A little over a week and a half ago, I blogged about my discoveries on the mobile traffic my website gets.
In my case it accounted for some 3.5% of all my traffic, but this, in fact, meant thousands of mobile visitors every year.
I ended that blog post with the following words:
The fourth quarter is quickly approaching … but there is still time to analyze your websites, and make them (especially those of them that are in any way related to the Q4 shopping season) more mobile-friendly.
But how exactly do you “make them more mobile-friendly”?
I was happy to find an article on this very topic in this month’s issue of the Target Marketing magazine. In it Brian Klais gives a few good tips on how “to optimize your mobile Web results.” Here are the 8 best practices (both for mobile sites in general, and mobile-optimized landing page, in particular) that I’ve picked from that article:
- Provide a clean, and swiftly-loading interface. No page should exceed 100 kilobytes in size.
- Navigation must be “intuitive and uncluttered”
- Links must be labeled with proper descriptions (not just “click here”)
- Provide a search function
- Do not forget your CTAs (calls to action)
- Flee from serving them pages that require any horizontal scrolling
- Individual landing page URLs should be as short as possible. Keep them under 40 characters
- Unlike it is with regular page titles (which are recommended to be kept at 67 characters or under), mobile browsers display only the first 45 characters, and when bookmarked, only the first 25 characters are displayed in the bookmark section. So, you want to keep the titles short and sweet too
Got anything else to add? Feel free to do so by adding your comments below.
Geno-
Thanks for summarizing these guidelines here. I think the biggest point in my experience is to avoid requiring mobile users to scroll horizontally. On our site (wordpress), I’ve been using a mobile browser plugin with decent success that follows much of your guidelines. It’s called WPtouch iPhone Theme (Google it). A little misleading, as it works on devices other than iPhone.
I got a sales call yesterday as a result of someone searching on their Android for my product, my SERP entry included my phone number, which was just one click for the prospect to call me. I think this is a best practice if you have a business where you want prospects to call you.
Thanks again for putting this together Geno!
-Travis
Pingback: Mobile Marketing Simplified for Local Business | Capture the Conversation