The Importance of Mobile Optimization Nowadays

Just stop for a second and think about the amount of time and money people spend on mobile phones nowadays. Seems like users are consuming content through their mobile phones more than ever, right? Well, numbers agree. Users spend, on average, 69% of their media time on smartphones – which explains why it’s essential to create a good mobile viewing experience for your customers.

In times like these, mobile search engine optimization is crucial for businesses and it will certainly bring potential customers to your products and services.

Here are some quick tips to ensure that your marketing strategy is optimized for mobile across various social media platforms.

Follow Google Best Practices

Ranking high on Google and using the right keywords can help marketers showcase their content to a broader audience — and following Google best practices will certainly enhance the mobile experience for your visitors.

Since many users often spend their time browsing through different websites on their mobile devices rather than on traditional desktops, it’s important to test your website through a Google mobile index tool to see if it’s mobile-friendly. Google ranks websites that are optimized for mobile viewing first in order to serve a new generation of digital search users. This shift towards responsive web design affected 80% of website search rankings and many businesses saw a drastic drop in ranking.

Google can greatly influence website traffic because it drives 96% of search traffic. Some of the easiest ways to make sure that your website is optimized for mobile usability is to use a mobile template, reduce screen size, truncate titles, shorten meta-descriptions, and follow Google mobile guidelines as listed here.

Switch to Responsive Web Design

Optimizing your website design for mobile users can be a challenging task; however, there are many templates out there that can help you get the job done. Make sure your navigation is easily accessible and prominent, have important links visible on your page, and ensure that your website loads quickly and that all content is well organized. Since screen real estate is precious, make sure your buttons do not take up too much space and are easily clickable. Additionally, use micro interactions to help guide your users and improve user experience.

Add High-Quality Images Throughout Social Media

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn all have mobile-optimized versions that can help you maintain positive interactions and engagement with your customers. To take advantage of them, make sure to include more images and less text throughout your social media posts — 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual and images are processed 60,000 times faster than text.

Since mobile screen size can be small, many users often ignore large chunks of text because they are often more difficult to read. When users scroll through their social media feed, colorful images and visual content often grab their attention first because 40% of people respond better to visual information than plain text. Research shows that when you add images to Facebook Posts you can get 2.3 times more engagement; therefore, it’s good practice to include images in all your social media posts.

Make Relevant Use of Videos

If you haven’t taken advantage of videos in your content marketing strategy, you should do so right away. Every day, people watch over 100 million hours of Facebook videos – and the vast majority of them are optimized to be watched without sound. Make sure your videos are short yet engaging enough to watch without any music or voice over.

It’s clear that consumers are watching more and more videos on their mobile devices; therefore, make sure you use bold text to caption your videos for a better mobile user experience. Additionally, since many social media platforms are in competition with each other, make sure that you always upload native videos because they will be ranked higher on that particular platform. For example, when using Facebook to upload a video, make sure that you upload it directly to the Facebook platform instead of sharing a YouTube video link of the same video. The same advice goes for other social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Conclusion

Since 80% of internet users own a smartphone, it’s important for businesses to have a strong mobile marketing strategy. That being said, only 35% of businesses have mobile-optimized sites — so by optimizing your websites for the mobile search you can significantly increase your conversion rate. Creating engaging and informative content can help you target the right audience and grow your brand.

When in doubt, always put your customers first and find ways to improve their user experience no matter what mobile device they are viewing your content from.

** About the Author: Natasha Lane is a web designer, lady of the pen, paper and keyboard, and one hell of a tech geek. She is always happy to collaborate with awesome blogs and share her knowledge about IT, digital marketing and technology trends through high-quality content.