Your Site Sucks on My Smartphone – Part 1

Try this little test.

Grab your phone – studies guarantee me that it is most likely less than 3 feet/1 meter away. Sit down if you’re not already sitting. (…and if you’re driving WHY are you reading this???)

Now pop open the browser and punch in your own URL.

If everything looks right, tight and beautiful congratulations! But for most readers this will not be the case. the reason is simple – you haven’t created a mobile-optimized version of your site for smartphone users and we’re not happy about it.

It gets worse - Google is not happy

And when Google is not happy it costs you money. Because they are now imposing a de-facto PPC cost penalty on every site that does not do a few hyper-critical things when it comes to serving mobile phone visitors. I’ll cover these here and give you some ideas how to fix the problem later.  Let’s get started…

Thing 1 – Mobile Device/Browser Detection:

What browser are you using? My site knows and will redirect you to the mobile version of this page. Question is: does your site do this? If not, and you’re using Adwords, you are probably already seeing your PPC begin costs rise. Here’s why – Google prefers that you give your visitors relevant content and that now includes appropriately formated content for the device they used to get to your page.

Not serving a mobile optimized experience to smartphone users can negatively impact your page score shoving you further down on that coveted Page One or worse, off to page two and beyond. You have two choices: crank up your spend (dramatically, like 200 to 400%) or get a mobile-optimized site up and running pronto.

Thing 2 – “Got Flash”?  Oops! (…and then @#$-!*&@)

Flash is a type of web design code that can do incredible things that html and css just can’t accomplish. If you want to make a beautiful, interactive, memorable end user experience, you build in flash.

It’s expensive, but boy is it cool. Your fancy-pants web designer may have wooed you with tales of fortune and glory – and how having this flash-based Wunder-Site will have clients opening their wallets in mad droves to buy your stuff – but there’s a big problem with this…

The problem with flash is that NO apple powered mobile devices (iOS) can read a single line of it. Okay, maybe more correctly they can read it, they just refuse to display it. And Apple swears on a stack of bibles the they never will. That means aeveryuser viewing a flash based website on an ipad, iphone, or ipod touch gets basically NOTHING. Gurgle Gurgle – that’s the sound of thousands of $$$ of web-design money going down the drain.

Thing 3 – A Real True Mobile Optimized Site

Do you actually have a “mobile version” of your site. What I’m talking about is not what you may think. “Mobile version” does not mean the automatic Shrinky-Dink version of your standard site that shows up in a mobile browser (and that no human can read).

It may mean simply using a WordPress plug-in to ‘automagically’ re-render your site on the fly (as we do here) but this will not work for ‘traditional’ HTML and CSS based sites.

I mean a specific, separate, deployment of your entire site – or at least the mobile-relevant pages, (more on this later). If you don’t then NOW is the time to get started on this. The problem for most business is, your current web designer (does anybody still say ‘webmaster’ ?) will probably have no clue on how to do this much less what to include.

Who’s using Mobile you ask?

(Source: http://www.infoworld.com/t/ipad/ipad-effect-produces-surprising-browser-share-results-174785)

Next Article I’ll cover how to fix this…

Until then, here is a great info-graphic: http://socialmediamarketinginstitute.com/blog/whos-using-mobile-location-based-services/

For more info, be sure to read this article – http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/159055/