Last week, I went over some basics on how to make your site mobile-friendly. But equally important is making your site mobile usable. What I mean by usable is giving mobile searchers the information they are looking for.
Realize that mobile searches are taking over the internet. More people expect to find what they want on their mobile phones—and they might not want to see the same info that they might when searching on a desktop computer. The reality is when we are searching on mobile devices- we want to find what we’re looking for fast because we’re on the go. In this post I’m going to walk you through mobile search from a usability stand point to make sure you’re getting sales from your mobile website.
But first, let’s take a step back. Why has the mobile site phenomenon been so huge?
- Objectives are goal oriented— Not surprising, nearly 50% of mobile searchers have a specific goal in mind when they start their search. That means they’re looking for specific information from your business.
- Mobile visitors generally are a little more patient than desktop—maybe this is a product of 3G era page load slowness, but mobile users don’t have as high of expectations for page load times as if they were searching on a desktop. On average, mobile users are willing to wait up to 3 seconds for content to load on a page before exiting.
- There are more mobile visitors than ever before—We are at the tipping point of a predominantly mobile web. The latest numbers show that mobile web visitors (51%) represent a larger proportion of users online compared to desktop (42%). What does this mean? If your website isn’t mobile friendly AND mobile usable, you’ve likely had many missed opportunities to convert visitors into new loyal customers.
- Mobile in the morning, mobile in the evening—This might come as no surprise to many of you, but mobile activity is at its peak early in the morning (7 – 10 am) and in the evening (8 – 10 pm). During working hours, people are accessing information on desktop computers, but when off the clock, a majority of folks are simply using their mobile devices.
Is all the content you have on your pages REALLY needed for a mobile user?
What the majority of us overlook when we think about mobile friendliness is: Is Your Website REALLY mobile usable? Are you providing the right content to people searching on mobile phones? Is all the content you have on your pages REALLY needed for a mobile user? What are mobile visitors doing on your site?
You may have a lot of good information on your website—especially your homepage. You might have lots of links to good internal content, some great product descriptions, a letter from the CEO or other information about your business and why it’s so valuable. But take a second and evaluate whether it’s all necessary or even easily digestible by a mobile visitor.
Down to brass tax. Are you providing the right content to people searching on mobile phones?
Remember that mobile users are goal-oriented. Here are some of the content they are expecting to see when they land on your website:
Phone calls—lots of people looking up businesses like yours (regardless of whether you are B2B or B2C) are hunting for a phone number. To make things easy for mobile visitors, you should really make your phone number clickable for easy dialing. There is a small snippet of html code that makes this possible!
Find a location—for most businesses, but especially B2C businesses, having your location easy to see on the mobile screen and clickable—linking to Google maps, for instance—will make finding your business a piece of cake.
Find a contact—whether you’re B2B or B2C, your customers want to find the right person to talk to. Having easily-accessible descriptions of roles and who is responsible for that role in your business can help direct callers to the right person.
Find a specific information— your business specializes in something that people need. And a part of that specialization might be sharing information with your audience. And in many cases, your visitors will be looking for information—whether it’s specifically about your product or service or more generally what to consider when thinking about products or services relating to the ones you provide.
And remember, searchers use natural language—this I’ll refer to as the Siri phenomenon. When many of us search on mobile, we aren’t thinking about talking the way we normally might write a query into our desktop search engine. We’re busy, on the move and use voice-related search tools to help us find information quickly.
Is your site mobile-usable? Concerned that your mobile site is not getting the sales you want? Our expert web team can make your site mobile-friendly, intuitive and that you have the right engaging content for mobile searchers. Contact us today for a FREE website strategy-building session.
