Google’s Coming to Get You!
Mobilegeddon is upon us … and you’re still here! Congratulations! But will you be in a year? While this asteroid may have already hit, it’s possible that its after-effects will not be felt immediately. You may think that you are doing all you need to do with your B2B marketing strategies, but we want you to know—that may not be so. As we talked about in our most recent blog post, the Google mobile algorithm is already at work crawling the web in real-time, and the ranking results may take time to show tangible drops, or rises, in SEO ranking. But this does not mean you have time to spare.
Let’s reiterate: this does not mean you have time to spare.
Don’t Panic—Prepare!
Okay, no panicking either. What’s important is that you need to put optimizing and mobilizing your website on a front burner, with the heat on high. That means making it mobile-friendly, or responsive, as it is otherwise known.
The stats for internet traffic on mobile devices continue to rise. Neptune Web shared results of a report by Cisco that by the end of 2014, mobile devices accounted for 55% (that’s OVER half!) of all global internet traffic. Mobile traffic grew by 69% in 2014 alone (wouldn’t you love those growth numbers in your own business)—and it is expected to grow tenfold by 2019. Wouldn’t you love to grab some of that traffic?
Brand Standing
Aside from the sheer you’re-out-of-your-mind-to-think-these-numbers-don’t-apply-to-your-business mind set, you have a brand and reputation to consider in all of this. Especially within the framework of B2B marketing, it is essential that you preserve your standing among peers, vendors, customers, and prospects that you got it going on. They need to feel confident that you are employing the latest, most contemporary business practices. And that means, as well, with your most public portal of entry to your company—your website.
You Gotta Up the UX!
It’s not only about the perception to prospects and customers that you are competent and savvy in how to reach and communicate with them—and dare I say, Google’s algorithm—but as much about their user experience (UX) when they get to your website. It’s safe to assume that anyone coming to your website is looking for info: an answer to a query; a solution for a fix; new business or products. You need to give it to them—as quickly as possible.
In a time.com article last year, Tony Haile tells us that 55% of visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds on a website. Your, ours, everyone’s. Industry standard for a good load time for a responsive website is less than four seconds (the average being 5.82 seconds), according to a 2014 Trilibis study of responsive sites cited by Marketing Land. Not only will customers click away from the site if it doesn’t load quickly enough (the stats support this), but the double whammy is that Google may penalize your site’s ranking because of a slow loading time. Here’s a tidbit garnered from Google engineers in an online article from The New York Times: “People will visit a Web site less often if it is slower than a close competitor by more than 250 milliseconds (a millisecond is a thousandth of a second).” And that was from 2012—I can only imagine that our patience quotient is less tolerant since then. Take into account limited phone-carrier connections, and the clock is perpetually ticking ... against you.
Easy Viewing
Optimizing UX makes it easier for people to find the info they are looking for. Some of the more “cosmetics” features of responsive web design will incorporate these features:
- Easy scrolling
- Seamless resizing
- Readable text, without tapping or zooming
- No unplayable content
- No horizontal scrolling
Vicious Cycle
Of course, all this is predicated on the notion that they can reach you at all when they search from a mobile device. Google’s goal is that users are able to “easily find high-quality and relevant” search results. Will they be able to reach you if you don’t rank because you haven’t boosted your mobile SEO rank? If you don’t have a responsive website, you may not show up at all. Yup, it’s a vicious cycle. Don’t let the asteroid turn into a whirlwind cyclone of destruction, rendering your previous B2B marketing strategies moot.
There are some very effective initiatives you can take to ensure you are maximizing SEO ranking, prospects’ ability to find you, and your ability to remain a top player in the worldwide web’s ever increasing mobility factor.
Go Mobile-Friendly
Google graciously provides a few quick assessment tools to help you gauge where you are on the playing field with Mobilegeddon.
Take charge by heading off this storm:
- You can plug individual pages into their Mobile-Friendly Test, and you can check the status of your entire site using their Mobile Usability report in Webmaster Tools.
- Check out Google’s FAQs to get a rundown of answers to the burning questions that may—or may not—have you searching for your own solutions before the SEO web-crawling bots come looking!
- Check with your marketing agency or web developer (Grant Marketing has in-house web design and development and web strategy capabilities) to find out if you are running outdated technologies, such as Flash and older versions of HTML. This advice, according to Neptune Web, goes hand-in-hand with revamping your website “to use technologies that are accessible to all devices including HTML5, JS and CSS.”
- You may not be ready for a complete redesign of your website immediately, but as stated in a recent blog, our marketing software partners at HubSpot recommend that you, at the very least, move your existing site, blog, or landing pages to a mobile-friendly platform. Grant marketing can help you migrate your existing site to HubSpot’s COS, which is inherently responsive.
We may not be as cool as Bruce Willis or as Hollywood as Ben Affleck (though it’s been rumored that we have a Liv Tyler look-alike in the office), but at Grant Marketing, we can get the job done. Let us help you do it before it’s too late.
To ensure that you are moving forward at the right pace with everything in place, we can assess your website. Click here to get your free mobile-friendly website assessment.
