Your Mobile Marketing Checklist

Having a mobile friendly marketing strategy is a far more critical need now than ever. Also, this is more than just having a mobile friendly website. A mobile friendly marketing campaign when executed well can contribute positively to the website’s SEO, its user journey directly impacting its user engagement and finally conversions from  all of the above. Here are some simple, effective tips to help you fix your mobile marketing strategy;

Design and navigation: First things first – when it comes to having a mobile friendly website, it is important to check if it has easy navigation through out the website, fast loading time, easy call to actions at each level and appropriate prompts to get audiences to do what you want them to do. Is it that you want them to ‘Sign up for a newsletter, undertake a survey, take part in the competition, recommend your products, give a review or a testimonial, or simply share on social media, what ever it is, ensure that customers are guided through each process to undertake this call to action How many of you get frustrated when you cannot read an article, or a research piece before having to go through multiple stages of sign-ins and complex hierarchy on the website?

Mobile SEO: Get rid of annoying pop-ups, remove flash, compress heavy images and use shorter titles and meta tag descriptions to fit small screen spaces. These are all simple yet effective ways in which your mobile site will climb up SERPs and will be well optimised. Have a singular URL which is similar to the mobile friendly site as well as the desktop one. Since Google crawlers crawl your URL only once, if this is the same url for both platforms then it would improve the indexing of your website.

Redirect chains can be harmful: Having multiple redirects results in increased loading time for the website which can be frustrating from a user perspective. Every redirect should be performed with one step to keep loading faster t avoid before getting timed-out. In case of 404 errors it is important that these pages are crawled again and fixed on a regular basis.

Browser cashing done well: When a user uses your URL for the first time the browser cache saves your website resources automatically. This allows the users to use the saved information for your website each time they visit you. This saves time to load your website the next time this user is wanting to open your website. To ensure the right version of your website is cashed, it is important to ensure that the web files for your website are downloaded to display your website correctly, so there are no errors the next time the customer visits your website.

Breadcrumbs – not the ones in your soup! Breadcrumbs give a clear hierarchy of your website. This allows the audience to navigate seamlessly through the website. This is especially useful if your website is a big one or is a n e-commerce one.

Strong internal linking – Linking internal pages from the website is certainly loved by search engines and it increases the relevance of the content and related topics. This also allows audiences to navigate from existing article to older articles allowing a smooth flow of traffic through out the website thus helping its rankings.

Optimise: locally and with help from plug-ins

For local searches: Including the city and state in title tags, your URL, the H1 heading, and Meta description will enable your website to be included in local searches increasing its exposure across the market. If your website uses platforms like WordPress, there are various plug -ins that enhance user experience when on a mobile website along with making it Google-approved and hence fairly credible for your customers.

Other directory listings: While ensuring that your website is mobile friendly across all search engines, especially the big ones, it is also key to check various other business directories where your business and hence the website would be listed. These include Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, industry specific business directories etc to ensure that the right version of your website is listed. There is nothing more annoying that finding an old clunky version of the website, that no one knows about.