Why a mobile-friendly website is essential for your business

Your website is the beating heart of your online brand. It’s where you spread your message, sell your products and talk to your customers. The chances are it’s also the way most of your customers find you.

You’ve probably invested a great deal of time and money into building a search-engine friendly site designed to attract your target audience and lead them smoothly through your sales funnel. But if you haven’t optimised your site for use on mobile and tablet devices, you may be missing out on a staggering 40% of possible leads.

A 500% increase in mobile searches

There are two reasons why mobile optimisation is critical to your business. Firstly, quantity. According to Google’s recently published Mobile Playbook (http://www.themobileplaybook.com), which provides some fascinating statistics and insights into mobile device usage and its impact on businesses, mobile search queries have grown by 500% in the past 2 years. Their research shows that 57% of customers won’t recommend a site which doesn’t work well on mobile and 40% of users will switch to a competitors site if they have a bad mobile experience. Having gone to all the expense of making sure you’re at the top of the search results, can you really afford for half of your leads to give up on you because your site doesn’t work properly on their smartphone?

Customers who are ready to buy

The second and even more compelling reason is quality. It’s all about when and how mobile users are using the internet. Google’s research has found that more and more people are using their mobiles at the very end of the decision-making process – to check competitors’ prices, find a nearby vendor or verify their product choice. Location services play a huge part here, of course, but the true business value of mobiles is that by the time your customer is standing in a store making last-minute price comparisons, or hungry on a street corner looking for a restaurant, they are ready to buy what you have to sell. All they need is to find you – and be able to access the information they need on the device in their hand.

“85% of smartphone users have searched for local information, 81% called a business after searching and 40% visited in person”

Google, The Mobile Playbook

Your audience – with the time to listen

If your site exists to share ideas or information rather than sell products, mobile is just as important to you, because it lets you reach out to people when they have time to listen. It’s when people are on the move, sitting in trains or standing in queues – when there’s no work, no chores, no loved ones claiming their attention – that they actually have the time to read blogs, do research or interact on social media. Unless you create a site – or even an app – that lets them access what you want to share from their mobile device, you’ll risk alienating a whole swathe of your potential audience.

A site which will grow your business

Building a mobile-friendly site means having content which will resize to fit any sized screen, avoiding technology such as Flash which won’t work on many mobile devices, and ensuring that all the functions and links operate smoothly. Your site will be far more usable – and popular – if you think about what your mobile customers are trying to achieve and build it around their needs, rather than simply adapting your current site by cutting out features. Many mobile-versions of business websites still feel like a pale shadow of the fully-functional computer version and this is both obvious and frustrating for mobile users.

The simple message is that if you have a mobile-friendly website your business will be more successful, because you’ll give your customers every reason to stay on your site, look at your products and read what you have to say.