More Reasons Why You Need a Mobile Friendly Website

There are so many stats on why you need a mobile friendly website for your company. Mobile usage has easily overtaken PC for time spent using digital media. With around 50% of people initiating their mobile query on a search engine, when they do find your site and it isn’t mobile friendly, they click off and find the next site that reads easier…your competitor’s site.

The implications are clear:  Mobile has a 10% higher bounce rate than desktop for sites that aren’t mobile optimized, so you need to get your website updated. Plus that, the search engines tend to give sites a higher ranking that are user-friendly for people on the go. Isabella Anderson of Social Media Today writes about these stats and more in this article:

This is Why Your Website Needs to be Optimized for Mobile | Social Media Today

Mobile optimization is a digital marketing buzzword that means a website is designed to adapt to the device the consumer is using to search for your business.

Well, both search engines and the people who use mobile devices to search for local businesses favor mobile-optimized websites.

Mobile Internet usage is 75% and growing. Besides, imagine it from a consumer’s standpoint. If I’m on my phone searching for a place to eat near me, and I click a restaurant’s website only to find the menu is tiny and the site is difficult to navigate, I’m going to move on to the next business.

I’m not the only one. In a survey, 91% of consumers indicated that they’d turn to a business’s competitor if the business’s website wasn’t optimized for mobile devices.

And mobile optimization isn’t just important for consumers. Search engines favor mobile-optimized websites too.

Of course, you want your business to rank high in searches – but did you know that search engines will penalize websites if they aren’t mobile-friendly? In April 2015, Google updated its search ranking algorithm to reward mobile-friendly websites for mobile searchers. Websites that weren’t mobile-friendly eventually saw a decrease in search rankings while the mobile-optimized sites tended to see an increase in rankings.

And in May 2016, Google tweaked this algorithm again so that mobile-friendly websites got an additional boost in search rankings. And Google and Bing both tell searchers whether or not a website is mobile-friendly in search results on mobile devices.

So, if your website isn’t easy for consumers to use on their smartphones, search engines will lower your mobile search rankings, making it harder for consumers to find you.

Read the full article here:  This is Why Your Website Needs to be Optimized for Mobile | Social Media Today

The above stats are not all that surprising because we constantly hear about the importance of mobile, although the speed with which mobile devices have increased in popularity is rather astounding.  The daily usage rate of desktop users never really changed much in the above infographic, but the section marked in green has expanded considerably. Just 7 years ago, desktop PC users made up 80% of the digital media area, but now that percentage has dropped to 42% compared to 51% mobile.

The next article from Entrepreneur’s Lesya Liu gives some insight for best practices when creating or upgrading your site so it is responsive to all devices.  They are somewhat common sense, but definitely topics you want to discuss with your website developer.

9 Overlooked Ways to Make Visitors Love Your Website

1. Make it fast.

A modern website needs to be designed for the modern browsers. Not only does a cleaner site create a better user experience, it also improves its functionality. One of the most important things to constantly monitor is the speed of your site. Did you know that 40 percent of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load?

It’s hard to resist installing all the coolest software, and making some money displaying ads, but these things slow down your site. Your site speed might really suffer, and you’ll lose your readers along with it.

2. Make it responsive.

Wikimedia Commons

I don’t need to tell you that a lot of site traffic will come from mobile devices. If your website is still not responsive, you have to take care of that right now. It is a horrible experience when a website takes too long to load, the text appears way too small to read, and your fingers are too fat to click on one thing instead of three. Guess what? People won’t tolerate this. They will simply leave your site.

Additionally, Google now penalizes sites that are not mobile-friendly. Forty-eight percent of consumers start mobile research with a search engine. So you’re losing out on potential sales in more ways than one.

3. Make it stylish.

Be clear on what mood and impression you want to project, and what color palette will help you achieve that. Select a palette, and stick with it. It makes people think you have bipolar disorder, when different pages have inconsistent background colors. It’s generally a good idea to have one neutral color and one bright color to balance the two.

4. Make it legible.

Select a font that will complement your overall imagery and that will be easy to read. Please don’t use Comic Sans or Times New Roman. While there is nothing wrong with those fonts, they don’t convey an image of a polished, well-defined brand.

To see the other 5 tips, read more here:  9 Overlooked Ways to Make Visitors Love Your Website

The point is obvious – Make your site pleasing to mobile users and you will have a much better chance of converting a sale and bringing them back as a repeat user. Most professional website developers know that it is crucial and will provide a responsive site, but be sure and ask questions so that you won’t be disappointed.

Seen first on S&S Pro Blog