How Important is a Mobile Optimized Site for Your Business?

Goin' Mobile - How Having a Mobile Optimized Site Gives You an Unfair Advantage. A huge number of searches are now being done with mobile devices and this is only going to increase in the very near future. People bought more smartphones and other mobile devices this year than socks, and they're increasingly looking for your business by swishing their fingers on that little screen. What this means for you is that your website has to be mobile-optimized. If you optimize it for mobile devices, you'll have an unfair advantage over the competition and that's a good thing! Maximized User Experience A mobile-optimized website gives the user a much better experience. If the user experience is bad, they'll give your website about 3 nanoseconds of their attention before they click away to your competitor's. Nobody wants to look at a desktop-optimized website on their smartphone. Search engines, which are placing more emphasis on mobile search, will also love it. Features and Apps When your site is optimized for mobile devices, you can take advantage of all sorts of features and applications, especially for smartphones. These include things like touch-screen options and integration with text and email. A person can, for example, find your business on Google Maps, read a Yelp review, blab about it on Facebook and then email a friend and say, 'Let's meet here,' all quickly and easily. Burn Your Brand into Their Brain What does somebody think when they stumble on a site that's well optimized for mobile? They think, 'Wow, cool!' By optimizing your site, you've just done wonders for your brand. You immediately stand out from the competition, which still has their boring desktop site showing up on mobile browsers. You've already told them that you're 'with it' without saying anything. Load It Up If your site is optimized for mobile, everything will load faster, and this means that your users have more time for browsing and enjoying your content. In fact, mobile users have notoriously little patience. Hamsters have longer attention spans. The time it takes for a Flash video or fancy graphic to load can lose you potential business quickly. Stay Ahead of the Competition Experts estimate that around 98% of all websites are currently not mobile optimized. This is especially true of offline businesses, which are often the last to adopt new technologies online. This means that getting ready for mobiles puts you far ahead of the competition. And the longer your site shows up in searches and draws traffic, the more authority it's given by the search engines. You get a head start. Finally, the greatest thing about optimizing your site for mobile devices is that you can do it without affecting your site adversely at all. It only adds to your search engine optimization and takes nothing away. The world is going mobile, so get with it!