Go Mobile

It's no secret that having a mobile friendly site will infact increase your customer base (and hopefully sales), and whilst companies are still not focused on producing such 'mobile friendly' sites, they're not only losing customers but also causing annoyance to search engines such as Google. Google has continued to push such companies to produce these sites, not only for the company's benefit, but also in the hope that the use of Google to find such sites will continue to be used. According to Google Mobile Ads Blog 61% of people would quickly switch to another site if they couldn't find what they were looking for straight away - and thats a big percentage to consider. Google also say companies without mobile sites are helping their competitors, not only that, but they're ruining their reputation in such a digital friendly age.

source: Google Mobile Ads Blog

Hend (2014) created a study which compromised some of the most important criteria that needed to be met in order to produce a good mobile friendly site. After having a read through, really the list is quite extensive, so I've put together a few bullet points which should summarise some of the key criteria that customers are looking for:

• Easy to learn and navigate the site, including easy return to home/main screen.
• Links that go to other mobile friendly pages!
• Sufficient space between links, to avoid what the author refers to as 'fat finger syndrome'.
• Input of numbers and letters easily (so true, card details!)
• NO under construction pages, NO broken links, NO pages in separate windows!

Although some of these points seem pretty obvious to some of us (especially those who use mobile friendly sites often), it's one of those things that can easily missed, and in actual fact cause such deterrence from a site that it's so easy to lose customers. It's also important to note that creating a mobile friendly site is relatively easy, there's tonnes of templates and tools to help create them, a long with cheap production costs. But they do have their drawbacks, unless done correctly, creating a mobile site can affect search engine visibility. The good news is that Google have actually released a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, and if you scroll to page 24, you'll find a section dedicated to improving SEO especially for mobile sites.

REFERENCES:

Google Mobile Ads Blog (2012) Mobile friendly sites turn visitors into customers [Online] <http://googlemobileads.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/mobile-friendly-sites-turn-visitors.html> [Accessed 8th May 2014]

Hend S. Al-Khalifa, (2014) "A framework for evaluating university mobile websites". Online Information Review, Vol. 38 Iss: 2, pp.166 - 185.