It’s no secret that people love their mobile phones.
In fact, mobile phone ownership has now reached 88%, with 35% of owners checking their phone within the first five minutes of waking up in the morning.
Your existing and prospective customers probably use their phone the same way you do, so it’s worthwhile thinking how your website is organised to ensure that information is engaging, accessible and easy to find.
Google reports that 58% of all searches it receives are from mobile devices, and as a result it has rolled out mobile-first indexing, placing mobile-friendly websites higher in search rankings. If you review your website activity via Google Webmaster you will also see a significantly increased crawl rate from the Smartphone Googlebot.
Businesses should start prioritising mobile users when organising a website – or risk getting left behind. Thankfully, there are plenty of easy ways to make your website mobile-friendly. Read on to find out.
1. Mix up your content forms
Studies show mobile users are more engaged with interactive forms of content. Embedding a video, picture or slideshow within written content can help you attract – and keep – an audience.
2. Produce content with mobile screens in mind
When creating content for your website, ensure that it will be easy to access and understand on mobile screens. Keep your paragraphs short, break up text with bullet-points or headers, incorporate images and video every 300 or 400 words, and use a font size of at least 12.
3. Make key information simple to find
Mobile internet users usually want answers to their questions quickly. Ensure information such as pricing, locations, work hours and directions are featured prominently on your website – or risk losing the attention of time-poor mobile users.
4. Check that every aspect of your site actually works on a mobile
This seems obvious, but many website owners are oblivious to errors on their site. Check the functionality of your website on your own phone and manually test every nook and cranny. This is something anyone can do, and it could be the difference between gaining a new customer or not.
5. (Lack of) Speed Kills
Above all else, the speed – or response time – of your website is critical to its mobile-friendliness. While newer website platforms such as WordPress and Wix are designed to respond quickly, older platforms can a long time to load on mobiles.
Research shows that mobile users leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load – and the average mobile landing page takes 21 seconds! If you can get your site to load within those essential first three seconds and respond quickly to all requests afterwards on mobile devices, you’ll be well ahead of a lot of your competitors.
Mobile-friendly content is not just for rankings. Google surveys revealed that a mobile-friendly site makes people 67% more likely to buy a product.
If you need help in developing mobile-friendly content for your website get in touch with us today.
Lead image sourced from Marco Verch’s Flickr under Creative Commons licence.