Take away from the article for those of us who are time poor:-
If your website isn’t mobile ready you are losing customers!
Even with the warning Google gave leading up to its latest algorithm change on April 21st 2015 many Australian business websites are not mobile ready.
Approximately 80% of Australians own a smartphone. And nearly all of those smartphone owners use their mobile device to browse the web researching purchases, locating restraunts or trying to find a businesses contact details.
In fact in some areas like hospitality, accommodation and food service between 42 and 50% of website views come from mobile devices.
(For those interested there is an article here on restaurants )
And another factoid, average internet usage on a mobile device is 1.85 hours per day, rising to 2.84 in the age range 16-24 years.
What does this mean for your business? And how does that effect the number of customers finding your place of business online?
Lets try to put this into perspective, 75% of Australian Small to Medium Businesses have some sort of Internet profile.
This internet profile could be website only or include multiple social media profiles, Facebook being the most popular, although Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter are up there too.
Businesses with a Social Media profile only are in the minority and are usually a micro/home based businesses.
Now lets consider this. Out of the 75% who do have a business website only 26% are mobile ready/optimised.
Lets put this into a real life situation:-
Introducing Susi and Mark.
Susi and Mark have just finished a night out having gone to the movies and are get out from the movie showing at slightly after 7pm.
Looking at a 20+ minute drive back to home having only eaten choc top ice-creams and pop-corn neither of them are willing to wait until they get home for dinner but neither of them want a big mac. Susi jumps on her smartphone and Googles local restaurants in the area.
Here are what Susi finds in the first couple of results. ( How does your website do with SEO ?)
Two websites, for local businesses. Restaurant sites. Both list there menus, opening times, and contact details including a reservation system on their sites.
Restaurant A has a desktop optimised site that looks perfectly normal when viewed from a big screen. But doesn’t respond well on her Samsung S5. The content is too big for the screen, images are taking too long to load and the menu system isn’t working too well.
Restaurant B has a responsive design for their site. This means the site responds to the devices screen size and serves both content and structure to suit that device. The site has a mobile menu, a minimal number of small sized images that quickly load over a mobile network, and any structure that would get in the way of the content on a small screen device has been removed.
Which one do you think gets the business?
While we are asking questions it might be a good time to stop and do a simple and quick self assessment of your website here.
With the Nielsen Online Landscape Review – February 2015 showing that 62% of browser use comes from mobile devices the need for your business to be mobile ready, to have in a place a plan that grows your market share online into the future is essential to keep your business succeeding.
Yes there is a lot of numbers in this article, business is like that. Constantly testing, observing, tweaking and re-testing to get your message and brand in front of potential customers is how it works. Data, information and planning around that collected data is just as important as having something to sell in the first place.
I will leave you with one final question, an important one. Do you have a plan for your Business Online?