Most of you will have been all too familiar with Google’s algorithm update of 2020, infamously referred to as ‘Mobilegeddon’. By penalising sites that aren’t optimised for mobile, the update made it even more vital that every B2B website design is mobile-friendly. Sites that aren't optimised for mobile have seen substantial dips in traffic in the aftermath of Mobilegeddon, and the wider impact of this is highlighted in a report by Adobe.
So, if you still haven’t taken action, what exactly should you do to please the Google gods?
When creating B2B mobile-friendly website design, we strongly recommend choosing a responsive site. If you’re looking for a quick, straightforward design that requires little to no maintenance while being virtually error-free - a responsive website is the one for you.
To help you in your quest towards creating B2B mobile-friendly website design, we’ve created a handy checklist that you can use throughout the website build process and once your website is up and running.
Lead generation
Generating leads is the main goal for the majority of B2B marketers and is the focal point of any inbound marketing strategy. Mobile phone users are much more action-orientated than their desktop counterparts, so make sure your forms and CTAs are simple to use.
- Make contact information easy to access: Contact details should be a prominent feature of your home page and include functionality that allows prospects to call you directly from your site.
- Simplify forms to increase conversion rates: Mobile visitors are less likely to fill out tediously long forms, due to time constraints and device limitations. Offer prospects a mobile-specific form with fewer fields. Also, consider using drop-down boxes on forms to help streamline form submissions. HubSpot increased its lead conversion rate by five times by shortening its mobile forms.
- Make follow-up emails mobile-friendly: If you’re following the principles of inbound marketing, you will most likely have automated emails that are sent to prospects after downloading your additional content, such as guides and e-books. Considering that 53% of prospects will read follow-up emails on mobile devices, ensuring that they’re optimised for mobile is essential. If prospects can’t read your email, then the sales cycle will come to an abrupt halt.
Usability
Mobile devices, despite their technological advances, still have their limitations, most notably their small screen sizes. Ensuring a user-friendly design is key, with 11% of visitors leaving a site that isn’t responsive.
- Simplify navigation and buttons: Mobile users aren’t known for their patience, so keep navigation and buttons fluid and simple. The majority of mobile visitors will be using touch screens and menus need to be clearly clickable. Dropdown menus with only a few select options are the best approach, enabling prospects to get their desired content as quickly as possible. Also, use large and responsive buttons, as nothing is more frustrating to mobile visitors than repeatedly clicking on the wrong button. Ensure buttons are big enough to click on easily and aren’t arranged too close together for mobile-friendly website design.
- Condense copy and content: Smashing Magazine warns that “you may be losing users if responsive web design is your only mobile strategy”. Your mobile prospects are most likely to be on the move and so will not be prepared to read through a lot of long text. Consider condensing and tightening your content, titles and paragraphs, making copy easy to skim and digest on smaller screens.
Performance
Your mobile audience expects a fast and responsive mobile site. On average, a prospect will only wait six to ten seconds for a site to load before abandoning the site altogether. Even a one-second delay in loading times can result in a 7% decrease in conversions.
- Keep your site lightweight: To ensure that your mobile site loads in five seconds or less, HubSpot recommends keeping your site data under 20 kilobytes. Remember, the majority of your visitors will be using 3G rather than a wireless connection to access your site, and so large sites will drain visitors’ data allowance and slow load times down. Unnecessary animations and large images will also slow load times, so avoid them if you want a mobile-friendly website.
- Only use mobile-friendly software: Avoid software that isn’t compatible with mobile devices. A common offender is Flash, which can’t be rendered by the majority of mobile browsers. Your prospects will likely be greeted with an error message, resulting in 43% visiting a competitor’s site. For special effects, use HTML5 instead.
- Test and analyse: With multiple mobiles and tablet models on the market, the performance and presentation of your site can vary considerably from device to device. While a responsive design should automatically adapt your site dimensions to each specific device, it is still important to test your site regularly across multiple devices using emulators such as http://mobiletest.me/.
- Practice mobile SEO: The location of your business is more relevant on mobile, so it's best practice to implement local SEO. Ensure that any spellings and abbreviations of your business name and address are kept consistent, and remember to include your location in the title and meta tags on contact pages to help local mobile visitors find your site more easily.