The Need for Mobile Responsiveness

It is nice to see that all the hype and buzz has died down a little bit about “Mobile-gedon” and all the terrible things that were going to happen as a result of Google updating its algorithm this past spring. It seems like marketing news is as bad as the regular news these days: focus more on fear mongering and not what is actually happening in the industry. Now that everyone has realized the world keeps turning even with algorithm updates we should probably take a deeper look into why it wasn’t all that bad.

First off, there are more pople than ever using the search engines on their mobile devices. And all these people looking for information and products on their smart phones and tablets want a website that caters to them. So when they land on a website that is not mobile optimized and they cannot read the text they are going to hit the back button and go somewhere else. This is bad for the business with the website that just lost a customer but also bad for the search engines because it means they did not give the user what they were looking for. Naturally, this was going to get added into their algorithm so that they would be able to deliver a better result for their users.

The real problem with the scare tactics of the marketing media is that everyone was worried the wrong thing. Everyone that is involved in digital marketing knows that conversions are a massive part of the equation for success.   If you are losing visitors because your site is not mobile optimized there should have been a reaction long before Google decided to change its algorithm. This is nothing more than a reflection of the true problem with the current state of online marketing, Vanity, and the lack of understanding by so many businesses that are hiring companies to get them to page 1 instead of hiring them to help get more sales. People are clearly more worried about getting to #1 in Google than increasing their revenue. These are not mutually exclusive, obviously a higher ranking will result in greater traffic and should result in greater sales. The problem is that people are only focused on the metric that is easy to see.

Please do not think that we are saying not to worry about your current SEO strategy or to discount search rankings. We are just saying that there is more to marketing that ranking. The next time you take a look at your sites metrics take a minute to figure out what your conversion rates are. If you need help with this or a couple of simple tricks you can do to help with tracking feel free to call the Alan Morgan Group at (866) 805-3494 and one of our partners will be happy to walk you through your options.