If you have a business website you have probably been told that your website has to be mobile friendly, you might even have talked to your web designer about a responsive website. Unfortunately for most businesses this is where it stops, that is until a critical point is reached; traffic drops significantly or the leads start drying up. To avoid the frantic troubleshooting that inevitably occurs at this point, you might want to think beyond the coveted “mobile friendly” search engine ranking badge and give some thought to the following:
- Do you have a mobile friendly website? At the risk of stating the obvious, it all starts here. Google has a handy tool that will rank your site and tell you if they think you’re in good shape. If you are, your site will likely have a “mobile friendly” designation in the search results page and you aren’t running the risk of losing visibility for those search terms that drive new business to your website.
- Does your mobile site convert visitors as well as your desktop (main) site? Check that your mobile site was built to convert visitors into clients. Does it have the same lead generation forms or calls-to-action as your desktop site does? Too often we find that mobile sites are too stripped down and are nowhere near as compelling to potential clients. Get someone you trust to test the desktop, tablet and phone versions of your website and tell you if they feel they are all equally persuasive, authoritative and trustworthy.
- Have you updated the bidding on your paid search (Google Adwords or Bing) campaigns? If you have been running any Pay Per Click campaigns you really need to take a hard look at your mobile visitors and make sure that they’re performing at least as well as desktop visitors. Bear in mind that desktop users will see at least ten paid ads while mobile users will usually see at most two (unless they scroll all the way to the bottom). This means that your ads that are sitting in positions three and lower aren’t sending you many mobile visitors unless you’re in a market without much competition. If you are sitting too low with ads that are converting on desktop you should consider bumping up your bids for mobile users.
- Is your referral traffic drying out? If you’ve been receiving steady traffic from banner, image or text ads on other websites for a while, check that the number of visitors they are sending has been consistent and not decreasing year-on-year. As those referring websites make the change to responsive or mobile sites they will have less space for advertising, either removing some spots completely or rotating ads less, meaning you will get less impressions, less clicks, and consequently fewer visitors. A simple glance at your referral traffic report in Google analytics, compared to the same period a year earlier, will tell you if you have a problem.
- Is your local presence as good as it should be? More mobile users means that more users are seeing Google+ pages dominating their screens when their search query has obvious local intent. Local results are critical in the mobile space and, as with paid ads, you are competing for less space than with desktop users. Make sure your Google local business listings are as close to perfect as you can get them. If you already have a Google+ page consider a virtual tour to engage potential clients, both mobile and desktop.
These five points certainly don’t guarantee that you are poised for mobile search domination, but they will hopefully point you in the right direction and ensure that you don’t start needlessly losing the business leads you have worked so hard for.
We will be following up with a mobile marketing checklist in a few weeks – sign up for our newsletter and you will receive an email with our updated blog posts and the checklist details when they are posted. We promise not to spam you and we won’t give your email address to anyone.
