partners specializes in Business to Business Marketing, SEO, and Web Design. Located near Chicago, Illinois, we welcome you to read through our Modern Marketing University blog and learn how to improve your current marketing practices.
