Lately there’s been a lot of hype about “mobile optimization”.
First, what does this even mean?
“Mobile optimization” can include mobile responsive design, mobile-only websites, ex. m.optimized-marketing.com, or simply providing visitors with mobile-friendly features.
As you already know, optimized marketers don’t get swept away in the torrent of trends without first looking at necessity, logistics, data, and overall, your ROI. There is always a cost-benefit analysis that needs to be done when considering new ideas/technology.
While all Optimized Marketing sites are mobile-friendly with click-to-call, mobile-friendly forms, click-to-drop menus and simple navigation, we’ve yet to switch all sites to a mobile responsive design or build new, mobile-only sites.
Keep in mind a few factors:
- Mobile responsive design increases load times. This is a HUGE deterrent for visitors actually making it to your site before giving up and clicking the ‘back’ button. This means less traffic and subsequently less online contacts for your business. It also means potentially lower organic rankings as Google penalizes slow-loading sites.
- A study done on whether mobile-responsive design increases website contacts shows that on mobile devices there was no significant difference (skip to minute 27 if you just want the answer).
- Responsive designs make it virtually impossible to separately test how desktop and mobile traffic interact with and convert on your site. Because testing is at the heart of all that we do, this is a big hindrance.
- For many of our clients’ websites, only 15% of traffic or less comes from mobile devices which hardly warrants an entirely new mobile site apart from your regular, local site.
- A single m. landing page that only asks for your contact information is often much more frustrating for a visitor than a mobile-friendly site that provides details on the products & services that are of interest to them.
We’re not saying mobile responsive design is all bad, it’s simply a brand new technology that so far won’t help your site.
When the technology becomes faster, more optimized, and helps increase contacts and ROI, we’ll compare it against all mobile options and go from there to come up with a game plan that will increase your site’s performance even more.
The most important takeaway here is to ensure that mobile-friendly features are already implemented on your website regardless of whether the experts say it’s mobile optimized.
