The New World Order: The Importance of Optimizing Your Website for Mobile

Mobile devices are changing the world. Today, everyone has smartphones with them, constantly communicating and looking for information. In many countries, the number of smartphones has surpassed the number of personal computers; therefore having a mobile-friendly website has become critical. Let’s review some stats.

• Mobile usage has overtaken desktop internet usage. Mobile digital media time in the US is now significantly higher at (51%) compared to desktop (42.) (Source)
• 70% of mobile searches lead to online action within an hour: Mobile users that find businesses online have a conversion percentage nearly three times higher than the same search done on a desktop or laptop. (Source)
• 40% of people will choose another search result if their original search is not mobile friendly: People are more inclined to leave a website that can’t provide them a seamless user experience while they are on their mobile devices. (Source)

Now that we have established the importance of making sure your website is optimized for mobile use, let’s talk about some key tactics that should be used to prepare your website for the mobile revolution and to leverage your mobile audience.

1. Mobile Friendly Test: If you are ever unsure that your website is mobile-friendly, take the Mobile-friendly Test.
2. Responsive Web Design: Make sure your website has responsive web design, which is an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience – easy reading and navigation with minimum re-sizing, panning, and scrolling – across a wide range of devices from desktop computer monitors.
3. Consider Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages): Accelerated Mobile Pages were created to improve the entire mobile content ecosystem for everyone, including publishers, consumer platforms, creators and users. Google search results now show Google AMP content first in search results, which is Google’s way of stimulating adoption of this initiative. Learn more about how to amplify your website content by using Accelerated Mobile Pages here.
4. Reference your Google Analytics Regularly: Google Analytics will give you some in-depth insight on the time users spend on your site, how quickly people leave your site once they click your URL, the pages on your website that receive the most engagement and many more details. Make sure you look at the devices field so you can gauge whether most of your traffic is coming from mobile or desktop engagement. If is it coming from mobile, make sure you are distinguishing between devices (Android, Apple, Blackberry etc.). This is a major component of your marketing strategy.
5. Use Mobile Redirects: Make sure to put redirects in place that will sniff out when a visitor is using a mobile device and direct him or her to the mobile optimized version of the site. Learn how you can implement these redirects here.
6. Create a Mobile Website: Although you may have response design, it’s important to also create a mobile website version of your website. WordPress has some plugins that do a pretty good job of this and Godaddy has an automated system that does it also.
7. Claim Your Business on Location-Based Platform: Registering your website on location based platforms, will allow for your address to appear in search results when users type the name of your company in search. This is highly visible on mobile.  
8. Use Analytics from Social Platforms to Optimize Mobile: Identify how much mobile traffic is coming from your social channels and use those metrics to optimize different sections of your website for the mobile user experience.
9. Flash is the Devil on Mobile: Make sure you limit the implementation of Flash on your website. The plugin may not be available on your user’s phone, which means they’ll miss out on all the fun. If you want to create special effects use HTML5.
10. Stray Away from using too many Pop-Ups: It can be difficult and frustrating to try and close these on mobile devices. This might lead to a high bounce rate. Once again it is very important to reference your Google Analytics to monitor what your traffic is doing on your website.

Conclusion

As a business owner, it has become necessary to optimize your online properties for your mobile audience. The number of users who are adopting the mobile-first principle is increasing daily and in today’s world, your knowledge in the mobile adoption space can be the determining factor of whether you will sink or swim against your competitors.

Gaetan is Director of Social Media at KCSA Strategic Communications.