1: 96 out of 100 people:

 Let’s start with the biggie and you might want to sit down for this. According to the Central Statistics Office 96% of internet users in Ireland access the internet via mobile devices. You knew it was high, but did you know it was this high?

You are likely reading this post from a mobile device and we hope you’re having a pleasant mobile experience on our site. We spend a lot of time making sure that you do. And you should be doing the same for your customers. Because if you’re not, they’re going to go elsewhere to another business that does, which is going to eventually leave your market really really small, only four people out of one hundred. Sure, you might have a band of loyal customers who will still phone you to make their appointment, or pop in to your salon, studio or clinic but this won’t last forever. Millenials are in their forties now and no-one from millienials and younger wants to even answer calls nowadays let alone make them.

You have to make it easier for them to book their appointments from their phones, which will make things easier for yourself too. A study by Appointy found that businesses that offer mobile-optimised bookings saw a 60% increase in appointments and a 50% reduction in no-show rates

And let’s look at it this way, by optimising for mobile you’re opening yourself up to 96 out of 100 more people, everyone basically.  

2: A pleasant user experience:

We all want to have pleasant experiences in life don’t we?  Relaxing spa treatments, fabulous hair cuts, smooth car rides, life-affirming yoga classes, a stay in an ice hotel. Okay that last one might just be me, but I think we can all agree that what we don’t want is for technology to get in the way of our pleasure or for poorly developed software to waste our precious time.

What we definitely don't want is to get stuck on suboptimal websites (that’s the opposite of ‘optimised’ by the way) while trying to book these pleasant experiences. Can there be anything more frustrating than sitting for ages looking at your phone waiting for a page to load, scrolling down and down and down looking for a 'book now' button that’s on the other side of the page, trying to tap a button that’s designed for clicking, or trying to fill out a form that keeps putting you back to the start after every field?

This is what happens when a website is not optimised for mobile and nobody is going to put themselves through that if they can help it. Give your customers a pleasant experience on your website, that is to say a mobile-optimised one. Give them fast-loading pages, let them explore your interesting content effortlessly, give them the information they need so they can move through the booking process quickly and intuitively and get back to their dinner in the ice hotel. They’ll thank you for it and so will your bank account as your appointments increase. 

And if you’re a dentist, well dentists appointments are rarely pleasant but booking them can be.

3: Reduce your bounce rate:

So we have established that your customers are visiting your website from their mobile devices. And well done if you ran a smart marketing campaign that got them there. We hope you didn’t spend too much on that by the way, especially if your bounce rate is high. 

Because that’s like opening up a drain in the street and just throwing your hard-earned money into it. And unfortunately we see this all the time.

Let’s get back to some solid statistics here. Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a single page on your site who leave without interacting in any way; in other words they bounce on and they bounce off. Bounce rates are 50% higher on mobiles than on desktops. Why might that be you are wondering? Well it can be a number of things; slow load times, irrelevant content, technical errors, poor user experience, inadequate Calls-to-Action, intrusive ads and pop-ups and poorly formatted content, all of which add up to a site that is not mobile optimised. Is your website guilty of any of these faux pas?

Well don’t worry because here’s the good news, all of these problems can be fixed with comprehensive mobile optimisation, which will in turn reduce your bounce rate. And here’s some more good news; lower bounce rates often correlate with better engagement and higher conversion rates. In fact a bounce rate reduction of just 10% can lead to an average conversion increase of 2%- 5%.

Let’s do some more maths. According to research by Think With Google, thorough mobile optimisation can reduce bounce rates by up to 30% leading to a corresponding increase in mobile conversions of 20% - 50%. 

That’s the kind of maths that’s going to make your revenue curve the right way. Well we’re not called Revcurv for nothing. 

4. Reduce your advertising costs:

Which brings us to our next reason your website should be mobile-optimised; to reduce your advertising costs. 

Remember that smart marketing campaign we mentioned earlier, just how smart was it? If it’s bringing traffic but not enough conversions then it’s not bringing the right kind of traffic and it needs to go back to school. In truth the marketing campaign’s job is done once the traffic gets to your site, as long as it’s qualified traffic because it’s only qualified traffic that leads to conversions.

And this is the clinker. A lot of businesses, forgive the crass term, ‘spray and pray’ when it comes to ad campaigns. They just throw money at it and say a few Hail Marys. Sound familiar? Sure, some of those visitors will stick but most of them will bounce and there goes your hard-earned money down the drain again.

Stay with me here as we go in reverse for a moment, back to your website and learn about its Quality Score. A high Quality Score means better ad placement and a lower CPC (cost-per-click). The way to increase your Quality Score is to create relevant landing pages with informative content that load quickly, are easy to navigate, consistent with your ad messaging and most of all, you guessed it, are mobile-friendly.  Search engines prioritise websites and ads that are optimised for speed, relevance, mobile-friendliness and user experience and they also tend to have higher CTRs (click-through-rate).  

In summary, higher Quality Scores lead to better ad placements, higher CTRs and lower CPCs, meaning you achieve better results for a lower price.

Feel free to say your prayer now because it costs nothing to bless yourself.

5. Increase your ranking in the SERP:

Hopefully we are starting to join the dots here and see a clear picture. 

The SERP is the Search Engine Results Page, the page that comes up with results when you put something into a search engine, for example Google. (Sorry if I’ve over-explained that, digital marketing is just so full of acronyms and jargon that at times I’m not sure what is digital marketing speak and what is normal language anymore).

Let’s say you are a physiotherapist in Letterkenny. If someone types ‘back pain Letterkenny’ into a search engine, you will probably want your website to rank high in their search results. If your ranking is high and your SERP snippet looks relevant to their search, they will likely click it. If your website is fast, informative, trustworthy, easy to navigate and offers a service that will help them, they might even book an appointment with you.

Many things contribute to your website’s high ranking in the SERP including good quality content, effective SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), compelling ad copy and a dynamic presence on social media, but since the advancement of mobile-first indexing, mobile-optimisation is increasingly becoming one of the most important factors in increasing SERP ranking.

Mobile-first indexing means that search engines will prioritise the mobile-friendly sites in their SERP. Search engines are always trying to giver searchers the most relevant and useful information. And since, as we said in the beginning, 96% of people are now searching from their phones, mobile-friendly sites are the most useful and relevant results and are thus favoured by these SERPS.

Finally, and not to frighten you too much but there’s an ongoing transition to a complete shift to mobile-first indexing which means that those without mobile optimised websites will simply get left behind.

But fear not because we at Revcurv are here to help you. 

Check out our other blog articles:

Five ways to optimise your website for mobile

Five ways Umbraco can make your website mobile-friendly.

Or hire our expert marketing team to do it all for you.