Mobile FAQs

It's no surprise that the majority of searches that are carried out online are from mobile devices and having a mobile-friendly website is critical for any local business. Take a look at these stats before we get into how you can get the fastest mobile website to improve conversions and inevitably, leads and bookings.

• 61% of mobile searchers are more likely to contact a local business if they have a mobile-friendly site. (Junto, 2019)
• 53% of mobile website visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load. For every one-second delay in site load time, conversions fall by 12% (Google, 2018)

Having a mobile-friendly website that loads in 2 seconds is the goal for any business that wishes to capitalize on clicks and website visitors. Let's get into how you can ensure your business has the best possible mobile website:

• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Google launched AMP in 2016 with the goal to improve the page load time and user experience of searchers. In short, AMP basically strips down the HTML code to bare bones and prioritizes delivering the most essential content of the web page. The Google AMP cache then helps instantly load the page when the visitor returns to the website. However, having AMP to every page of your website is not recommended, and as Milestone CMS deals with AMP, we ensure that the most important pages, or pages that have the highest engagement, are converted to AMP.

• Reduce re-directs

Having pages with re-directs will only increase the load time as the server will take time to retrieve the original content which could result in visitors bouncing off the page due to slow page load.

• Keep the website design simple and compress images

Having an intricate design might attract website visitors, but increases the load time due to the heavy code. Also, use smaller images that are suitable for mobile devices to ensure there is no time spent loading them.

• Turn browsing caching on

This will ensure that the page loads instantaneously when the user revisits the page.

• Minimize the sign-up steps

If you wish for visitors to first sign-up to your page to see the content, ensure there are not more than 3-4 steps. However, having a sign-up option on the website rather than the first screen a visitor sees on the page should be a thought.

• Ensure the mobile page is responsive and meets Google's mobile-first indexing standards

Having a page that is responsive will certainly help with your rankings as it is a standard when Google indexes the mobile page. Of course, you'd want to carry out an in-depth mobile SEO of your page to ensure that you've got it all covered to be a mobile-first website.

Considering that there are millions of apps, ensuring visibility of your app could be a genuine challenge and you could approach like how you would carry out SEO of a website to ensure it is visible on Page 1 to get the highest clicks and impressions. When optimizing your apps on Play Stores, follow the steps:

• Carry out in-depth market research and identify keywords The first step is to know your competition and analyze what they are doing to achieve visibility. Take note of all the meta data factors (title, icon, developer name, screenshots, description, feature graphic) that they are displaying and achieving success. The next step is to use keyword tools to know the searches and queries on Play Stores that are trending, and jot down the most-used long-tail keywords that you can use in your meta data.
• Carry out an A/B testing Google has an A/B testing tool integrated into the Google Play Console and you could use it to make a comparison. Make two listings with all the required meta data and elements and make a comparison based on the results each listing will fetch you.
• Track the performance of the App Like you can change the content of a website to make it more relevant and click-worthy, you can change the meta data of your App to improve its performance. Scrutinize the performance of the keywords that you have used and decide whether it needs to be changed or updated. Basically, optimize your content until you see positive changes.
   
  Pay close attention to the URL structure of your App, this can’t be changed and needs to be concise and have the most appropriate keyword to feature in the search list. Next, ensure that your title, developer name, and description include the keywords of your research (ones that will work) and are catchy to get the user sure that the App is what he/she wants. The screenshots, icon, and feature graphic should be good enough to grab the attention of the user.

Absolutely, because the features of AMP and PWA complement each other with their functionalities and pave the way to a super-fast user experience for users. While AMP will help with fast page load speed, the other advanced functionalities of PWA will ensure that your website visitors are getting the best of both worlds. Consider AMP as the entry to PWA. In fact, Milestone CMS makes the best use of the capabilities of both features AMP and PWA to give our clients the best possible website experience. While AMP offers stellar page load speed, we use PWA for our clients to re-engage with their customers using push notifications.

While responsive sites were the first step to allow websites to suit mobile devices, Progressive web apps have gone a few steps ahead for mobile websites and apart from faster responsiveness for mobile websites, they offer advanced functionalities such as faster load speed and caching, offline usability, improved security, easy installation with just the link, accessibility irrespective of the browser, and can be used for push notifications to re-engage with customers. Overall, while PWAs are more expensive, they come with the aforementioned functionalities that are perfect for online bookings and transactions, and better for mobiles.

As the name suggests, Progressive web apps (PWAs) are web applications that give a native app-like experience to users - basically, websites that look and function like apps. PWAs offer several perks such as faster load speed, responsive design, HTTP secure, accessibility for all types of browsers, offline usability, and has personalized functions as websites can use them for push notifications, etc.

Initially, desktop websites were considered the primary version and mobile websites were the alternate version for businesses, but following search behavior and trends of mobile searches, this has changed and Google decided to introduce mobile-first indexing. What it means is pretty simple, if your website has a desktop and mobile version, the mobile version will be indexed first, which means for it to rank, it needs to follow the SEO best practices. If your desktop is ranking well, and your mobile website is similar in layout to the desktop version, you just have to ensure that it is responsive to ensure that it ranks as well. Of course, they are searchable. If a query is made using a mobile device, Google will display your mobile version to users.

While AMP does have its drawbacks with regard to reduction in display of advertisements and stripped-down analytics, decreasing traffic to your website is not one of them. In fact, the sole purpose of AMP is to reduce the page load time and improve the engagement and experience of website visitors. With logical SEO reasoning, AMP will only increase the traffic to your website and inevitably will improve your mobile page ranking.

As a business, covering all possible touchpoints with customers is absolutely necessary to leverage the reach of your business to improve engagement and conversions. Though your business has the majority of its traffic on your desktop website, following the latest trends, majority of searches are carried out on mobile devices, and the numbers of searches for local businesses on mobile devices are increasing as every day passes. Having a mobile website is essential in this day and age to not be left behind, and if you do have an existing mobile website, ensuring that it is mobile-friendly and has the AMP framework for the most important pages will certainly improve the traffic to your mobile website.

The Americans with Disabilities Act is a federal law that prohibits discrimination against anyone with a disability in all areas of public life, and in 2018 and 2019, more than 2,000 cases have been brought before the courts of America for websites and apps been inaccessible to those disabled and using screen readers. For this, your website needs to follow certain guidelines with regard to its functionality and accessibility:

• Should have the ‘Skip to Content’ button to ensure screen readers can read the important content on the web page in a structured manner
• The web page should respond to keyboard navigation to ensure all the functions of the web page can be done just by using a keyboard
• Carousels should have a stop/pause button to give readers with poor vision enough time to view the content
• Labels such as ‘group code’ and ‘coupon code’ should be outside the input area to be captured by screen readers
• The background of the web page should be contrasting with the tabs, drop down-menus, booking button, etc. to be legible

To know more, check out our blog What your business needs to take care of to be ADA lawsuit-free