How Not Optimizing your Website for Mobile Will Cost You 97% of New Customers.

The Absolute Importance of Mobile Readiness, Mobile Accessibility & Local Search in a Post COVID 19 Business Environment

Did you know that roughly 70% of all web browsing including search is conducted via mobile devices? This is probably much higher now given the fact that a lot of people at home during the lockdown are browsing incessantly using their smartphones.

“So what, I don’t browse via mobile so how does this impact my business?” Well going forward, when we consider that the majority of internet users are now mobile devices; it is now more than ever vitally important to optimize your business website and ensure that it is “Mobile Ready.” A quick test you can do yourself to assess your businesses mobile readiness is to use a tool I often use to test a websites mobile accessibility.

The tool is called Test My Site from Google and it allows you to quickly assess your websites accessibility for mobile device users. Test My Site tests areas including whether your website gives users important and useful information such as your business location; your business phone number; whether a mobile browser can call your business directly from your webpage; or whether your page loads quickly enough so as not to discourage busy and likely impatient potential customers who will simply go elsewhere if your page takes too long to load.

A second tool you can use to test the mobile readiness of your website also from Google is called Google Page Speed Insights. The tool lets you know right away whether your website is properly optimized for both desktop (many websites score well here) and for mobile devices (the vast majority of websites are not properly optimized for mobile search and score abysmally here). The site will even advise you on what fixes to implement to improve. This is important again when we consider that more than 70% of all searches are now done on mobile devices which means desktop searches and browsing is falling precipitously.

Now, here are 7 staggering statistical trends to bring home my point about the impending ubiquity and importance of mobile and why we all need to take it seriously and include optimizing your business websites for mobile search and accessibility.

1.      Roughly 90% of all internet users worldwide do so via mobile devices.

2.      98% (that’s 805 million people) of China’s total # of internet users do so via mobile.

3.      95% of FaceBook users access the platform via mobile devices.

4.      70% of all YouTube content is watched via mobile devices (YouTube is the Second largest search engine in the world after google).

5.      Did you know that a whopping 82% of all smart phone shoppers conduct “Near Me” searches, meaning they do “Local Traffic” or Local business searches for products or services using local search listings or local search engine business listings like Bing Local, Google My Business or Yahoo Local.

6.      By 2021 the amount of Ecommerce business done via mobile devices is projected to be well clear of 54% (it would be safe to assume that the figures will be well beyond that due to the impact of COVID 19). 

7.      Only 13% of websites that do well in desktop searches are able to retain their ranking on mobile search. In other words, the majority of websites are simply not optimized for mobile searches and drop several places in ranking on a mobile device search which is very significant because mobile searchers rarely if ever bother to scroll beyond the visible (Top 3) local search results. 

In summary, for your businesses to survive and thrive in the “new normal,” it will be imperative that you develop and implement an online or digital business strategy that includes mobile readiness and accessibility. 

Website Mobile Accessibility Test Tools

1.      Think with Google: Test My Site: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/

2.      Google Page Speed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

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Sources:

1.      https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/mobile-percentage-of-traffic/#gref

2.      https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-traffic-coming-from-mobile-devices/

3.      https://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-marketing/search-engine-statistics/