Mobile phones are becoming increasingly powerful and ubiquitous, and what we're seeing is that there's a lot of traffic coming from them. Getting to your website and engaging with it, from a smartphone or other device, is now just as easy as it is on a desktop. The difference, though, is the experience your users are getting. User expectations and behavior on a mobile device can be very different than on a computer, so you need to make sure you're making the appropriate changes to optimize your engagement with your customers. Watch today's video where we'll be giving you some helpful tips on building a great mobile website, and check out our infographic below on how much of your audience could be coming from a mobile device.
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Hello and welcome to our video today where we're talking about mobile website design tips. I'm Chad Hill and I have Adam Stetzer with me.
Good afternoon Chad. Mobile websites are a hot topic. But people that chat about them a lot don't always do them. And I think today we want to lay out the case for why you should build a great mobile website. And what some of those tips are to make your mobile website work.
91% of adult Americans own a cell phone. And of those 56% are smartphones:
So we've been watching that market heat up, penetration is high. That means if you carry a smartphone, that's an opportunity for someone to visit your mobile website. What can we help our viewers with today?
Well, I think the first thing is to really understand what your mobile website usage is because we see this very quite a bit. Depending on the type of business you're in. If you're a restaurant or a retail location, you may have very high mobile usage. If you're something more like a local service business, plumber, maybe it's a little lower. But you want to understand what that is nonetheless.
So the way you do that is you go into Google Analytics, if you have that. And in Google Analytics there's a dashboard area where you can then segment your traffic by mobile or non mobile. And so what you can see is in the percentage of the actual traffic on your website that is mobile to know where you are.
Excellent point. So look at analytics first. Make sure this is something you actually need to be doing. You don't want to be chasing rainbows with a small marketing budget. You need to put it where it counts.
So if you're in analytics and you're seeing a large percentage of your visitors, or even a good sized percentage of your visitors are on mobile devices, that tells you need to make that experience great. And that gets us into mobile website design tips. So what are some of those tips?
The first thing you want to do is you want to-- you have two paths you can go down. There's the path of making your current website more responsive or mobile friendly. And the other path is to build sort of a standalone separate domain just for mobile website traffic. Let's go down the first path first.
The first thing you want to do is you want to clean up your website as much as possible. So if you have lots of formatting all over the place, you want to streamline that a bit. And be especially careful to make sure you get your phone number in the header. Because a lot of people on mobile phones they're coming your website, even if it's not 100% optimized they may want to pick up the phone and call you. So if you hidden your phone number, you made it really small, it's hard to get that finger on it to call the number. So start there.
All right, so if you can't do response design or you want to have a totally separate website, you've got a whole different set of tips for them?
Yeah, I mean there's basically-- what a lot of times you want to do if for whatever reason you can't get your current website to work on the mobile device for a number of different reasons and you need to start with a mobile only website, what you first want to do is make sure you have a script on your current website that redirects traffic over to the new one page or mobile website that you build. And then on that website again, there are a lot of different ways to go.
We can help you build up a simple mobile website that answers the specific questions that mobile users are going to have, like maybe contact information, or directions to your location. So you would then redirect that traffic when it comes to your website to the mobile website.
All right, and it seems to me to the higher the percentage of traffic that is coming in on the mobile website, you may want distinct websites because you're probably going to want to service them differently, and customize that experience. If it's low to medium, you might be able to get away with the same site, but it's also a matter of cost.