3 Undisputable Reasons Why Mobile Optimization is Crucial to Digital Marketing

Here’s a trade secret in the digital marketing field: user experience (UX) can make or break your promotion efforts. Whether you’re advertising a product or service, how your audience interacts with your online channels predicts how they’ll respond to your campaign.

In this article, we’ll discuss what mobile optimization is and how it’s the new frontier of digital marketing. We hope that by the end, we’ll have convinced you to level up your mobile-friendly website and transform it into a channel optimized for phones.

What is Mobile Optimization?

Mobile Optimization is building a version of your online channel to be well-navigated in a mobile setting. This initially means that your images and text display well to smaller screens. But optimizing your site for mobile also has to do with adding navigation features exclusive to phones.

Don’t confuse mobile-friendly sites to channels optimized for phones. Mobile-friendly websites are essentially a more compact version of a desktop site- they don’t offer new features nor do they promise great navigation options for the viewer.

Why is Mobile Optimization important to Digital Marketing?

From online shopping to connecting with loved ones, more and more people are using their phones to surf the net.

According to We Are Social’s Digital 2022 report, 92.1% of the 4.95 billion internet users access the web on their phones. Although you’re not catering to that many users, it can be presumed that a huge chunk of your audience will be on their phones.

First impressions are crucial. According to a study by Google, 53% of mobile users leave a website that loads for more than 3 seconds. In the same study, 79% of mobile users reported that they’re more likely to visit or share a site that’s easy to use.

Picture this: a user stumbles upon your brand via a social media advertisement. They click on the ad and they get redirected to your website. It’s messy and slow, the photos are too huge, the and the links are unclickable. They can’t find what they’re looking for.

They find it hard to navigate and they exit the site. Now you’ve lost a potential conversion. This negatively affects your bounce rate. This, in turn, can decrease your search result rankings and can therefore decimate the traffic driven to your website.

What are the benefits of Mobile Optimization?

We’ve told you what mobile optimization is and we’ve explained why it’s crucial for digital marketing. But what are the specific benefits you can reap when you optimize your channels for mobile? Let us count the ways:

1. Your audience will love you more
   Love is a big word, but trust us- users appreciate a good mobile site. In a survey conducted on February 2021, people spend an average of five to six hours on their phone, not including work-related usage.

   During that period, users can visit a multitude of websites or apps- make yours stand out by providing the best user experience you can offer. If users have a negative experience with your pages, they’re likely to exit immediately and never visit again.

   UX should be a huge consideration when building your websites. Here’s a few tips and tricks you can take note to improve your channels:

   • Give your users what they want- immediately. Don’t beat around the bush. Provide the most pertinent information on top. Whether they’re looking at a product listing or they’re reading an article that answers a question they looked up, they want the details presented at first look. No one wants to scroll to oblivion to see what they need.
   • Beef up your speeds. As we’ve mentioned before, you literally have less than a second to grab your users’ attention. If your pages’ load times are more than a second, you’ll likely to lose your audience. Even if you have the answer to their question or you have the best product for their needs, if you don’t make the load speed snappy, you’ll lose a potential customer.
   • Strategize the size. Users’ attention tends to be drawn to bigger elements- huge photos and blown up fonts. To emphasize the information you want to showcase in your pages (like headers and images) you can play around with sizes. Directing your users’ eyes to these information can help decrease the time they spent looking for what they want, therefore improving their experience.
2. You’ll level up audience engagement

   The better the mobile website design, the longer your users would want to stay at your pages. If you craft your site to be interactive, easy-to-use, and informative, the more likely your audience would want to explore its pages. 

   Pro tip: Internal linking helps encouraging site exploration. Strategic internal linking within your mobile site is also one of the best practices in digital marketing, particularly Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

   If you’ve convinced your users to go on a deeper dive in your site (i.e. checking out other offerings, store or office branches, and customer service options) you’re one step closer to making a sale.

3. You’ll significantly improve your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Rankings

   The topic of SEO and SERP is a nuanced one, but let us break down in two quick sentences. To put it in the simplest terms, SEO has to do with ranking high in the SERP. Ranking at the top of the SERP increases brand visibility, which has a direct correlation to higher engagement and conversions.

   The average user doesn’t check past the first page of Search Engine Results. If you want your audience to find your pages, you want to rank high.

   Improving UX is a considerable factor in how search engines determine which results to display first. If your website has a track record of negative user experience because it’s lacking mobile optimization, your pages are likely to be buried at the lowest of SERP rankings.

Need help in optimizing for mobile? Let us help!

In a market growing to be more mobile-dependent, your business should be poised to keep up. To maximize this growing audience, make sure that all your digital marketing efforts can translate well to mobiles.

There’s too much potential in a mobile-optimized site–don’t make the mistake of missing out.

If you’re gearing up to optimize your channels for mobile but you’re not sure how to start- we got your back. Should you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us via our official channels.

Here at iTworks Global Solutions–an outsourcing company based in the Philipines–we have a dedicated team of experts ready to help companies with all their digital marketing needs!