How to Ride the Rising Wave of Mobile Traffic

Researchers estimate that about 60% of today’s internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Seeing how the popularity of mobile internet devices has exploded in the past five years, there’s not question as to how this statistic came about. Top organizations now focus significant resources on attracting mobile traffic to their websites. Here are some effective ways of making your mobile website attractive to visitors.

Design for Mobile

Designing a well-rounded mobile website involves more than just following popular web design trends. You have to also consider that surfing the web on a mobile device is different than surfing the web from a PC. The screens are smaller, and most people use either their finger or a stylus to navigate instead of a mouse. Last year, Google issued their mobile website design guidelines to help designers avoid many of the common mistakes of mobile web designing. These include using video formats that don’t play on mobile devices, and linking to non-mobile websites from your mobile website.

Use Mobile Device-Specific Features

Marketing to users with mobile devices comes with some nifty advantages over traditional internet marketing. These include:

Store locator: Mobile web surfers can use their GPS-enabled mobile devices to easily find store locations. Many big-name retailers now use this feature on their websites including Wal-Mart, Sears, Target, and Walgreen’s. It’s much more convenient and modern than asking users to enter their zip code to find the nearest store location.

Click-to-call: By clicking on a phone number on a mobile device, a user can automatically call a number they see on a website. This convenient website feature allows people to get in touch right away, instead of saving the number and possibly forgetting to call later.

Mobile scanning: Scannable QR codes allow mobile device users to interact with physical media, and can be found in magazines, on banners, on flyers, or just about anywhere there is printed media. Users with a camera on their device can scan the code and go to a page that gives them more information about the advertised product or service.

Keep it Local

In a survey conducted by Ipsos and Google last year, researchers found that internet users on smartphones searched for localized information 94% of the time. It also found that 84% of users took action as a result of their local search. Since so many people search for things like “Indian food in [name of city] or “Home improvement store in [local neighborhood],” make sure that your business’ mobile website reflects what you do and the locale in which you do it. If you serve multiple locations, it’s a good idea to create separate landing pages for each of them.

Experts predicted that mobile web usage would one day overtake desktop web usage, and it looks like their predictions are quickly coming true. You can stay ahead of the curve by designing a mobile website that will attract the new wave of mobile internet users.