Mobile Traffic: 3 Questions Business Owners Need to Ask
For most websites, the number of visitors using mobile devices — smart phones, iPads and similar gadgets — is on the rise. That makes it truly important that you take your mobile visitors into account when planning any changes to your website. Doing otherwise is simply a fast way to miss out on sales.
There are three key questions that you need to ask in order to make sure that you’re presenting the best experience to anyone visiting your site from a mobile device.
Is your site responsive? A responsive website will reformat for mobile devices, ideally making the site more usable on phones and tablets. If you’ve built your website in the past 5 years or so, it probably is, but a lot of older B2B websites that we encounter are not mobile friendly.
What do mobile visitors need to do on your site? If someone is accessing your website through their phone, odds are good that they’re not trying to read every page on your site. So creating a mobile version that emphasizes those tasks that a visitor actually needs to complete makes sense. Maybe they need to place an order quickly or confirm a price. Making it particularly easy to perform such tasks will win over customers who rely on their mobile devices.
How are you marketing to your customers? If you’re doing email marketing, a lot of emails are opened on mobile devices, so you need to make sure that your website and/or landing pages are mobile friendly. This will help increase conversion rates and improve the overall user experience.
With a growing percentage of all online traffic coming from mobile devices, you don’t have any option but to make sure that visitors to your site can read what you have to offer. They have to be able to interact with your site whether they’re on an iPad, on the phone or anywhere else.
When you consider that it’s even more likely that a business owner or manager is likely to be out and about when they need information online, it’s especially important for B2B companies to make sure that their websites are ready for mobile users.
5 Ways to Cut Web Costs Without Cutting Results
When you’re already paying for rent, advertising, and every other expense that goes along with running a business, the thought of paying for all the bells and whistles that go along with having a website can seem painful. But a website is a necessity for businesses both large and small. What’s a business owner to do?
There are ways that you can minimize the costs that go along with building and maintaining a website, while still getting the results you want — more clients, more sales, and more awareness of your business.
Learn the content management system. When your web designer is putting together your site in the first place, make sure that they use a content management system. For fairly simple sites, WordPress is a great option (this site is built on WordPress). For more complex sites, we typically use Drupal. As long as you can spend a little time learning how to use that system, you can make updates to the content of your site (like adding new products) without asking your web designer to handle it.
Shop around for your domain name and SSL certificates. There can be some dramatic differences in the prices of registering a domain name between different companies, making it crucial that you look at more than one domain registrar. There can be similar differences with SSL certificates. Similar products from companies like Verisign, Entrust and GoDaddy vary dramatically in cost. It’s important to look at exactly what you get for your money before making up your mind on hosting. Some cut-rate hosting providers don’t give you what you need, despite their low prices and big promises.
Create a consistent style. It’s easier to maintain a website where every page looks similar than one with lots of differences. It also makes it easier to roll out social media accounts, mini-sites, HTML newsletters and every other aspect of your online presence — and the consistency will help your customers recognize your website and other efforts immediately.
“Future proof” your website. While there seem to be constant changes to what technologies and strategies are used for websites, taking as many steps to make sure that your website can be easily updated is important. That can include, but isn’t limited to, avoiding website builders and templates that you can’t be sure have kept up with the times, making sure that your web designer is using the most up-to-date techniques and choosing content management systems that can be easily updated.
Make arrangements to back up your website. Our hosting plans include daily off-site backups, but if your host doesn’t, make sure you have a backup copy of your site. Recovering a website after a problem can be an expensive (not to mention unexpected) process, sometimes requiring you to go back and have the site rebuilt from scratch.
You don’t need to become a web expert to make sure you get the most out of your website and there are some options that make the ongoing costs of maintaining a website much lower than in the past.
