Get mobile already!
As Justin Bieber so insistently asks, “Where are you now?” That should be one of the first questions you ask about your customers when developing your business website.
On any given day in any given city, thousands of people are looking down, tapping away on their mobile device. There are more than 200 million smart phone users in the US, which is a huge population of potential customers that can’t just be ignored.
Smartphones and other mobile devices have quickly become the favored method of Internet access. As of 2014, mobile devices accounted for 55% of all Internet usage, with desktops only at 45%. Understanding this shift of online usage is vital to attracting and retaining traffic on your business site.
At Beach Lion, we have about 53% of visitors coming to the site for the first time from their mobile device, so we make sure that our content is scaled correctly, legible, and easy to view. We want those new visitors to have a good experience and stick around a while. If a potential customer goes to a website from their phone or tablet, and it’s cumbersome and frustrating to view, they aren’t going to want to spend much time hanging around that site. They may even give it up and look for the next option – In a 2012 Google survey, 61% of participants said they were likely to leave a site if it wasn’t mobile friendly.
There are a few key ways to make sure your site is mobile friendly:
- Check your site on the Mobile-Friendly Test provided by Google. It lets you know how your site performs on mobile and provides a mobile preview.
- Ensure content displays correctly and doesn’t require pinching and zooming to see the text. Utilizing responsive design is a great way to do this, which adjusts the display to different screen sizes, ensuring that it looks great no matter which device is being used.
- Your site should be streamlined to reduce the number of clicks a user needs to make to get to your content. If your end goal is for a user to find and buy your product online, make it easy for them to find that product, instead of having to hunt through 5 click-through categories.
Having a mobile friendly website isn’t just important for those companies with e-commerce. A small business that relies on their online presence for lead generation can lose out on both individual user traffic, as well as their positioning in search engine rankings. Google announced in 2015 that it was now factoring in a website’s “mobile-friendliness” into its search algorithms. This means that even the best keyword and SEO efforts can be sidelined by a site that isn’t easily usable from a mobile device, resulting in a downgraded online search presence.
Surprisingly, 40% of small business websites are not mobile optimized. If your company’s website is in that group, and you want to find out more about putting your website into the hands of mobile users, we’d love to hear from you and talk about the huge impact mobile marketing can make on your brand.