Mobile Search Tips

In today’s fast paced world and with the advent of mobile technology it has become more and more important for businesses to ensure that their website presence also encompasses the mobile or hand held device arena. Today’s mobile search on Google alone accounts for 58% of all searches meaning that it is now imperative as a website/business owner that your website is ready for mobile traffic.

In today’s entry I would like to cover some important aspects that we consider important for converting mobile website visitors into paying customers. These factors can be broken down into:

Responsive Website Design – this may sound obvious but it’s really important that your website design is responsive and mobile enabled. Having a mobile friendly website will really help your website visitors and making it user friendly and easy to use and navigate will make it easier for customers to spend. From a search perspective, UX is also a ranking factor, meaning that there is more than one benefit of having responsive mobile website.

Speed – as with desktop sites, site speed plays a big part in the success of your mobile platform and it’s important to ensure that your site and its images are displayed quickly. Site speed is one of the most important aspects for SEO and also for mobile search. Depending on the platform that your website is built on there are a number of plugins available that will help with site loading speed. For example, a good plugin for WordPress is Gzip Ninja Compression – this will help to compress images and code so that your pages will load faster. A good quality hosting solution should also be used to host your website.

This video shows mobile search hints & tips by Neil Patel

Header Images – Large header images don’t do mobile sites any favours both from a users point of view and also from a search perspective. Always try to keep the header image as small and compressed as possible. This will help with the above page loading time as well. Large header images take up valuable page real estate and influence the UX.

Pop Ups – Pop ups are often an issue on desktops but even more so on a mobile device were the screen space is very limited. My advice would be, unless absolutely necessary I wouldn’t have any form of pop up on a mobile device. Try and think of yourself as the user and empathise with your site visitors? Would like loads of annoying pop ups on when you visit a website?

User Experience (UX) – Design and layout are really important for mobile sites. We’ve all tried to use a website that isn’t responsive and so often we just end up navigating away from the page as it becomes more trouble than its worth. Some open source systems such as WordPress now come with a responsive design built in, meaning than you don’t have to worry that your site won’t be responsive. A good UX also plays a part in the the wider digital marketing mix, in particular SEO. So having a good UX offers more than just value to the end user as it will also help with your websites organic ranking.

We have covered some very basic points here that should you choose to follow them they will undoubtedly help you with your mobile search presence. If you have any thoughts or suggestions that you feel would be a good addition to this entry then please do feel free to comment in box below.

If you have read this and are interested in working with Herd Marketing then please reach out and give us a call on 0151 721 1628 or Contact Us via email.