Drawing prospects and customers to your brand’s website is half the battle, the other half is keeping them there and securing their business. CMOs know that a brand’s digital experience (its website, social media presence, etc.) determines whether or not prospects will stick around to get more information about the brand.
Since 2017, mobile devices have consistently accounted for half of all global website traffic, recently hovering around the 60% mark. While apps, social media, streaming services and video platforms have contributed to an increase in mobile usage, remote work, accessibility and convenience also play a major role in drawing users to mobile sites.
For organizations, this means special attention must be placed on optimizing mobile speed to improve the user experience. Even if you have the best content, most engaging social media posts, and a compelling product, customers will move on if they cannot easily access your website. Mobile site speed (or, rather, a lack of speed) can negatively impact your SEO efforts, making it even harder to get in front of competitors.
Since your mobile site might be the first impression potential customers receive about your company, and the first resource they might seek out for contact information, you need to make it count. Let us tell you how.
Mobile site speed requires lightning-fast downloads.
The average American spends 5 hours and 25 minutes on their phone and, while that may seem like a lot of time, every second counts. How often have you followed a website’s link only to find a blank page waiting to load? Consumers expect information to be readily available, and quickly. This is especially true when using a mobile device, which consumers use to conduct quick searches.
If customers are forced to wait more than a few seconds for a site to load, they’ll become frustrated, leaving your page and looking elsewhere. You could have the best marketing assets and the clearest messaging, but if your website doesn’t load quickly, you’ll miss out on an opportunity to engage customers.
The slower the speed, the lower the SEO ranking.
While mobile search engines and websites have made it easier for customers to seek and find information about business products and services, the amount of options available to them means users have to wade through a seemingly endless list of options before diving into a business’s offerings. As a result, users typically click into the first few pages that come up in a search, favoring businesses that have achieved a high SEO ranking.
Guiding a large percentage of digital marketing efforts, SEO best practices have made one thing clear: Content is king. Once your business has established its content marketing needs, you’ll need to start thinking about search engine optimization and rankings to deliver that content and generate leads.
One way to improve your ranking is by creating and maintaining a user-friendly website and while much of the emphasis for this experience centers desktop, it’s important to carry that focus to mobile sites. In fact, many B2B SEO experts believe that Google penalizes sites that aren’t mobile-optimized.
Buyers are seeking a sleek, user-friendly design and interface.
It’s no secret that the modern buyer is more autonomous and discerning than ever before. Today, 65% of customers rely heavily on websites, prefererring remote human interactions or digital self-service options over traditional, direct methods of communication with sales reps. In addition, customers require an average of 27 touch points before converting. So how can you make every interaction count?
Start by increasing your brand’s visibility with a high SEO ranking. Once on your site, ensure users have a positive experience. This means your site has a streamlined, professional, mobile-first design that’s easy to navigate on devices and allows them to quickly and effortlessly utilize your site’s interactive elements.
Achieve this by implementing a few simple B2B web design trends that balance complex technical features with ease of use.
Provide an app-like experience.
Make your website a fun, engaging experience for visitors by thinking like an app developer. How can you simplify the design and streamline the mobile experience so that visitors can find information more quickly and be intrigued by interesting graphics or innovative experiences? Think creatively.
While a variety of factors impact mobile site speed, including connectivity and the device itself, businesses have control over their site’s design and optimization. You want to strike a balance between delight and delivery: Make your mobile website experience interesting, interactive, and even entertaining, but make sure that the information is clear, readily available, and easy to find.
Simplify with a one-page website.
Are you trying to share information about a specific product? Or are you still in the process of building out a full website? Getting your name out there is an important part of establishing your brand and connecting with potential customers. Even if you don’t have the resources to develop a regular blogging cadence or provide a detailed overview of your latest launch, one-page websites like product pages and landing pages offer quick, simple solutions.
Even when you do have more information to share, one-page sites provide a simple way to share your message to new visitors without overwhelming them. One-page sites are also mobile-friendly, making information and important resources available in an easy-to-digest manner.
Implement AI-powered design.
The constant headlines about the use of AI in marketing may make it seem overwhelming, but it can be a valuable tool for adapting to meet customer needs. From automation to reducing redundancies, AI-powered design works to quickly identify problems and provide solutions. AI can resize images, optimize layouts for different devices, and automate other repetitive tasks. By analyzing user data, AI can also make recommendations to create more effective designs that reduce latency.
Make smart design choices.
Good design is universal and B2Bs know how important it is to clearly communicate and engage site visitors. Start by designing with minimalism in mind. Think big headlines, concise messaging, contrasting colors, and plenty of white space between text and images. Adding clickable interfaces for calls to action, additional pricing information, and communication resources makes it easy for users to independently navigate your site.
Prioritize convenience.
With a limited amount of time and touchpoints guiding user experience, filling out a form, checking out, or starting a chat should be as fast and reliable on mobile as it is on a web browser. Ensuring your site design places all of your calls to action in high-traffic, visible areas capable of maximizing mobile conversions will also help increase those leads.
Aligning your website design, B2B content marketing and SEO to prioritize a mobile-responsive, mobile-friendly website will also add to the user experience.
How to Check Your Mobile Site’s Speed
Understanding autonomous buyers and the generally short attention spans of our modern society, you want your website to provide as much information as quickly as possible. Videos, audio files, images, digital brochures, and white papers are excellent, comprehensive sources of information, but they can negatively impact your site’s loading speed. Plugins, themes, coding and server-side scripts also affect your website speed, even more so for mobile devices.
Frequent site audits across devices can also give you real-time results and reveal areas requiring attention. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool analyzes your site’s speed across devices, providing a separate score and recommendations to improve those results for mobile and desktop versions of the site. The interface mirrors a simple Google search. First, enter your website’s URL into the text field, then select analyze.
Google’s infrastructure provides additional tools to analyze and optimize your website, providing access to popular, open-source libraries, improving privacy and security, and providing updates on the latest ways to enhance web page performance and optimization.
How to Optimize Mobile Site Speed
Using Google’s PageSpeed Insights and conducting other analyses of your mobile site’s speed, performance, and general ease of use is just one way to enhance user experience. More can be done on the backend to optimize mobile site speed.
Use local caches.
For mobile browsers, using local memory to cache resources over remote memory can improve speed. Like the name suggests, local caches are beneficial for the local application, perfect for mobile devices. Cache plugins also reduce resources used to load pages.
Reign in redirects.
Loading a website with too many redirects will lead to a frustrating user experience bogged down by slow speeds. When building a website, be mindful of redirects in internal links and menus. For established sites, conduct an audit to look for duplicate and unnecessary redirects, deleting the ones you find.
This goes for plugins, too. Minimizing the amount of plugins on your site by reviewing and removing old, outdated plugins will also enhance your security. Disable plugins, then turn them on one by one. Use PageSpeed Insights to test site speed and determine which ones should be deleted.
Resize media content.
Large images, carousels, videos and pop-ups may work well on desktops, but that’s not the case for mobile sites.
Along with reducing speed, consider the different ways media affects a site’s navigation. Is a large image or video blocking important information or impacting the content above the fold? With limited space, every corner of a mobile site is valuable real estate. Ensure your media isn’t disruptive, distracting, or disengaging.
If you need to ensure your business is set up for mobile site optimization but don’t know where to start, reach out to us here at Zen Media.
