Let’s imagine, it’s Monday morning and your alarm has gone off, the sun is starting to shine. You only have a few minutes to get ready and leave the house, but you know it is going to be a long day. However, what is the first thing you do?
Generally we check our phones. It is claimed that most people are addicted to technology, so much that being more than an arm’s reach away from our mobiles is too much to bear. So, as the day starts we grab our Smart Phone and check for messages, news, Emails.
What I am trying to say is that our interaction with digital information is no longer starting when we sit down at our office desk, but the moment we are grabbing our phones. Consequently, mobile optimisation has become an essential asset for everything online.
But What Is Mobile Optimisation
Mobile optimisation is the process of ensuring that visitors who access your site from their mobile devices have an experience optimised for their device. Every year more people spend more and more time on their mobiles and other smart devices. However, many websites today haven't been designed to account for different screen sizes or load time. The mobile optimisation takes a look at those sites and their designs, structure, page speed and much more to ensure you are not unintentionally turning mobile visitors away.
Mobile optimisation is the digital process of allowing mobile users access to every website in an optimised look, feel, and experience. However, mobile optimisation not only refers to the looks of the website, but it also refers to how the search engines, like Google for example, ranks your site, which in turn will directly affect your traffic, user engagement, navigation and everything to enhance the user’s experience on the site while using a mobile device.
Why is the mobile optimisation so essential?
When we talk about digital marketing, the mobile search optimisation is becoming more and more vital than ever in this digital era. Mobile traffic is currently eclipsing the desktop traffic. Have you clicked onto a site you all were interested in and had to do all sorts of zooming and searching for things? Believe it or not, that is a common thing, and if you have ever experienced that, then we assume you did what the rest did and just gave up, closed the site to go and look for the next relevant search result.
Now imagine if that were your site, this can pose a big problem. If your site is the one in question being clicked out of, and according to Google the chances of a mobile device user purchasing online are higher than the ones of a desktop one and what is worse is that a high number of the mobile searches result in offline purchases from professional servers and retailers. The mobile market is focused and ready to purchase, and it is your obligation to be there and see when they are scrolling around your products and services.
Here are five steps to make your site mobile-friendly through optimisation.
Care for your audience & SEO.
Is your target local or international? If you happen to have local audience, it is essential to remember this when you are optimising your site. Currently known as local search engine optimisation for an offline store’s online presence. This will help your brand show up on the map as well as the high results on the SERP (Search engine results page). When it comes to mobile optimisation, this is of crucial importance. It’s important to place yourself in the customers shows, what will they be searching and what’s the key information which will be of interest. You’ve got to provide them with information which exactly matches their search query.
Keep your structured data organized.
Using schemas to organise the information for google and create valuable pieces of information in the SERP is something you should take advantage for. While search engines like Google gets more robust information about your business, users get a more detailed search result that will show ratings, smaller URLs and more. It is a win win situation.
Do not use Flash.
With mobile optimisation you want to get rid of the old and embrace the new, and you want to do this by getting rid of any Flash you have on your website. Flash plugins may not even be available on your user’s phone meaning they wont even render for them. Instead, you need to use some HTML5 to create improved and new special effects to keep your users engaged while creating a whole new experience for your customers on your website at all times.
Get rid of popups as well.
While some pop ups can be very helpful on some desktop sites, for mobile users it can be something close to a nightmare when interacting with these on mobile sites. Your phone size is about as big as a desktop popup and scaling that down to fit the screen within a smart device just isn’t practical. Save your bounce race and think about your customers, get rid of those pop ups.