The increasing importance of a mobile-optimized experience

We're squarely in a multi-screen world and people are using smartphones to search, shop and get things done more often than ever. That means delivering a great experience on mobile devices is increasingly important, since it affects organic visibility, Quality Score, ad position and cost, sales, and customer loyalty.

The mobile experience matters
Recent research conducted with Nielsen shows that 48% of mobile consumers start their purchase journey with paid and organic search results. With mobile ads, the quality of your mobile landing page experience directly affects how your ad ranks (including whether it's seen at all) and what you'll pay per click. Mobile site experience factors can also directly affect your organic search rankings.

Getting more mobile traffic and lower CPCs is great. But after the click, your mobile landing page experience is even more important for converting visits into sales and building customer loyalty. According to 2012 research on what users want most from mobile sites, 67% of consumers say that a mobile friendly site makes them more likely to buy, and 74% say they're more likely to return to that site in the future.

The experience of ProFlowers, a major US-based fresh flower retailer, confirms the benefits of offering a great experience on smaller screens. After launching its mobile-optimized site, Proflowers saw its conversion rate increase by 20-30%. It has also seen mobile contributing more to conversions that occur on other devices.

“Many users check us out on mobile, and then convert on our [traditional desktop] site... Regardless of where the final sale comes from, staying ahead in mobile is an invaluable part of our successful marketing and customer relationship strategies.”

- Leif Heikkila, senior director of online marketing, ProFlowers

Resources for making your site more mobile-friendly 
We think every business can succeed at providing a great mobile experience. Here are some resources to help:

• Visit our new multi-screen home for resources and partners to help optimize your site for multiple screens. It's rich with web developer resources like the PageSpeed tool that analyzes your web site to provide code-level feedback on how to improve load times for a better mobile experience. 
• You'll find more information on how to make sure your website is well indexed and mobile-friendly in ourGoogle Developers site for webmasters.
• For best practices and inspiring examples of winning mobile marketing strategies, please check out our recently updated Mobile Playbook. 

Building Smartphone-Optimized Websites

Introduction

With increasing smartphone usage, making a website that is friendly to smartphone users has now become a critical part of website management. This document outlines Google's recommendations to webmasters who wish to serve content in optimized formats for both desktop and smartphone users, and notes the common mistakes you want to avoid. We have pages about websites for tablets and feature phones too.

Overview of Google's recommendations

Google supports three different configurations for creating smartphone-optimized websites:

• Responsive design: serves the same HTML for one URL and uses CSS media queries to determine how the content is rendered on the client side. This removes the possible glitches of user-agent detection and frees users from redirects. This is Google's recommended configuration.
• Dynamic serving: serves different HTML for one URL depending on the user-agent. Use the Vary HTTP header to indicate you're doing this.
• Separate mobile site: redirects users to a different URL depending on the user-agent. Use bidirectional link annotations to indicate the relationship between the two URLs for search engines.

Make sure you aren't blocking resources like JavaScrpt and CSS for search engines, regardless of which configuration you're choosing. For how-to on the technical implementation, visit our details page.

Types of mobile devices

1. Smartphones: Phones with browsers that are capable of rendering normal desktop pages, at least to some extent. This category includes recent mobile browsers that can render HTML5, and covers a diversity of devices, such as Android-based phones and iPhones.
2. Feature phones: Phones with browsers without the capability to render normal desktop webpages. This includes browsers for cHTML (iMode), WML, WAP, and the like.

We do not consider tablets as mobile devices because, among other reasons, they tend to have larger screens. Most tablet users expect to see tablet- or desktop-optimized pages when browsing the web. This means that, unless you offer tablet-optimized content, users expect to see your desktop site rather than your smartphone site.

Optimizing Your Mobile Website: The Benefits

Why it is Advantageous for You to Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices

According to a mobile users’ survey, at least 50% of the population of smartphone users in the United States of America alone, would be accessing the Internet via their mobile devices. These users would be surfing the Web for multiple purposes, such as downloading apps, getting information from search engines, making mobile payments and so on. In order to reach the maximum number of users and also to enhance the conversion rate of casual visitors paying to customers, more and more companies are now working at optimizing theirmobile Website for different mobile devices.

Mentioned below are the advantages of optimizing your mobile Website for smartphones and tablets:

Better User Experience

Since mobile Websites are especially designed keeping handhelds and other mobile gadgets in mind, they are naturally capable of enhancing the general user experience. Keeping your audience engaged at all times ensures that you further attract them towards your business, thereby substantially increasing the chances of their becoming your loyal customers.

Typically, mobile users are looking for instant answers to all their queries and do not want to wait longer than a few seconds. Websites are lighter than regular Websites and so, they load much faster. The faster they get to browse your site and receive that answer, the more inclined they would be to visit you again.

Heightened Interaction with the User

A mobile Website enables you to work around with a whole host of mobile-specific features, such as offer maps, location-based features, click-to-call functionality and so on. This is even more beneficial to you when they visit your local area of functioning. This way, they can find and connect to you easier.

The mobile user is always online and can access the Internet from wherever he or she may be. This high level of connectivity helps you keep connected with your current customers, while also offering you the opportunity to reach an ever wider and newer audience.

Enhanced Search Engine Rankings

Creating an optimized mobile Website helps you enhance your ranking on mobile search engines. This is extremely beneficial to your business, as it helps you establish yourself in the mobile sphere as well, also getting yourself included in an increasing number of directories online.

Creation of a Brand Identity

A site that is completely optimized for the mobile Web lets you stand head and shoulders above the rest of the competition, putting you at par with the most established companies, who are viewed as being serious about their business.

This enhances the reputation of your company, thereby creating even more visitors you can showcase your products and services to.

Offline Integration

The use of QR codes can help you easily integrate with offline media, especially press and print media. Your QR code can be scanned with smartphones and these are then electronically translated into information such as your Website URL, email address or a simple SMS.

QR codes are now becoming a popular means of offline advertisement for companies all over the world. Inserting this code into regular advertisements helps direct visitors toward your business, thereby enabling you to open up an instant communication channel with a vast offline audience as well.

Video:How to Use QR Codes With an Android

More Affordable than Mobile App Development

Creating a mobile Website is much easier and also lesser expensive than developing a mobile app for your business. Since this works in tandem with the Web, you will have far lesser issues than with a mobile app. Mobile apps need to be formatted in different ways fordifferent mobile systems and devices. Apps also require to be downloaded and installed, in order to be accessed.

A mobile Website, on the other hand, works uniformly across the range of major smartphone browsers. Needless to say, however, some businesses require both a mobile Website and an app to reach the maximum possible target audience.

In Conclusion

The mobile Web has now proved itself as one of the most effective ways of communicating with a target audience. Given the sudden increase in users browsing the Internet via their smartphones and tablets, it only makes sense to optimize your own Website for mobile, so as to take full advantage of the wide range of benefits it has to offer.