Use Your Mobile Device To Check Your Website Often – Plus Some Important News and Show Updates
On this episode, Bob and Jesse discuss the importance of checking your website on mobile devices. They explain the best way to check your website on mobile and what a mobile friendly website generally looks like. The pair also take the time to introduce the new producers on the show, and to encourage listeners to vote for our upcoming online courses. Listen today for great insight and a unique opportunity to interact with us!
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What you’ll learn
- The importance of a mobile-friendly version of your business website.
- Mobile optimization is more important to certain fields that may be accessed more often by phone than computer.
- What to look for in creating a clean, accessible mobile website.
- How you can participate in testing our new online SEO courses.
Here is the Transcript for Episode 75 – Checking Your Website On Mobile Devices For Optimal Performance and Conversions;
Caleb Baumgartner: Hi folks. This is Caleb Baumgartner, producer for Local SEO Tactics. You have a website for your business, but is it optimized for mobile? Today, Bob and Jesse discuss the importance of mobile optimization for your business website. Thank you for downloading, and enjoy the show.
Jesse Dolan: Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan. I’m here with Mr. Bob Brennan, virtually via Zoom again here. Thanks for coming on, Bob. And let’s talk some snappy SEO stuff here. So I guess first things first, let’s talk about the new interesting and maybe slightly seductive voice that we all just heard introducing us here on this episode. That’s Caleb, a member of our team here at Intrycks. Caleb’s been with us for probably, is it about nine months now? I’d say.
Bob Brenann: Yep.
Jesse Dolan: And had worked with Bob and I previously at a different business venture for, gosh, a year or two, somewhere in that range previous. And Caleb’s a rock star. He joined the Intrycks team and has kind of been behind the scenes in the back office administration and do a lot of things back here. But then the last, I don’t know, 10 or a dozen or so episodes of our show here, Local SEO Tactics, he’s been the producer and editor of it.
So getting him involved on the front side now to be a little bit more public facing. I think he’s going enjoy a little more creative input and getting on the show, right? So everybody, you can kind of look for him in the future to help set up the shows and be more of a not just behind the scenes producer, but being actively on the show and not so much giving SEO tips and strategies, but providing some other functionality. So look to hear more from him in the future. Welcome to the show, Caleb. So this will be kind of fun.
Bob Brennan: Caleb is a good guy. He’s smart. He’s definitely a huge help to our team.
Jesse Dolan: Yeah. I think everybody that’s listened to the show for a while knows we’ve been going through some growing pains and some growth spurts and Caleb has just been amazing getting on our team to help us manage through that and grow. It’s always nice when you find somebody that can, as you know, Bob, add to the team, that you can then count on and that can really help move forward and be an asset and make the team better, not just be more overhead.
But good addition to the team. We probably haven’t told Caleb this enough direct person to person. So he’s probably hearing this as he’s going through editing this episode now. Hopefully give yourself a nice pat on the back, Caleb. We really do appreciate everything you do and excited to have you actually on the podcast now. So we’re going to go through a couple other bits here about some housekeeping stuff, some things that we’re going to be launching and introducing.
Before we get into that, I do want to mention, as always, our free instant SEO audit tool out on our website, go to localseotactics.com, top right corner, click on the yellow button for a free instant SEO audit. Plug your webpage in there, plug the keyword you’re trying to optimize for, or that you want to crosscheck against. And it’s going to give you a report on basically how well or not your webpage is optimized for that keyword.
You can use it on your website. It’s page by page. So when I say website, I mean like the actual page. You can also use it on your competitors to see what they’re doing and try to reverse engineer them. Totally free. Use it as often as you want. Localseotactics.com. Check it out. So now the next thing we’re going to talk about is, I think we’ve kind of teased it in a couple of past episodes, Bob, we’re going to be launching some digital courses.
I think everybody knows. We have this show that we put out, which of course is totally free, and trying to help people either do a DIY SEO, not to have too many acronyms there, but to learn some things and do it themselves. And then of course, on the other end of the spectrum, we are an agency. We do SEO and digital marketing and are for hire. And many of you out there in the audience listening have engaged and hired us, right?
We have something that’s going to be kind of in the middle, digital courses, kind of an extension of the podcast, diving deeper than we do on the podcast. And these will be paid courses. This is not going to be a completely free resource, although it should be very affordable. And the ROI we’re trying to position it to be kind of a no-brainer for you.
But these are going to be some great digital courses that are going to be… I don’t know. Bob, how would you explain? Like go at your own pace, following a system, not just a bunch of recorded videos. But giving people the templates they need, the guidance they need, the cheat sheets, the tool list, things like that.
Bob Brennan: We really want to give small business success. And if we’re going to be a part of the change that can happen in this country in the future, I mean, not to get too altruistic or what have you, but we have hundred million dollar clients, and we have clients that are sub probably $200,000 in annual revenue that we do services for. And there’s people that are falling through those holes and services that we can provide.
And I feel these courses done well, which is our objective, are going to ideally help everybody. You don’t know this, Jesse, but I got a call from a referral two days ago, a really nice guy in his 80s. He has a mobile home moving business, which is really niche. And he was inquiring about our services. Our services aren’t cheap. They’re fair.
And the reason I say they’re fair, I know they’re getting return on investment because the way we set it up in such a way that we can measure the metrics in terms of phone calls and leads and lead volume and we know they’re there. Unfortunately, he didn’t have it in his budget. And this is where these courses come in. So it’s my goal to say, okay, if you’re willing to do the work, and I don’t think it’s extremely hard work.
It’s new and it’s different. But the nice thing about this work that you’re going to be doing is it’s going to benefit you long-term. And then having the knowledge to do it maybe takes your business to the next level. And let’s say you either engage us or some other company, you’re going to have that much more knowledge to know that the services they’re providing or we’re providing are effective for you. I don’t know if that makes sense.
Jesse Dolan: I think that’s a great setup. Some people want to completely DIY and go figure it out themselves. We got the podcast for that. And there’s tons of other resources. We are by no means the only people out here talking about SEO or local SEO. And again, not to make this a pitch fest, but of course, you can hire us.
If you totally want the headache-free solution, this is something great in the middle, whether it’s your budget size or just maybe you had a passion, you want to do this. You just need a little bit more guidance and structure than some random podcast episodes or things like that.
So again, not to make this a pitch fest, but the reason we are bringing this up for everybody is, number one, we know we have a great audience and great community out there that listen to this show and tune in the episodes. Based on the feedback and the questions we’ve received, the emails we get, the engagement and everything else, the reviews, we know that there’s a good segment of you out there that may be interested in this, and we want to get some participation.
So we’ve got a lot of good ideas lined up, a lot of good curriculum on the courses. We want to tap into you guys out there. You guys and gals, I think is the right way to say it. Tap into you for feedback here. And there’s really two chunks we’re going to go through. I’m going to rattle off a few of the courses. And I guess maybe, Bob, we should even pause there.
We’re talking about not just releasing a course or a couple of courses, but more of an overall suite of courses, continual courses. We’re going to try to shoot for one per quarter that are going to help business in general, definitely with the lineology of local SEO and SEO, digital marketing. But we’ll get into some things that are about converting a customer when they call. And I’ll read through some of our topics for the course here.
But the point on this is to help you overall on your business, not just for SEO tips and tricks. So what we are curious from everybody out there is which ones to do first. If you go out to localseotactics.com/courses or you can go to the bottom of the website, there’ll be a link for courses. Click on it and you’re going to see the survey. And it’s going to have the information I’m going to read through right now as well.
But what we’re going to be looking for from everybody is a vote. I mean, give us your feedback on which course you would want to see, which one’s most attractive to you first. And I say first because we’re going to do all of these. It’s just a matter of which one should we kick off first. In addition to that, we’ll talk about this more on subsequent episodes here.
We’re also going to be looking for five to ten or seven people to help us be beta students on this. So we’re not only looking for your guidance and direction on where should we start for which course first, but then also we’re going to ask some people to take those courses for free and just like any other beta tester or beta student, in this case, we’re going to want your feedback.
I think, Bob, we have a pretty good approach on how we’re going to do these courses, but these will be the first ones. There’s going to be some wrinkles to iron out, right? Some titles defined and some things like that. So we’re going to be asking people to help us on this journey, help vet some of that out. And then in return, you’re going to get some high value courses totally free.
So first step on this is, again, we want your feedback on where should we kick this thing off? What’s most attractive to you to learn and implement for your business? I’ll read through the shortlist we have here. There may be a couple more that get up there by the time the survey and this episode is live. There’s also going to be a spot for other, where you can write in a suggestion if we totally missed something on the list here. So reading through the quick list here.
Some courses will be how to get more five star reviews. Really most that’s going be focused around Google My Business, getting reviews on Google My Business, but anywhere reviews are important. Google My Business ranking. How to get into the top three for the Google My Business for what’s called a Map Pack. I’m doing the air quotes on video here for everybody tuning in the video. How to get into that Map Pack.
How to rank in the top three for Google My Business. How to convert on the phone. We’ve talked, Bob, in different episodes in the past, getting ranked is one thing, getting people to your website is one thing, getting them to call you is one thing, but not converting them on the phone. There’s a whole other process there and that’s really where the rubber meets the road. All your work up to that point needs to pay off when you’ve got to convert them to a client.
Bob Brennan: Yeah. Because we know that to create a call or a lead, whether it’s a form feed or more importantly a call, I don’t know, you can monetize that anywhere $10 to $100 a call. And if that’s what it’s costing, somebody better pay attention to the metrics of conversion.
Jesse Dolan: Yep. And it’s really not completely difficult to do. You just have to do it with intent. Not that different than SEO. If you want to rank for something, you got to do it purposefully. Same thing here. You should have a purpose and a method and a script for answering the phone or other other ways too. So that’d be a topic we’re going to cover on a course. Extremely important.
And that’s where, like I said, on the front side, maybe that’s not an SEO thing, but it’s part of this ecosystem for what we’re doing with digital marketing and local marketing. We’re trying to get that phone call. And I think with all the customers and the clients we’ve worked with over the years, that we’ve got some great tips and advice and it’s going to be a very impactful course just in that one topic.
Some other topics here for courses. Local citations building. How to find, how to build and properly manage your local citations, which is a whole nother topic. We did an episode on that for a podcast, if you’re not familiar with what I mean by that. I’m not going to expand on that necessarily right now. But that’s going to be a great course. Local SEO kind of broadly on your website, but then also kind of niching down into some areas.
Webpage speed improvements. Landing pages that convert. Image optimization for speed and for relevancy. We’ve got another one here. How to do keyword research in a meaningful way, not just to discover keywords, but marrying it with the keywords that make sense for your business that you want to target. And we did a good episode on that a number of episodes ago too.
I think somebody actually called in with a question about how we do our keyword research and we kind of dove into that a little bit. So here’s an example of where a podcast is going to give you a certain amount, the course is going to go even further on that. It’s going to take a much deeper dive because we can only cover so much in a 15 to 30 minute episode here. And these courses are going to be quite extensive compared.
A couple more here. Voice of customer. This is something that I think a lot of businesses take for granted. Bob and I have done this multiple times in our brick and mortar businesses over the last decades. Tapping into your customers, right, Bob? For how do they feel? What do they want and how do they even view your business?
Bob Brennan: And I think Sue can help us out a lot in that. More likely she’ll be on the board with that, putting that course together.
Jesse Dolan: Absolutely. And we’re going to come and talk about Sue here a little more in just a minute too. So yeah, voice of customer. Content accelerator. This is a program that we do to really… You hit a certain phase in SEO where you’ve optimized your website, optimized your content and hopefully ranked a lot of it.
But now you need to create new content, new pages, whether it be for a blog post or just to target a certain keyword, and that can really slow things down quite a bit. So we’ve got some pretty good ideas there on how to leverage some methods with video and doing some other stuff to accelerate your creation of content in a targeted way. That’s going to be a very exciting one.
Bob Brennan: Real quick, Jess. Who do you think that would be? I’ve just got some thoughts here and maybe you can spin on them. We own a couple of businesses together and basically we’re looking at a business or product that can actually be sold all over the United States. So I think this content accelerator is going to be good for local SEO, but I do think it’s going to be effective for those people that do work all over the United States.
They want a local emphasis, but this begins to help them reach out for their services or their type of expertise. Let’s say they’re an aircraft appraiser or exotic boat surveyor or whatever the case is. In my opinion, this kind of course would help them grow their business on a much broader scale. Does that make sense?
Jesse Dolan: It makes a lot of sense. As we dive into that course and this topic more, we’ll do some podcast episodes around it. I think people will see that we call it a content accelerator, but there are so many other benefits that come with it. The exposure you get in different digital platforms almost as a by-product of doing this, yeah, it helps your exposure, helps your digital footprint, helps your authority as a brand and as an entity within the eyes of Google.
And to top it all off, it’s an amazing way to quickly create great content for your brand and for your website. So we’re super excited about that. That’s an area that’s getting a lot of growth here in our company. Email marketing, social media, things like that. Again, not exactly SEO, but related to the SEO efforts and digital marketing. And then last but not least, again, like I said, blank, or other. What do you folks think?
That list we just rattled off, we’re going to do a course on each one of those, and we’ve got some other ones that are kind of on the fringe that we didn’t want to include on the list. But what did we miss? Whether it’s a deeper dive into one of those topics or something completely not even on the list. We’d love to hear that from you. So check it out, localseotactics.com/courses, or go down to the bottom, click on the link that says courses. Take the survey. It’ll take you 30 seconds.
The more feedback we can get, the better it’s going to really help guide us. And then next week we’re going to release another page. We’re going to ask people to sign up to be beta students for whichever course we decide we’re going to do first. We’ll talk more about that course. Talk more about what being a beta student would mean. But we just want to tease that out there right now and see if anybody gets interested in that journey with us. Do you have anything else to add to that, Bob, or do you think that covers that topic pretty good?
Bob Brennan: No, I think it does. I mean, any feedback people could give us would be just huge and helpful. I mean, we’re going to launch a series of courses. We know that. We just want to serve audience better and listeners better. We’ve got too much inside knowledge on what we think we should deliver as a course. But if everybody is needing this and this is the overall consensus of needing this type of course, then that’s what we’re going to go with for first. And then we’ll try to build off of that.
Jesse Dolan: Totally. I think we should say too, again, I don’t want this to be a big pitch fest. Anybody who’s listened to our show for a while knows the show is really all about the value, not upselling ourselves or pitching ourselves. We are definitely asking on this episode here today for your feedback towards something that’s going to be a revenue generator for us. Make no mistake about that.
But our strategy is going to be, let’s just say if we’re going to talk about that content accelerator as a course, we’re going to do a few podcasts episodes leading up to that course launch that talk about this topic too. So in a roundabout way, we’re also asking for you to vote on the type of content here too that you want more on the podcast, which is totally free.
So yeah, go on out there. Give us your feedback. We would absolutely love it, and that’s going help us decide the direction that we go. I mentioned just a minute ago Sue Ginsburg. We’ve talked about her a few times on the show here. We’re excited that I believe two episodes from now, if the calendar holds true, everybody’s going to get exposed to Sue for the first time.
Sue has been with us for a while. A very bright woman for kind of overall marketing, not per se like an SEO expert, which is why we got her on the team to kind of bring a whole other new element to the organization. Many of you clients right now that have engaged with us and hired us for services are already familiar with Sue. She is our client success specialist, engages with clients directly and has just been wonderful for helping push things forward, find the right solutions for clients and develop some good products here.
Sue’s going to be coming on doing kind of a show within a show. We’re going to be adding one episode per week with Sue, and the format of that show is going to be kind of a little bit of a question and answer. Bob and I will both be on there. Unless something happens schedule-wise, at least one of us will always be on there with Sue. And Sue will basically help kind of be an advocate for the customer.
I think we’ve mentioned on the show before, everybody’s probably familiar, but you can submit a question to us and we’ll read it on the show or play it on the show if you record your audio, which is great. We love doing that. If we use your question on the show, we also send your free Intrycks t-shirt, which as always, I’m modeling. Another reason to check out the video. You can see the awesome artwork on the shirt there, and the polo.
Bob Brennan: The polo. Got to be an executive of the polo.
Jesse Dolan: You’d have a really good question to get a polo. It’s like an off menu item. That’s what we’re going to be doing with Sue. She’s excited to read or play your questions on the show. Get into a question and answer about that topic. And she has her own questions or topics. She’ll be interjecting.
Because her role is primarily working directly with clients, she’s very in tune with what’s happening out there, what kind of questions people have, what kind of things they want to know. So it’ll be a different format of the show. It won’t be so much technical getting into things and tips and tricks. It’ll be a little bit more question and answer, led by Sue. But I think everybody’s really going to enjoy her insights, her expertise. And I would also ask everybody right now another bit of feedback.
If you have a question, now’s a great time. We’re going to be doing this regularly. Let’s develop some inventory. We’ve got a few of them saved up for her to kick off with, but always looking for more. So if you’ve got a question about a certain SEO thing, a digital marketing topic, something that you’ve been wondering for a while and you want to ask us directly, or just an opinion about something in general out there relating to SEO or digital marketing, local marketing, go on to localseotactics.com.
Down in the bottom left corner, submit a question. And you’ll go through there. If you just want to fill out the form and type in your text, that’s great. If you do want to call in to the phone number we have there and record the audio, we’d love that even better because then we can play it on the show and everybody can hear it. And you can point to your husband, wife, or significant other and show them how famous you are that you’re on a podcast too now, right? So that cannot be understated the value of that right there, plus the free t-shirt.
So yeah, help us out with that. And we’re looking forward to getting Sue on the show as well. Pretty cool. Two new people we’re introducing. I think we’re like 75 episodes in Bob and I. This is going to be pretty cool to have two completely new people on the show and part of the voice here with Intrycks and Local SEO Tactics. So good way to kick off 2021. And we’ve got even more stuff in store. All that being said, we should probably get into like a little bit of actual SEO stuff here, right?
Bob Brennan: Might be a good idea.
Jesse Dolan: Anybody who’s still listening at this point. So what we want to talk about though on this here is your website on mobile. So no big transition there. We’re just going to bluntly shift gears here and just jump into some SEO technicalities. Bob and I do this frequently ourselves, but it’s a practice I think that’s lost on a lot of people is checking your website on mobile.
And I don’t mean like resizing your browser or using… There’s various browsing testers where you can kind of render it in mobile, but still on your desktop. I’m talking about actually physically picking up your smartphone, your Android, your Apple, whatever it is, and using it to view your webpage. This is an important practice because most of the time we design websites, let’s just say you’re in WordPress. You’re on desktop. You’re not designing it in mobile.
And as a marketer, a business owner, or whoever you are listening to this, if you’re touching your website, designing your website, odds are most of your experience with that website is in a desktop format, a widescreen format. And you’re just inherently not looking at it in mobile as much. And that’s kind of the root of what we’re getting at. But there’s kind of two things here to kick it off.
One is actually taking advantage. For setting the stage, pick up your phone and use it to look at your website. Don’t just go straight to your website though. Do a search, whether it’s red balloons near me, auto repair near me. You should know the keywords you’re trying to be found for. So take advantage on checking your rankings on mobile too just to see if anything’s kind of weird for what you expected, at least.
Also, while you have that mobile search engine results page, the SERP, take a look at how does that look compared? So you’ll have your page title, which if you’re in Google, that’s usually like the big text, the blue text or the purple text. If you’ve clicked on it, that’s the link. That’s your page title. And then under that is usually a paragraph, a small snippet of information.
More often than not that’s your meta-description, that’s called. You input that onto your webpage and Google shows it. Sometimes Google will pull texts off your site and show that instead. So that’s not a guarantee that they’re going to show your meta description, but it’s usually what they show. The point on this is you want to take a look on a mobile device, how do those two things look?
In order to get somebody to your website, number one, you have to rank to be found. But then number two, they have to click from Google to your website, right? So just from the perspective of being on your mobile phone, do a search. See how you look compared to everybody else. You’re on a lineup, whether you’re first, second, third, or seventh on the Google results page. Other people are there too.
Are you attractive? Is your text cut off? Again, on your mobile phone, which is going to look a little different than desktop, how do you represent? I guess take note and make changes accordingly. I don’t know if we have anything specific there to talk about, Bob, but that’s kind of the MO.
Bob Brennan: Well, I guess emphasis on your five keywords or whatever you want to find. And then the couple of caveats is near me searches. I mean, stainless steel exhaust installers or muffler shops near me or whatever it is. And then again, the caveat that if you’re in your office doing that, well, guess what? There’s a high likelihood it may show you where you may show up in the top three of the Google My Business, for instance.
So go ahead and drive around with it. If you’re out on a date with your wife or husband or whatever the case is, you pull that out and type that in and just see how you fare. Don’t lose sleep over it, but just make it a habit. In my mind, I mean, I do it a couple of times a week. And when I think of it, if I have to go somewhere outside of our respective business just to see, okay, how are we fairing? So to speak.
And I actually had my team, people that work with me do the same thing from time to time because I tell them that’s our front door. I mean, you got to protect the front door. And if you’re not showing up, that’s your sales force. So I don’t know if that makes sense.
Jesse Dolan: Makes perfect sense. And again, it doesn’t take a lot of time. It can be a practice or a habit that you do. And it’s just good to check. Hey, if everything’s great, everything’s great. Move on. That 30 seconds was well worth it. But if you do notice something, whether you ping that back to your webmaster, your SEO person, or if it’s you yourself, you make a note.
Definitely just pay attention to what’s right and what’s wrong. Just resetting the stage. What we’re talking about there is now you’ve done a Google search. You haven’t clicked on your website yet, even. All the stuff we’re talking about right there is about your ranking, your appearance in Google and where you show up. Like Bob said, maybe have these five keywords that are your core ones. You should kind of know that.
But now also click through and go to your website. So again, don’t just go to your website directly. Do a Google search. Take advantage you’re on mobile and kill two birds with one stone here. Sorry, PETA folks. That’s just a phrase. Nothing meant by it. But take advantage. Now that you’re on your website, again, you’re usually probably focusing on this on desktop. So pay attention to what looks different right now on mobile.
A couple of things here worth mentioning that I’ve outlined is the loading time that it took. This is your website. So when you clicked on it from Google, you know what you’re going to see, or you know you’re going to get to your website. But think about this from the eyes and the mindset of somebody who hasn’t been there before. Is it taking a long time to load?
Would you have backed out by now if it wasn’t your website? So there’s a little bias here when you’re doing this, but pay attention to that. Did it load fast? If not, well, you’ve got some work to do there, right? If it wasn’t up to your tolerance. But try to be honest with that with yourself and be aware of that. When it does load, is your call to action clear?
Sometimes what can happen on mobile versus desktop is the layout can kind of change. If you have a two column or three column website, horizontally, left to right, it’s probably one column on mobile. And usually if you had three things, the first thing is at the top, the second thing that was in the middle, now it goes down and it’s in that single column. It’s the second thing you’re scrolling.
The third thing that was all the way to the right on desktop is now the third thing down on that column, top to bottom on mobile. Maybe that’s okay. But again, just pay attention to that and say, does this matter to me for the conversions that I was hoping to have, for the way the page read? Whatever it is, does your message get all jumbled up when it’s on mobile? Because it’s out of order now.
So your overall message, but then explicitly your call to action, which usually you want that above the fold, we call it, right? Which is back to an old newspaper term. If you’re looking at a newspaper, above the fold meaning the cover. Your call to action, the main thing you’re asking people to do, whether it’s call now or click here for this, or fill out this form, or here’s a coupon, whatever it is. That should be the first thing visible on the page or extremely towards the top.
For some reason, if it’s not the first thing on mobile, make sure that that doesn’t shift down to be the third column down. If that was all the way to the right on your homepage on desktop, does that shift to be midway down the page now on mobile? Pay attention to that because that was the main thing you wanted people to see on your page. If you buried that down, it’s different.
So again, check your page speed on mobile. Check your call to action and make sure it’s clear and visible on mobile and check to make sure that the overall flow worked good on mobile too. That when it rearranged, that the order is proper. The good news is if that any of that doesn’t work, you can change it all. Most WordPress themes nowadays, or if you’re using Square or Wix or something else, they’ll have this too, you can show or hide elements based on mobile or desktop.
For some reason, maybe that big hero image you had on your desktop that looks awesome on desktop, high resolution image, clear call to action, maybe on mobile that renders down to be just not as impressive because that’s instead of like a nice crapped in image, it’s just this wide landscape that really does doesn’t look quite as sexy. You can have a different version show on mobile versus desktop very easily.
So you can kind of customize that mobile experience. It’s not a different page. A few years ago, you’d have to have a different page for mobile, where we would redirect. Everything’s way more sophisticated now. You can just say show this image if it’s desktop view, show this image if it’s mobile view. And you can kind of have two different pages designed based on experience. You don’t need to do that. Just to be clear. You don’t need to. But if your site doesn’t look good on mobile like it does on desktop, that’s when you want to explore this.
Bob Brennan: What percentage of searches right now are they saying are mobile? What would you guess?
Jesse Dolan: Great question. Sometimes people throw out like 70% or 80% type range without citing sources and getting like super specific here. That’s going to be more global, like all around the entire globe, 80% is kind of a common number that you’ll see. It’s very heavily weighted because you get into like Africa, there’s just not as many computers and desktops and laptops. People access the internet on mobile phones.
So there’s a bit of a slant there. But for sure, if you could just enter the United States here, domestically for the US, for us, 50% or more. More than half of your users are probably checking you out via mobile. There are some exceptions. Bob and I have a brick and mortar business selling copiers for businesses. Probably if you looked at the analytics, which you can answer this question too for your business.
Go to your Google Analytics and It’ll tell you what browser people are visiting you on. Probably a chance that more people are looking for a copier on desktop because they’re at work or it’s for corporate. You know what I mean? But if it’s for whatever you said, like auto repair near me or things like that…
Bob Brennan: Tow truck, 80%, 90%, right?
Jesse Dolan: Totally skewed the other way because that’s a more intense type thing. So muddy answer for you there without any clear facts or citations even. But definitely can tell you that more often than not mobile is the majority of your audience. Even if it’s split down the middle of worst case, it’s like 50/50 more often than not. Even if we’re wrong, just to really be conservative, what if it’s only 20% or 30%?
Hey, 20% or 30% of your clients, customers and audiences are viewing your website on mobile devices, definitely take a few minutes and check out what we’re talking about, how it renders on mobile just for the off chance that you may be doing a disservice to them.
Bob Brennan: You’d have to be living in a cave if you think it’s 20%. My gut tells me closer to that 70%. And again, if you’re an architect, an architect firm, that’s probably closer to that 20%, 30% are going to be mobile and the balance is going to be desktop because people are going to want to see your work and your gallery and everything you do. So everything you’ve got kind of look at it from what is your do.
Jesse Dolan: Yep. I’ve got two more quick nuggets here. I guess three. This one I forgot to mention. Also check the functionality of your things. If you got a phone number, can you click the call on mobile? If you got a form to fill out, is that submit button big enough to hit with your fingers? Is it next to an image and it doesn’t work. So just make sure things are functionally working on your mobile view as well. Give it a quick test.
And then go to Google Search Console. We’ve talked about this in previous episodes. It’s completely free. There’s a spot within Google Search Console for mobile usability, where Google will tell you if they discover that there’s a problem with your website as it relates to mobile, things too close together, text too small, anything in their eyes that’s a problem, they’re going to flag those pages and they’re going to tell you what’s wrong.
If you see any of that, fix it. We want to be found in Google. If Google is telling you that there’s a problem with your website in mobile, guess what? They’re just not going to show your website as much. It’s going to come back to bite you if you don’t fix it. So take the word right from the horse’s mouth there and check that out. Let’s see. I think that is actually about it, looking at the list. That does cover all the bases there.
So don’t discount your mobile. We’re going to talk more in some future episodes about how to optimize for mobile, how to do some other things, maybe to increase your speed, let’s say in mobile. But the lesson here that we’re trying to communicate is check it out mobile. Even if you don’t think, like you’re saying Bob, that your majority of your users are on mobile, number one, you might be mistaken.
And number two, there’s still going to be a significant amount of people that are checking you out on mobile. We’re talking with search and maybe going direct to your website. Even just think about Facebook. If you’ve got something on Facebook, if you’re promoting yourself or somebody shares your page, most people on Facebook are on mobile, and they’re going to visit your website on mobile coming from there even, even if it’s not from a search angle. So lots of reasons.
As always, if you need any help in that, of course, we are here for hire, like I mentioned earlier a few times. And stay tuned. We’ll have more content to help you out on mobile either way. Did you have anything else to add, Bob? Otherwise, I’ll jump into our review of the episode here.
Bob Brennan: Nope. That was about it.
Jesse Dolan: If you haven’t left us a review, man, I’m asking for a lot of things in this episode here for everybody. I’m sorry, but kind of standard procedure here to say if you haven’t left us a review, we’d love to get one from you. I think you all know by now we read one on every episode. We’ve got a lot of reviews inventory left to read. Exciting to just keep having these fresh.
Go out to localseotactics.com, go down to the bottom, click on review. We make it real easy. If you want to leave us a review on whatever, Facebook, Google My Business, Apple Podcasts, whatever it is, we make it real easy for you. Just a couple of clicks and you’ll get to your portal. And share if you like what you’re hearing here and if you’re getting some value.
I’m going to read one here. If you’re happy enough to leave some texts that we can read, great. Or if you just want to leave us five stars, we’d appreciate that too. This week, or I should say this episode here, we’ve got a good five-star review from geo town. He says, “Love these guys. Longtime listener. Actionable advice. I use this in trying to grow my business. The education these guys share freely is priceless. All you have to do is act on it. Don’t know if you already covered written in depth, but backlinks, specifically interested in press release, possible free options. Anyways, thanks so much for your help and support. Valuable education.”
We’re going to get into some of that in the future, geo town. And obviously, first and foremost, thanks for the awesome review. Like we were just saying, it not only makes us feel good, but as always lets us know we’re doing a good job. There’s people out there actually listening, actually watching and feeling like they gotten enough value to take some time out of their day to drop a review.
So we do appreciate that, and we’d love to hear more from everybody else. So with that, we can wrap up this episode. Again, thanks, Caleb, for jumping on the front side, and hope you all are going to get to enjoy him. Looking forward to Sue coming up and love to get that feedback from everybody on what kind of courses you want to see from us and where to go next with this. So thanks for tuning in, and we’ll catch you next time.
Bob Brennan: Thanks, guys.
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