It’s kinda hard to remember The Time Before Cellphones (BC). But oldheads like us have fond memories of calling dates on a corded phone in the kitchen, unfolding paper maps, and, ya know, actually talking with people in person. Get off our lawn, kids!
In all seriousness, mobile devices have changed our lives tremendously, and they’ve changed the focus of online marketing too. Ten or more years ago, we’d focus almost exclusively on how a site looked on a computer monitor. But mobile browsing now dominates for all our clients – let’s take a look at some metrics across our client base for the first half of 2021:
2021 % mobile visitors: 80.1%
2015 % mobile visitors: 47.8%
Increase since 2015: 67.6%
2021 % mobile leads: 59.6%
2015 % mobile leads: 31.1%
Increase since 2015: 91.6%
What do all these numbers mean? Some takeaways:
- The vast majority of the visits and leads you get from your website today happen from folks on mobile devices.
- Mobile visitors don’t convert at as high a rate as desktop visitors.
- But the percentage of leads coming from mobile has outpaced the increase in mobile traffic, suggesting that more people are comfortable not only viewing your site on their phone but taking the next step there too.
Mobile Focused Optimization
Given that mobile is where it’s at, how do you best cater to that crowd? Let’s take a look at the key components of a great mobile website experience.
User Experience: As we’ve said many times, we don’t optimize sites for Google. Our job is to optimize user experience, because Google wants the people who use their products to have the best possible experience. What does that look like on mobile? Easy to use navigation, readable fonts, big buttons, clear hyperlinks, and other elements that make it super simple to use your site.
Load Times: An essential element of good SEO on any device, load time becomes absolutely critical on mobile. 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. We review load times along with other development-related factors each month for our clients and make updates as necessary to ensure lightning fast mobile speed.
Calls to Action: On traditional desktop designs, users have learned that they can get to a contact form in the upper right of most sites, or at worst, in a footer link. There isn’t quite the same standard for mobile experiences, and given the smaller screen real estate, it’s extremely important to prompt users to take the next step with sticky navigation contact buttons, tasteful
Multimedia: Given the smaller screen size and the nature of user behavior on their phones, having more graphics and video, and fewer words, wins the day for mobile users. People on mobile are looking for super snackable, easily scannable content so they can get the info they need and move on to the next thing on the web or their favorite app.
ADA Compliance: As most of our clients know, ensuring accessibility of your website is of major importance these days, with many law firms aggressively filing demand letters for sites that are not making reasonable efforts to comply with common website accessibility standards. All the technical details of ADA compliance become even trickier on mobile devices with smaller screen sizes and other limitations.