Start being mobile friendly !!
Google just made a change to their algorithms that will greatly benefit websites who are mobile friendly (and vice versa). If this is not enough motivation for you to handle that, here is some more food for thought:
- Some stats show that over 60% of Internet usage occurs on mobile devices
- There are already 1.75billion smartphones users in the world and some people may never own a computer but do have a smartphone and a lot of the future growth may come from countries that display those patterns
- We do not have proven stats on that, but common sense is that you are more likely to reach your target market on their phone: for instance open rates for sms are much higher than email
- If like a lot of our clients you are in the B2B or services/experts space you will not look like you are still in the 80’s when people look your company up
- People are much more likely to take action especially with features like maps, direct call, etc. Customers are good for business, so make it easy for them to find and buy, right?
When you are prepared and have the right strategies AND, the right timing your marketing can reap big rewards at lower costs. Too early, it will feel pretty lonely. Too late, you will compete with every other person as it goes mainstream.
Few years back, clients were getting all the traffic with SEO and PPC and experienced massive growth, when everyone else was still waiting for the big yellow pages books to drive them customers. Do not laugh it is not nice 😉 (plus it was actually the vast majority of business owners still on that boat). A bit later, our clients could get results from mobile search and mobile marketing. Now, it is also getting more competitive, but with the Google change if you rely to some extent on online search for new business you probably have to get on that train.
Now, I will not go into all the details of the 200 criteria as I am not a mobile friendly expert, and as business owner you probably do not know and do not care, as long as the right team gets the outcome. And just relax, I am also not going to sell you a program for you to optimize your site. I could, as we have one of the best network of SME service providers, but this is not the point.
Few things that you may want to know though: some information derived from the indexed apps of signed-in users may have influence. That means that apps may offer the additional benefit of helping with your ranking. Also make sure that this happens for all pages on your site_ as your home page could be ok and the rest still have issues. Your current supplier or team member should be able to handle all that, if not outsource.
So be friendly to mobiles, they have your perfect customers attached to it.
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