Why Google may hate your site.
Do you have a mobile version of your site? If not Google will hate you more then the next guy that does. Google will lower your ranking if your site isn’t mobile friendly, here’s a quick tool they provide to evaluate your site.
Well, yes and no.
All of the vital content that a customer needs should be available on your mobile version, but keep in mind that users on their phones are different then users on their tablet or desktop. This may be basic mobile design 101, but they are still important to remember.
That means your phone number big and easy to tap. All mobile sites should be written with HTML5, which allows little tricks like clicking phone numbers opening up you phone keypad and ready to dial to happen. The same goes for maps and emails, insure they are HTML5 enabled.
This is key, if you only have a minute or two and a screen the size of your hand, what info would you want? Location, contact info, opening hours, and whether they have the product or service you are after. If you sell lots of products and services, make them easily filtered, or insure you have a good and prominent search box.
a. Images: Unless you are selling products, keep images on your mobile (phones) to a minimum, or insure you have optimised them to the full. There are a lot of ways to do this and I will save that for another post.
b. Intro text, marketing bumph: You don’t need to get rid or hide any of these, just make sure it slides below the more important content. If you are using a framework like Bootstrap or Foundation then this is super easy and content will stack for you.
4. Make sure your call to actions (ie buttons) are large enough to easily tap with a finger and aren’t so close to other elements that the conflict with each other.
You may now be asking yourself DO I REALLY NEED A MOBILE SITE? There are 2 reasons why this is a resounding yes.
1. People use their phones when they are somewhere new to find business/services and if you aren’t accessible and mobile friendly you will be overlooked. Approximately 1.2 billion people worldwide access the internet via their mobile phones.
2. Google now ranks mobile sites differently then desktop. It works like this: Suppose searching for your business type on a desktop you normally turn up somewhere on the front page. Now imagine the exact same search from a mobile device and you have not optimised your site for mobile, suddenly you may drop down to page 3. Google is giving a greater weight to those website owners who take mobile users into consideration.
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