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Appealing to mobile users

Justin Aldridge

Mobile searching is on the increase, and more and more companies are finding that it’s important to create a mobile-optimised version of their site. I attended Internet World 2013 in London, where I sat in on a talk about mobile marketing and why so many big brands are using it and how the most successful mobile marketing campaigns are operating.

Mobile sites require a very different approach to their web equivalents. Whereas websites are all about optimising for SEO using intricate blends of keywords, title tags and other elements, the priority of a mobile site is to make it functional. Phones load pages more slowly than computers, so you can’t overload it with big graphics or Flash animations which may not work on a mobile.

Smartphone

One trick could be to allow Google to find the full web version of your site through mobile search, which will include all of the SEO data you have worked on online, and then offer the user the option to switch to the mobile version. Lots of big sites do this; they detect that the user is on a mobile, loads the web version in the background and invites the user to switch to the mobile version. Some people prefer to use the full site on their mobiles, but it is a good compromise for those who don’t to attract them to the mobile site whilst using your normal SEO text to get there.

With mobile sites, you need to be really careful about keeping it simple and usable. The call to action buttons should be prominent and easy to find, with all the most popular site features on the landing page. Mobiles tend to be trickier to use, and you don’t want people to have to zoom in to read tiny text, so make it all big and bold and easy to navigate.

While it may be on its way up, mobile marketing tends to be the realm of the huge multi-national businesses. Think Coca Cola, sports brands, TV channels… if you’re a smaller business, you should probably focus your attention on web marketing for now. But who knows what might happen in the world of mobile marketing in the future? However, this is a case of not running before you can walk, so if you would like some advice on sorting out your web marketing, get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.