If your company’s website isn’t yet optimized for mobile use, you could be losing sales. Consider this: during a recent holiday season, almost 70% of all Amazon.com shoppers made their purchases from mobile devices instead of desktops or laptops—and that was back in 2015. Consumers have made it clear that convenience is king when it comes to purchasing decisions and website browsing, and if your website isn’t optimized for it, they won’t hesitate to click over to your competitors’ sites.

Google wants your mobile website.

At the tail end of 2016, Google announced that it is favoring mobile searches over desktop searches. Google’s new mobile-first index is the next natural evolution, given that more people click over to Google on their smartphones and tablets than on desktops. This new development means that Google’s search engine index will evaluate websites from a mobile browser perspective, rather than from a desktop perspective. If you don’t yet have a mobile version of your website, Google will still crawl the desktop version. The mobile-first index is still in its infancy, and it’s unclear how this might affect rankings, if at all. But one thing is certainly clear: if Google, consumers, and your competitors are all going mobile, then you should, too.

Mobile website visitors are different.

Applying the same marketing strategies to mobile users as you would for desktop users isn’t a formula for success. This is because a consumer who is browsing an e-commerce website during a lazy Sunday afternoon is vastly different from a consumer who is frantically shopping for a quick hostess gift online while running from one appointment to the next. Mobile users have different objectives in mind. They know what they’re looking for and they want to find it as quickly as possible. If your company’s website is difficult to read or navigate on a mobile device, you’ll lose traffic—and lost traffic means lost sales. If you can overcome this obstacle and please your mobile visitors, you’ll likely be rewarded with increased sales, as mobile users are much more likely to be impulse buyers compared to desktop users.

Convenience is king.

So how exactly can digital marketing specialists make your website translate well to smartphones and tablets? There are a number of effective strategies, including improving the convenience of the site. For instance, enabling autofill lets mobile users easily bypass the inconvenience of typing in their info with those tiny touchscreen keypads. With autofill, your mobile users can automatically add their information to the correct fields to make a purchase. The less that is required of a mobile user, the more likely you are to see high conversion rates. Even if you do enable autofill, it’s always a smart idea to limit the total number of fields. That is, only request the information that you truly need for the sale to be processed.

Bite-sized content is a must.

These days, more consumers than ever before are using their mobile devices to interact with search engines, read email, and check social media accounts. It’s human nature for a person to want to share their latest exciting find with all their friends, and they do it by sending links. Links can be frustrating for mobile users, since a website will look overwhelming if it isn’t optimized for mobile devices. One way to overcome this problem is to provide bite-sized content that users can quickly scan to find what they’re looking for. Mobile-friendly content adheres to the following guidelines:

  • Uses bullet lists to create more white space.
  • Avoids chunky paragraphs.
  • Avoids superfluous words.
  • Makes the most important sentences easy to find and easy to read.
  • Makes the content scrollable, as clicking through multiple pages is inconvenient on mobile devices.
  • Uses only high-quality, closely cropped images.
  • Uses large, easy-to-click buttons.
  • Only includes videos that are compatible with mobile devices.
Mobile optimization leads to brand engagement.

Mobile optimization can be tricky, but gaining traffic from mobile users may pay off in spades. If you give your mobile users a pleasant browsing and shopping experience, they’ll reward you by returning again and again, and by sharing your website with their friends. Through mobile optimization, you can encourage consumer engagement with your brand, which supports better brand awareness and customer loyalty.

When you partner with Pennington Creative for your digital marketing campaigns, you can customize your bundle of services to suit your company’s outreach strategy. We offer a range of content services that are ideal for both small businesses and marketing agencies with extensive client lists. Contact us today and let our team of digital experts get to work for you!

About the Author

Jacky - Digital Marketing Specialist, Copywriting
Jacky Gilchrist

Digital Marketing Specialist, Copywriting