Increase Conversion Rates and Improve Rankings with a Mobile-Optimized Website
December 16th, 2021 by
Key Insights:
- A mobile-optimized website can make or break a business since a bad mobile user experience can result in a loss of leads and conversions.
- With more than half of site visitors coming to sites through mobile, your mobile site must have a positive user experience.
- A positive user experience revolves around how easily a user can navigate a site and complete their goal.
- Google expects your mobile experience to be just as good, if not better, than desktop.
- Ensure a positive user experience for mobile users through site speed, ease of use, and similarity to desktop experience.
In this digital age, it’s standard that people access the internet on their mobile devices vs. a desktop computer. A mobile-optimized website can make or break a business since a bad mobile user experience can result in a loss of leads and conversions. This post will talk about what a positive mobile experience entails and why it’s so important for businesses today.
Why is the Mobile Experience Important?
A bad mobile user experience hurts lead conversions and the overall perception of your company and service.
According to recent studies, over half of internet visits in 2017 originated from a mobile device. As of August 2021, that number has moved to 56.75%. With over half of website visits coming from mobile, your website should accommodate those users. And, with over 53% of users only willing to wait 3 seconds for a mobile page to load before abandoning the page, it’s essential to make sure that the user experience of your mobile site is optimal.
A positive mobile user experience helps retain leads that come to your site from mobile devices and increases the likelihood they convert. A user navigates to your site with a goal. If they aren’t able to complete that goal with ease from their phone, they won’t continue to use your site and service—meaning, they won’t convert.
Additionally, Google has stated they use a mobile-first ranking strategy. This means that before they check the desktop version of your site, they look at the quality, effectiveness, and user-friendly aspects of your mobile site to determine your ranking within the search engine.
You can check out Google’s mobile-first indexing best practices here. Some key takeaways:
- Google expects a positive mobile experience and checks on this by making sure your desktop and mobile versions of your site are virtually the same
- Google verifies your site makes good use of structured data
- Your site has fast load times.
Google provides Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool you can use to indicate whether Google finds a page on your site mobile friendly.
A positive mobile experience impacts the perception of your business. With almost everyone on a mobile device and accustomed to certain standards of the digital world, a bad mobile experience leaves the wrong impression. A user might think, “Maybe if this business isn’t ‘with the times’ and able to provide a good mobile experience, what else can’t they do for me?”
3 Components of a Strong Mobile Website Experience
Positive Browsing Experience
A positive user experience hinges on a user’s ability to navigate a site with ease. In a mobile context, this means a user can navigate the pages of the site to accomplish their goal without having to put in too much thought on how to do so.
The site navigation needs to be easy to find and easy to use. For example, if you have a lot of pages and the menu expands so long when clicked that a user can’t easily click on the pages they need, that results in a negative user experience.
Another example could be looked at in the scope of e-commerce:
- Can the user easily access the cart?
- Can a user easily and intuitively add and remove items from their cart?
Your mobile site should make it so that the user doesn’t have to think about what they need to do; they can just complete the actions they need with ease.
Clear and easily clickable calls-to-actions benefits users when navigating around a site and completing actions. If a user can’t accomplish their goal easily, it will likely result in a lost lead and conversion.
Site Speed
Users and Google value site speed. Users are not willing to wait around forever for a page to load. This case is even more true on a mobile device. If you picture why someone might be using mobile over desktop, it very well might be that they are on the go. A user in the middle of something, needing to be able to accomplish a goal quickly, is even less likely to wait for a page that’s taking too long to load completely.
The Mobile Experience Mirrors the Desktop Experience
As outlined in its best practices, Google expects your mobile experience to mirror your desktop experience. All the same tasks a user can do on your site on a desktop should be as easily accomplished on mobile. For example, a user should have as easy of a time scheduling an appointment on the mobile version of your site as they could on a desktop.
With so many visitors coming to sites on mobile, it’s imperative that your site follows good mobile user experience best practices. This will help with lead generation and with search engine rankings. Not sure where to start? Reach out today and talk to us about conducting a user experience audit for your site.
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