How To: Make Your Content Mobile-Friendly
With over 3.5 billion mobile internet users, is your site actually responsive? Google reports that a phenomenal “53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load”. Now, just imagine how many potential customers you could be losing.
As the use of mobile devices rapidly amplifies, it’s imperative to optimize your website. A mobile-optimized website enables several benefits for your site visitors and of course, your business.
Since Google’s new algorithm caters for this rising trend, mobile-optimized sites are set to rank higher. Further to this, mobile-optimized sites ensure an improved user experience. Lower bounce rates grow the average amount of time spent on site and increase your mobile SEO.
Mobile traffic is fast surpassing desktop traffic. Regardless of the product or service being sold, merely speed up your site and increase sales. When your site’s mobile pages load just 1 second faster, you can attain a 27% increase in conversion rates.
Having a mobile optimized site isn’t just beneficial for established companies or global brands, it’s profitable for everyone. For start-up or local businesses alike, this is especially beneficial. Only 30% of small businesses have a mobile-friendly website, so having a mobile-optimized site proves your fast advantage over industry competitors.
Simply put, a responsive website means increased mobile traffic, and that equals? A greater return on investment. So, how do you do this? Whether you’re looking to improve your mobile marketing strategy or create a new one, here are four simple yet highly effective ways to make your content mobile-friendly.
1. Change Your Writing Style
Remove the fluff, and get straight to the point. Mobile users do not have the same attention span as desktop users. This is why it’s essential to employ a copywriting style for mobile.
Know your audience and keep your content sharp. Typically, five lines of text is the maximum length for a paragraph. The average reader is most comfortable with about 50-60 characters per line. Keep paragraphs as succinct as possible. Use subheaders, bullet points and ample whitespace to break up the text.
In this case, less is definitely more and communication is key. Ensure communication is kept clear by using an easy-to-read typography. Optimize font sizes to suit the user’s smart device. Adobe suggests at least a size 11 font for iOS devices and a 12-14 sp for Android devices.
2. Optimize Visuals
As explained in our previous post 5 Digital Video Trends That Will Boost Your Brand’s Engagement, visuals are a phenomenal tool. Correctly optimize images and videos for mobile users, and keep your audience engaged.
Broken images and non-responsive videos are a fast way to lose visitors. This also amplifies bounce rates and disengages potential customers. Confirm your videos and images are optimized for mobile users.
Use a responsive video player to host your videos. This will enable mobile-friendly playback with auto-adjust functionality and a fast loading time to meet the viewer’s demands. For images, you’ll need to employ the right format.
Whether you’re dealing with a vector or raster image, optimizing your images is a great way to ensure cross-compatibility. There are several software applications designed to pre-optimize images for specific platforms. Following optimization, it’s highly recommended to break up every 300-400 words of text with an image.
3. Responsive Web Design
A responsive web design is the gateway to having a mobile-friendly site. Here, it’s important to note that a responsive website and a mobile-friendly site are not the same.
A site can be mobile-friendly, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be issues with navigation. A responsive website is undoubtedly greater – it’s the tool that seals the deal. It’s the best way to ensure your site is mobile-friendly.
Allow for a seamless user experience across all devices with a responsive website. Regardless of the mobile device being used, a responsive website automatically adjusts the screen pixel-width to adjust.
Websites that aren’t mobile-friendly are incredibly uncomfortable for smart device users, whereby squinting, zooming, pinching and cursing are reportedly common issues. A responsive website is the solution to these issues.
4. Test Site Across Multiple Devices
With mobile-first becoming the “status-quo”, your site should cater to all devices. But, this is always easier said than done. A mobile-friendly site must assure visitors of the right scalability, response and engagement.
To ensure this, the most practical method is to test your site across multiple devices. However, this is not a one-off test. As technology is constantly evolving, we must become accustomed to adaptation – especially since Google’s ‘Mobilegeddon’ algorithm.
Test your site pages on multiple devices: iPhone, Android, PDAs, Windows Phone, Tablets etc. This is where you should test your site’s level of intuitive UI, including buttons, visuals, call-to-actions and more.
There are many platforms, which can be used to test your site. In particular, Google provides the free tool ‘Mobile-Friendly Test’. Simply enter the designated webpage URL, and see whether or not your site passes.
Get to it! Now that your content’s mobile-friendly, learn How To Measure The Effectiveness of Your Content Marketing Strategy or boost your email conversion rates with these 3 Tips For Perfecting Your Email Marketing Strategy.
