As mobile search becomes more and more common, it’s important that your site be compatible for various devices. The way your site functions on smart phones and tablets could significantly and negatively affect your business, if you don’t take the necessary steps to improve it. More importantly, it is critical to consider how your users are searching for your data, and what data they’re looking for when you want to create a mobile site.
Why Your Site Needs to Go Mobile
Mobile Device Search Is Rapidly Increasing
In 2012 more than 50% of mobile phone users had smart phones1, 1/5 of Americans access the web by mobile device each day2, and 5% of the top 500 online retailers have a mobile website/iPhone app3. Mobile web searching is growing rapidly, and it’s here to stay. If you don’t get in the game now, you’re sure to lose business down the road.
Google’s Mobile Index
Google has a separate index for mobile sites4. While this index is relatively empty now, it will rapidly fill as more and more companies develop smart phone and tablet-friendly sites. Moreover, as searches from iPads and smart phones are more and more common, being ranked highly on Google’s mobile index will be a critical component to your SEO strategy.
Your Regular Website Design Won’t Cut It
Your standard website is not designed for a mobile device and won’t be nearly as effective. Have you ever tried using a drop down menu on a tablet that was built for the web? Not fun. The fundamental design differences between regular websites and mobile sites really leaves you no choice but to alter your website so that it works differently in each case.
How To Create a Mobile Site
User Behavior
The first thing to take into consideration when building your website for mobile devices is that your visitors do not behave in the same way as they do on your regular website. For starters, they’re likely using touch to move through a site, rather than a mouse. That makes things like drop down navigation menus and clicking on text links much more challenging. It’s critical to redesign your site so that users can easily maneuver through it, without getting frustrated.
Secondly, users search behavior is vastly different on a tablet or phone compared to a desktop computer. Users often search with less keywords and browse more quickly than on a desktop computer. This means that your site’s most important information needs to be prominently displayed on the page. You need to catch your users attention immediately. If you’re banking on your visitor clicking on link after link to find what they’re looking for, your site won’t do you much good.
Common Changes
Lastly, consider what elements of the site are most important to your mobile visitors. Work with your web developer to create solutions to the problems your visitors will face. Typical changes that need to be made for mobile compatibility are: Flash, navigation menus, bigger button for touch, pictures, forms, size of website, font size, and graphics. If you need to eliminate some elements of your normal website to make your user experience better, so be it.
Perhaps you’re not buying this. Maybe your average client age is late 50’s and you think that they’re way beyond the years of wanting to play around with new technology, let alone surf the web from an iPad device. A good tool to use to see just how much traffic is being driven to your site from mobile devices is Google Analytics. Here you’ll find data about how users are coming to your site, and how that traffic has increased over time. Perhaps we won’t convince you in this article to create a mobile site, but I guarantee your Google Analytics data will. Making your site compatible for mobile search is imperative to the success of your online business and SEO strategy.
1. Sterling, Greg. “Pew and Nielsen Say Smartphones now 50 Percent, When Will ComScore Now Join The Club?” Marketing Land. March 29, 2012. Retrieved January 2013. (http://marketingland.com/pew-and-nielsen-say-smartphones-now-50-percent-when-will-comscore-join-the-club-8979).
2, 3, 4. Odmark, Joshua. “Top 10 Reasons Your Website Should Go Mobile.” Search Engine Land. December 29, 2009. Retrieved January 2013. (http://searchengineland.com/top-10-reasons-your-website-should-go-mobile-32566?fb_ref=sel-story-stbox).