When I recently visited my brother, a Peace Corps volunteer, at his current home in a small rural village high in the Andes Mountains, I noticed something interesting. Even in a town without consistent access to electricity, everyone had smart phones. It just goes to show that it doesn’t matter where you go; if you want to reach your customers where they are at, you need to make sure that you can reach them on their mobile device. In some cases, it may be the only way to reach them.
You will likely have heard these facts before, but they are worth repeating.
- Global mobile Internet users have surpassed global desktop and laptop Internet users.
- Google prioritizes mobile-friendly sites in SERP rankings.
- Mobile users will abandon a website that is slow to load or confusing to use, and most of them will not come back.
To make sure that you’re retaining valuable converting customers, there are several things that you can do to make your website more attractive to the growing number of mobile users.
The most important thing is having a responsive website capable of adapting to desktop, tablet, and mobile screen size and orientation. No one wants to be forced to zoom in to read the text on your page, or be forced to view only a chunk of text or image at a time. Another solution to this problem is to create a separate mobile sub-site, usually differentiated by an m.site.com domain name.
In this same vein, reorganizing the content on your website to eliminate excess steps will help channel your users through the conversion funnel faster and with less difficulty on a small mobile screen.
Businesses should make sure that their webpages feature clear calls-to-action. Keep in mind that a tapping finger is less precise than a cursor, so large, easily clickable buttons will make it easier for mobile users to navigate your site.
Mobile-friendly sites can also make excellent use of the abilities a smart phone has that a desktop does not. Click-to-call buttons allow users to contact your business without first exiting the browser. And with “mobile” in mind, maps with GPS-powered directions can send the shopper directly to your business’s location.
If you are curious about how web design can help you gain and keep customers, contact Aronson Advertising to ask about our SEO and mobile optimization services.
