The True Cost of Lost Traffic from Smartphone Search Results
If currently your website is utilizing optimal keywords and fresh relevant content, it’s a non-sleeping, never-surrendering, always on-time, no sick days salesperson for you and your organization. It’s the equivalent of a TV commercial 24/7/365 with no air time fees.
But what if your target audience is smartphone users? Then come April 21st, your website will be taking a serious medical leave. Consider this:
In reviewing analytics for one of our client’s websites, we found 7% of her traffic is coming from smartphones. While this number seemed low at first, digging deeper we found that 7% amounted to over 3,000 page hits thus far in 2015 — whoa Nelly!
Google’s search algorithm is changing all the time and sometimes it’s hard to keep up. But we’ve done the research and looking back on our own website, we can see that smartphone usage is increasing amongst our users so we made the decision immediately to be mobile friendly.
The decision to be compliant comes down to a few factors:
- Know your numbers. Use your website analytics to determine how much traffic you’re currently getting from smartphones. Even if the percentage is low, how many page hits / prospective clients does that convert to?
- Know your customers. Do they use smartphones? Are you in an industry that provides products/services that are commonly searched for while traveling outside the home or office.
- Know your competition. Plain and simple, if your competitors are mobile then you need to be mobile.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that if your website currently doesn’t have good search engine optimization (SEO), or you don’t have an SEO plan in place, or if your website currently isn’t showing up in search results in the first place, this update will have little or no effect on enhancing that placement.
On the flipside, it’s important to realize if Google devalues your website because you aren’t compliant with this update, it may be a harder climb to increase ranking after the fact. This was the exact reason that we decided to go mobile ourselves.
While you’re making your decision, here are some steps you can take to stay ahead of the curve:
If you’re still unsure about your site, check it: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
Check your site usage statistics here (if you’ve set up Analytics) http://www.google.com/analytics/Still have questions? Give us a call (608-268-5525) or send an email for more info.
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