How Mobile Optimization Techniques Can Impact Your Marketing Strategy
What is mobile optimization? This term refers to how well your website is optimized for viewing on mobile devices, such as iPads, tablets, laptops, and smartphones. A Nielsen “Mobile Path to Purchase” study found that 74% of mobile users conduct a search on their phone before deciding to purchase an item. Therefore, to engage with potential customers, ensure that the quality of your website display is not just limited to desktop computers. You want your website to display well across all mobile devices your target audience is using.
The advantages of mobile optimization feature heavily in today’s digital age. People rely on the responsive design of their mobile devices to look up websites, research products, and gather information about brands and businesses. What is meant by responsive design? Responsive design refers to layout that is mobile-friendly. Put simply, it means that your website looks consistently attractive across all platforms, such as phones, laptops, tablets, and iPads. Not only will mobile optimization help your customers, it will also help you attract more visitors to your website.
Mobile optimization is also a key SEO ranking factor. A non-responsive mobile design will cause Google to penalize you in terms of rankings, because Google wants its users to have the best experience possible. They know that around 90 percent of all mobile searches across all the search engines run through them, so Google puts a lot of weight on it. For example, you want a device to display your website content in a clear, compact, concise way in order to minimize the amount of scrolling and zooming in and out a user must do to read your words.
A quick way to determine whether your website is optimized for mobile devices is to grab the corner of your current website on your desktop computer and try to move it. Does your website move to fit the entire screen? If your website does shift when you grab the corner of your screen to resize it, that indicates that your website is already responsive and you’re good to go. Go to the upper-right-hand corner and resize the window or the frame.
Another thing to consider when you are optimizing your site is not only how organized your content is, but also how quickly your webpages load. If your page loads slowly because you have large, clunky images that are clogging it up, then people are going to bounce to another webpage. To test your loading times, take advantage of Google’s PageSpeed insights, a free tool that offers feedback regarding how many seconds it takes for your website to load onto a platform.
If your website design is simply not mobile-friendly, consider creating a job posting on freelance websites, such as on Freelancer.com or Odesk.com, for responsive redesign. In your job posting, let freelancers know you are looking for a redesign of your current website and that you wish to improve its mobile responsive design. If you have run Google’s PageSpeed insights tool, you know that in addition to offering information about page loading time, PageSpeed insights also suggests helpful tips regarding what kind of mobile optimization improvements you can make. Direct your freelancer to these suggestions and have him or her implement them. If your website or blog is built on the WordPress platform, you can simply search for a responsive WordPress theme and choose one of the available options.
If you’re not mobile-friendly in today’s digital age, it will be difficult to pick up customers from your competition. The world is becoming a mobile world, and you need to adapt accordingly in order to engage with your target audience.