The mobile consumer market is building at a rapid pace. The number of people making purchases through their mobile phones has more than doubled in the last year alone! So if you aren’t fully optimized to take advantage of this new influx of customers, there’s no time like the present.
Web-Responsive Design
The first step in making sure your site is ready to receive mobile customers is web-responsive design. Web-responsive means that your site reacts or “responds” to the device your customer uses to view it. Therefore, if your customer is accessing your site on a PC it looks like it always does. But if they access it on a tablet or smartphone, it will resize itself appropriately. This may require stacking side-by-side columns into one row or moving your content into clickable headings that open the copy up at the press of a finger.
The most important thing for mobile is guaranteeing your site has large buttons and easy to use navigation. Customers can become easily frustrated if they are consistently hitting the wrong key due to your buttons being too small or too close together. And as you well know, frustrated customers won’t stay customers for long.
Fast = Good
When your customer is browsing on mobile, speed matters. And it doesn’t just impact customer ease-of-use. Search engines are also turned off by slow load times, and that results in your page being down-ranked. Make sure that any image heavy posts keep the majority of those images below the fold. This will greatly increase load times on your page.
Mobile-Specific Key Words and Phrases
Interestingly enough, customers often use completely different phrases when searching on mobile. This is because mobile search is normally voice search, and that means the customer is asking questions as they would in a conversation. “Wedding Flowers” becomes “Where can I buy flowers for my wedding?” This means you need to make sure your website contains both sets of key phrases and not just the PC-specific ones. That doesn’t mean you should keyword stuff. Just work it into your copy naturally.
Don’t Forget Local
Most mobile users are looking for local businesses. Even if your business offers services or products across the country, don’t forget to make local a priority as well. It doesn’t have to be your top priority, but it does need to be present.
I won’t bang the drum here for quality content, but yeah, do that. Becoming optimized for mobile isn’t that difficult. With just a little pre-planning, you can create a site that’s valuable for all your customers no matter what device they use to access it.
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