How to ensure your business is optimized for mobile

One of the most important aspects of running a business today is ensuring you have a website. The website needs to tell potential customers what you could offer them, show your brand personality and values, and provide plenty of instructions and calls to action on what to do next. But while most website facilities can create easy drag-and-drop pages that look perfect on your monitor, many businesses forget how important mobile is. Between 2013 and 2018, the prevalence of mobile searches increased from 16.2% to 52.2%. Including tablet search into that and the entirety of non-desktop search was 67% in 2018. Mobile is such a useful tool that some businesses don’t invest in enough. As this figure is expected to grow, how can businesses ensure they are mobile optimized?

Social Media Responsible for Mobile Search Rise

The reason for the rise in popularity for mobile searches for business isn’t necessarily because we aren’t using desktops anymore. It’s more to do with the fact that referrals are coming through social media – which is used primarily on mobile devices. 81% of people’s consumer decisions are influenced by friends’ social media posts, while 78% are influenced by brands directly. As such, social provides some of the best links to our sites, so we need to ensure the customer’s journey is a pleasant one.

Through seeing a post on social media, whether it is an image or viral video, blog or customer service response, we can then click through to their website. As so many of the referrals are coming this way, it makes sense that businesses make sure their mobile sites are easy to navigate, look good, and allow customers to complete their journey to make a purchase. Some people are more likely to purchase through our phones because it seems less of a commitment than going on our laptops to do so.

Make Sure Mobile Looks Good

So, we understand that mobile sites need to look good, but what exactly does this mean? The main thing to be wary of is ensuring your content fills the mobile screen in an appealing way. SEO practices often mean we have pages with a lot of text. When displayed on desktop, this looks easily manageable. On mobile, we could be scrolling a while before reaching images, which would be instantly off-putting. There’s a balance between getting across enough information on mobile and ensuring you don’t put consumers off.

Not everything needs to be on your mobile site, especially if it doesn’t look right. You can get your blog a new design if it doesn’t feel fully optimized for mobile and can ensure through programs such as Photoshop that images won’t be too big for the screen. Make sure images suit the color scheme you have chosen for mobile search by adjusting colors in Photoshop. Many of the standard website builders allow you to see how the site will be viewed on mobile, and some elements can be removed if they don’t suit the look. An unappealing image on mobile could make consumers think you are unprofessional or won’t give a good service.

Make Sure Mobile is Navigable

Being able to get around your website is the most important thing. Consumers don’t want to go clicking through your links and find themselves lost, unable to get back to where they need to. If this happens, they’ll just turn off and find a competitor who is easy to navigate. Placing a simple and clear menu that they can always find helps ensure your potential consumer does click through to your blog or contact page while also being able to get back to what you’re actually selling easily enough.

Sometimes the consumer gets through to the payment pages and finds that the page jumps around. Some might be put off by this and think that a slip of their finger could result in overpaying or using the wrong information. Anything financial gives people cause for concern, so if your payment information page jumps around and isn’t properly optimized, people could switch off and go elsewhere. Many website builders don’t consider the functionality of a mobile version of a site and merely show you what it will look like, so beta testing yourself is important.

Ultimately, mobile business pages can be incredibly useful. Those with limited time or who have found you through social media can quickly find out about you. Even if they don’t make the purchase decision immediately, you will have made your case. Make sure that you are optimized for where your referrals are coming from. Ensure that the look of the mobile site is professional and doesn’t jump around or look disproportionate to the screen size. Ensure that your site is easy to navigate too. Following these simple instructions can be the difference between the sale or your competitor making the sale.