It's predicted that mobile search will outpace desktop in 2015. What does that mean for you and your website? You want to make sure that clients and customers can easily find and browse your site on any device - whether it's a desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile phone. Thankfully there are a few tools out there that can do the testing for you :
Test your site using Google's Mobile-Friendly test
This takes only moments to do! Go here and enter your website's URL to check if it's mobile friendly or not : https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ . If there are issues, you can follow the outlined steps to improve your site's mobile friendliness.
Test your site using Google's Webmaster Tools for mobile usability
This tool requires that you've already setup your site with Google's Webmaster tools, so if you haven't done that already I recommend doing that because this is just one of the helpful tools that Webmaster Tools provides : https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-usability
What are the top three things I should know when building a site for mobile devices?
1. Make it easy for your customers!
Remember that as devices get smaller and smaller, there is less and less screen real estate for your web page content. You may want to write an insightful or interesting blog, but keep the most important actions you want your customers and clients to take easy.
What does this mean for hypnotists ?
- Make your most important tasks you want customers and clients to do easy and obvious.
- Make your contact information easy to find, including your location, email address, and phone number. Don't make your potential clients or customers look to hard to be able to connect with you.
- Include linkable assets - like a map to your address.
- Note that "click to call" features are not required to be coded anymore - meaning most modern mobile browsers automatically detect telephone numbers and will enable them to call the phone number if clicked on from a mobile device.
2. Measure your mobile device traffic
Using Google Analytics or another tool, measure your website traffic. This tells you a few things - first how many of your visitors are on a mobile device, and second, if they're able to complete the most important tasks on your site. If your site has on average 25% mobile traffic, but only 5% of your visitors are completing your most important tasks on a mobile device, that means it's not mobile friendly.
I wrote a blog post on measuring mobile traffic that you may find useful.
3. Use a Responsive design for your web template
A Responsive design is a term that means that the template you use for your website will be responsive to a variety of devices - it will look good on a desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile device. There are responsive website themes or templates that do this work for you. That's another reason using a good Content Management System (like WordPress) can be so helpful, especially for busy entrepreneurs, because if you're using a responsive design, most of the work is done for you.
If you have questions about any of this please leave a comment below or contact me directly.
Erika Flint, BA, BCH, A+CPHI
About Erika Flint, BCH, CPHI
Erika Flint is a Board Certified Hypnotist, Certified Professional Hypnotherapy Instructor, Software Engineer, Web Developer, and she's also AdWords Certified. She became a hypnotists after over a decade as a Software Engineer in Silicon Valley.
Now she enjoys using hypnosis to help clients, teaching hypnosis and hypnotherapy to students in one of her hypnotherapy certification courses, and she also provides website, SEO, and AdWords consulting for Hypnotists to help them reach a wider audience by optimizing their website and bringing in new clients.
She's presented her material at the National Guild of Hypnotists, and you can review the details of that talk here: Get new Clients With Google, fast.
