Mobile devices are long beyond the fad stage. They are rooted into the way millions of people interact with the Internet every day. There is a lot of data showing that mobile will eventually over take desktops. In no way am I suggesting that the desktop is dead. What I am saying is that any business trying to create leads and ultimately sales online needs to address and adapt to this shift.

Any Internet marketer, whether you focus on SEO, SEM, or Social, needs to make sure that the traffic you attract has a smooth transition from your campaigns into your sales funnel. This can be done by ensuring these mobile visitors can interact with your lead/sale generating site as easily as possible.

responsive web design maximize conversions

Mobile Web Design for Better Conversions

The goal is to make your sales funnel mobile friendly. There are a couple ways you can go about this depending on your budget:

  • Mobile friendly landing page
  • Stand-alone mobile web site
  • Responsive web design

Mobile friendly landing page

At the very least make the landing page or micro site mobile friendly. This way you only have to invest in a few pages that can serve both desktop and mobile devices. A good developer will be able to create a responsive design. A responsive web design is able to detect the size of the browser and reconfigure the page so it still looks good.

Going this route is good if you are on a budget. You only have to pay for a developer to convert your money pages while leaving the rest of your site untouched.

Stand-alone mobile web site

stand alone mobile siteA stand-alone mobile site is like having a second website that is strictly for mobile viewers. The user interface, graphics, etc… will generally be stripped down. The bells and whistles you’d normally see on a site are removed in order to use as little bandwidth as possible.

The site will be smart enough to detect a mobile browser and send them to the proper version of the site. For SEO reasons noindex the mobile version in order to hide it from the search engines. The last thing you want is to end up with duplicate content and a mix of mobile and desktop pages littering the SERPS.

Generally speaking, you only should go this route if your current site is too complex/cumbersome to convert into a fully responsive design. Creating a stand alone mobile site isn’t cheap and can be time consuming. Unless you have a really good reason, I’d suggest skipping this and go for a fully responsive design.

Response Web Design

The best option is to have a fully responsive web design. This is like the landing page example above but only for your entire web site. This means only having one web site but it will automatically adjust to the width of the device displaying it.

If you are in the market for a new site or a complete redesign make sure your developer incorporates a responsive design. Retooling an existing one to be responsive can be extremely time consuming and costly.

responsive web design

 

What Does This Have to Do with Social Media, SEO, Etc…

As Internet marketers we spend a lot of time generating traffic through our campaigns and take web design for granted. It is important to keep an eye on each step a person takes in order to convert into a sale. A flawlessly executed campaign pulling in targeted viewers can still have conversion problems simply because the landing page is too hard or clumsy to submit a lead. Each click along the way should remove as much friction as possible. By ensuring that your website can easily adapt to mobile devices you have removed a barrier to sales for an ever increasing demographic.