Mobile Friendly Site

Did you know that ½ of all Internet searches for LOCAL products and services are performed from mobile devices?

Imagine your potential customers whipping out their cell phones to look for your type of product or service while “on the go”…

Yes! They found YOUR business’s website, but once they get to your website, they can’t find your phone number… or your directions… or your menu/services…

Of course, that information is probably on your website, but if it is not “mobile-friendly,” it will not be clearly visible to mobile users.

Because of this, visitors will quickly leave your website. Why would they stay? They can’t navigate your site to find what they need, so they move on to their competitors.

Studies show that more than 20% of local business searches are performed from mobile devices. That’s potentially 20% of business that YOU could be missing out on!

No matter what business niche you are in, times are tough these days when it comes to getting ore customers and sales. So you cannot afford to miss out on ANY business.

One simple way to prevent this is by having a mobile-friendly website for your business.

Traditional websites are built to be viewed on a computer screen instead of a small mobile phone screen. So viewing a traditional website that has not been “mobilized” on a mobile phone is almost impossible.

Not to mention that they take forever to load! In fact, most “non-mobilized” websites don’t even load at all on mobile devices.

Mobile-friendly websites simply make it convenient for your customers and potential customers to connect with you. As a business owner, your main goal is to remove all obstacles when it comes to your business’s “visibility.”

With mobile-friendly websites, “on the go” visitors can easily find and contact your business with one-click calling, one-click email, and instant directions. Again, this removes those “extra steps” that may be otherwise needed to contact your business.

Mobile Website Branding

If you are focused on branding your business, remember that your mobile website can help – or hurt – this process.

What is “branding” exactly? The practice of creating an instantly recognizable site, logo, color scheme or any other visual “cue” that helps viewers identify it instantly with your product or business.

If you’ve set things up properly, the advantages you can expect to reap from branding are:

Your customer knows who you are and what you’re about
What to expect in quality, service and price
Whether or not he is your favored target market (and if he is, he tends to stay loyal!)

You need a strategy, if you decide to focus on branding. You need ideas and methods to keep your sites and products in front of the public eye.

Coca-Cola’s distinctive red-and-white colors are as much a part of its branding as its actual logo. Even when small details change, the overall feel stays the same.

The Coca-Cola polar bears are instantly recognizable as part of that brand. Their graphic representation taps into 2 key elements of strong branding:

- Consistency
- Repetition

Even though you don’t want heavy graphics with a mobile website, small graphic elements that instantly remind people of your brand will work well. Allowing your branding to remain even through your mobile sites ensures:

1. Potential customers think of you, the moment they see those graphic elements on their mobiles

2. Potential customers know instantly what they’re going to get – they develop either a positive or negative emotion when they see your name or logo

3 Repetition of positive feelings brings trust – and a willingness to entertain your offers

4. Trust brings purchases – and develops repeat customers, who remain loyal for as long as you remain consistent

So don’t neglect your branding (if that’s relevant to your business strategy) when you decide to go mobile.

It can help boost your credibility more than you might ever realize, or think!

6 Tips for Mobile Websites

What makes a great mobile website? We all have our own criteria, but basically, many of the same qualities that make good sites on PC’s. They have to be:

- Reliable
- Quick to load
- Easy to browse

This latter requirement, however, differs slightly, when it comes to mobiles. “Easy to browse” means the navigation buttons can’t be too piddly-sized; shouldn’t be out of sight, and the amount of interaction (i.e. clicking and entering data) you have to do should be the absolute minimum.

And if it’s a mobile version of a well-established PC website, as many components as possible should be the same (or a simplified version), making it familiar and friendly to use.

Here are my top 6 picks for enjoyable and easy to use browsers for most mobiles. When so many sites still haven’t caught on to
what’s happening out in the real world, these sites are refreshingly easy to access – and use.

1. Topping the list and easily bagging the gold, m.facebook.com. You can basically use it exactly the way you would on computer.

2. Next, the silver medal goes to m.amazon.com. Amazon has espoused the credo: “Keep It Very, Very Simple”. What this means in
actual fact is that (providing you already have an Amazon account set up) you can purchase goods directly, using your mobile.

3. The bronze medal goes to the competitor everyone loves to hate (secretly), google.com/xhtml – you can personalize it for your
mobile, as well as access weather, movie times, news, and local searches. (A GPS, though, it’s not!)

4. This one’s a personal favorite… Darren Rowse’s Problogger.net has gone mobile (using the WPTouch plug-in, so you don’t even have to lift a finger to view it properlly in your mobile screen.)

5. Don’t want to wait till you get home to log onto Twitter? Don’t want to miss any of the latest links? You can set yourself up for
m.twitter.com either on your PC or on your mobile. (Only drawback – pushing it further down the list – no Direct Messages.)

6. Last but not least, mobile Wikipedia (wapedia.mobi/en) – entertaining and handy if you want to look something up in a spare
moment – but it’s last in my top six because Wikipedia data is not always reliable.

Notice that these are all large, mainstream sites. It’s my hope that more and more unique, individual sites will go mobile in the near future.

And then I hope you’ll write and suggest your own “local heroes”.