On a study conducted Jan 2017, WeAreSocial recorded more than 4.917 billion unique mobile users. This can be attributed to the very many smartphones and mobile gadgets that are now available at a very low price. Because of this constant increase of mobile users all over the world and the same amount of people getting access to social media networks, online shops, and a lot more, companies now tend to gear towards the idea of going mobile-friendly, subsequently giving birth to mobile marketing. According to Mobile Marketing Magazine, most recent estimates show that mobile will account for 50% of all digital ad spend in 2016 – worth around $100 billion.
Now, almost every online business is going mobile-friendly, giving each and every user the experience they surely deserve. Even search engines started jumping on the mobile bandwagon. Google alone launched what online marketers call Mobilegeddon 2.0, an analytics-based campaign that wishes to improve online users experience through favouring sites that are mobile-friendly. In short, this will be an added ranking factor to the search engine results page of the authority engine.
This is an extra challenge to online marketers, though. They now need to make a website more relevant and effective, to both the users and the search engines. But how does an online marketer know if the site is optimised? The fastest way is to use Google’s Mobile-Friendly test tool.
Sensis also breaks down the guidelines of the search engine for easier implementations.
Design
Google favours a layout that is easy to read with fonts set to 14-16 pixels, easy to access buttons, and content that is locked width to width to keep the user from scrolling from one side to the other.
Go easy on Media Rich Contents
While it is cool to watch videos on mobile phones and gadgets, some multimedia programs just don’t work. A good example to this is Flash as this program does not work on a lot of mobile devices. Pop-ups are also a major no-no for mobiles. All of these things, however great the intention is, will only waste precious time and ruin user experience.
Responsive site
The signal configuration of a website is very important. This has to have a single code that is the same HTML and/or JavaScript set, which enables the website to resize by itself to fit the screen size where it is being displayed on. The Dynamic Serving is just as important. This is the server-site to which any change is automated in response to the current device it is being accessed on.
Page Speed
The speed of access to the site is very important to user experience – and the search engine. The performance speed or load time of a site may vary from device to another. A faster way to test the load time performance of a site can be done through Google’s PageSpeed Insights page.
