Optimizing Your Business for Mobile

Over the past few years, the mobile phone has established itself as the consumer’s default device for accessing the internet. This trend is clearly visible when you analyze where site traffic is coming from. Mobile has a higher percent overall of traffic driven, vs desktop or tablet. If your business isn’t optimized to give consumers the right experience when they’re on their phones, you will be missing out on a good chunk of revenue within the local market. A recent study found that 85 percent of respondents were unlikely to do business with a company following a bad mobile experience. No cause for worry if you follow these tips to get your business up-to-date:

Make Sure Your Website is Responsive

If you have an outdated website, chances are it’s showing the desktop version of your site on a user’s mobile phone and tablet. A responsive website will auto-format correctly to whichever device someone uses while looking at your website. Mobile has become such an important part of the way we search that Google is now including the quality of a website based on the responsiveness of the mobile version.

Your Website Load Speed Matters!

In today’s busy society, there aren’t many people who have time to wait for a website to load when they’re researching a business or products online. Kissmetrics posted a nice infographic describing a survey done on mobile users. The survey found that 47% of consumers expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less. And 40% abandoned a website that took more than 3 seconds to load. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check the speed of your website.

Phone Number Placement and Click-to-Call

It seems so obvious that a phone number would be at the top of every page of a business’ website. But still we find a good number of clients coming to us with their phone number only on the ‘Contact Us’ page, or buried at the bottom of a home page. It’s imperative for your website to have the phone number at the top of your website on every page (on the “Header” of the site), so that a consumer can quickly access it. Having a ‘Click-To-Call’ function, will let the consumer call your office right from the mobile site and help increase the chance of a conversion. We also recommend that the phone connects directly to a person, and not an answering machine with a long message and tons of prompts.

Website User Experience

A convoluted website makes for a bad user experience. Make sure your website is easy-to-navigate and clean-looking. Users expect to get what they need easily from a mobile site. To provide more insight, Google published a 42-page research study, providing a ton of great information around mobile site design best practices.

Search Engines – MAPS Section

Proximity to the user on their mobile device is extremely important. This is where the MAPS Section on the search engines come in. Claim your Google My Business page, in addition to your Bing page. Make sure all the information is filled out and upload as many photos as possible. Ask your clients to leave reviews on those pages as well. Having all of these elements complete will help your chances of showing when a user is searching for a business nearby.

Now more than ever, mobile has become an important focus of a business’ marketing mix. If it all sounds too confusing, give us a call – we’d be happy to help you navigate through the digital marketing landscape.

Need some help getting your advertising on the right track in 2017? We can help! Our team would be happy to get your 2017 started on the right foot.

Originally posted at thepamediagroup.com