Mobile Website Optimisation: Is your site up to scratch?

Have you ever wondered how your site looks on a mobile device? Does it load quickly, or even at all? Can your customers find what they need easily?

Try doing this now. Take out your phone and enter your website url into your phone browser and find out right now.

Chances are your website is already outdated. The times are moving fast.

Technology is advancing and accelerating at speeds never seen before.

This means it’s probably about time you updated your website to be mobile enabled. Then, once enabled, you wan to make it as easy as possible for customers to find.

Why Mobile?

Today (July 01, 2011), there are over 4.4 Billion mobile devices worldwide and the industry is growing 4 times faster than the Internet itself.

In fact, one out of every seven minutes of media consumption now takes place on a mobile device, and that number is rapidly increasing.

It’s already happening: people right here in Australia are going to your website from their mobile phones. What do they see? Does it load? How long does it take? Can they find information easily? What does it look like on the iPhone? A BlackBerry? The Motorola Razr? And can people even search for your site via the many mobile search engines currently available?

These are the questions we as business owners need to be asking.

Why a Mobile Website?

The fact is, mobile websites are the way of the future. Over 90% of all internet searches will be done via mobile in the next 2-3 years and if your business isn’t mobile enabled, well, you’re simply cutting access to a massive portion of your customer audience.

Here are just some of the reasons why you need a mobile website:

• Mobile Websites Are Far More User Friendly – Mobile users on the go need different information. They should be able to find it quickly, and easily.
• Mobile Websites are Fast Loading – A website designed for mobile will load in about 4 seconds, while a desktop site can take up to 40 seconds or more to load on a mobile device.
• Mobile Websites Offer a Better Brand Experience – You control the brand experience which means you are not at the mercy of the various mobile browsers to decide how your site will look.
• Mobile Websites Get Picked Up By Mobile Search Engines – As with traditional websites, mobiie sites can be optimised for mobile search engine traffic.

That last point is specific what I want to talk most about here. Because it’s no secret that businesses must view mobile as a significant piece of their overall marketing strategy, and optimizing your mobile site for mobile search engines should inevitably become apart of that strategy.

So here are some high level SEO strategies that brands can implement into their overall mobile efforts to ensure they are getting maximum visibility via mobile enabled search engines.

Optimize for All Mobile Devices and Browsers

A fully optimized mobile website that has extended functionality and key content will simply rank higher in search results than a website that has just been reformatted for a smaller screen. Search engines now incorporate various criteria in mobile browsers to determine page rank, including: overall site performance, usability, download speed and screen rendering.

An example of this would be simply transcoding a webpage through the use of a cookie-cutter template which ends up stripping the site of key content while leading to incomplete pages and decreasing overall usability.

Poor navigation and broken pages will also result in a lower page rank and a negative user experience which, at the end of the day, will fail to encourage repeat visits.

It’s also a fact that different mobile web browsers will determine how your site renders on a particular phone, so this is why it is essential for companies to develop a device agnostic mobile strategy that supports the wide variety of available mobile operating systems.

Tennis.com’s mobile website is a good example of this and was developed to support all web-enabled devices.

To decrease bounce rate (i.e. when a user views only one page on a site and then leaves), a companies mobile site must automatically recognize the consumer’s device as it loads and then render the page accordingly to ensure a view that is best optimized for the user’s particular screen.

Continue Reading… >> Translating Traditional SEO Practices to the Mobile Platform