If you’re a business owner who has already invested in a professionally-built responsive website, you may be wondering if it’s necessary to put down more money into a mobile app. About half of the traffic on search engines comes from mobile devices, but a well-designed responsive website can already serve mobile as well as desktop traffic. So what’s the point of adding a mobile app to the mix? Being optimized for mobile devices and more quickly accessible in just a single tap, mobile apps can make many interactions easier, quicker, and more convenient for customers as opposed to a website. Here are a few compelling reasons you might want to invest in a mobile app even if your business already has a well-designed responsive website.

Building Brand Awareness

An app will play a significant role in building brand awareness. With icons occupying prime real estate on people’s phone screens, an app acts as a billboard. This makes it easy for people to know what your app is all about before even opening it, unlike a website that must be accessed through a browser. You will improve your brand recognition if you can proceed and get an app. And as all marketers know, when people get to know you quickly, they will tend to do business with you more easily.

Improving Customer Engagement

Once a potential customer installs an app, you will be free to send notifications and even get personal data from the customer. It is unlike running a website where it can be hard to get into details with the customer. Imagine you’re a restaurant owner. Instead of requiring customers to visit your website then call to book a table, you can easily make the booking process available online with a few taps. While web apps can also accomplish this, a mobile app will be more easily accessible and better optimized for mobile devices. Your customers will prefer the quicker and easier option!

Beating the competition

Your competitors may still be relying on their websites to handle all of their online interactions with customers. With a mobile app, you can potentially introduce something different and make your business stand out. When your services are available on an app, you will take advantage of potential customers who are ready to get your services online quickly without having to open their browsers and navigate to your domain. Because of this, many business owners who opt for apps on top of their existing websites find it easy to realize the best return on investment.

Cultivating Customer Loyalty

Most business owners are running all sorts of advertisements out there. You need to look for a way to keep the customers you get and turn them into repeat customers so those competitor ads don’t lure them away. An app allows the creation of special offers that you can then send to potential customers as exclusive deals. It is easy for the customers to get coupons and apply them to the app, making them develop some form of brand loyalty. Making customers prefer your brand over others can make your business grow quickly.

Improving visibility

An app can hold a very prominent place on a smartphone’s user interface. People spend a lot of time on their phones, and an app icon will be immediately visible to them anytime they open their phone screens. This makes it easy to improve your visibility if you can get as many interested buyers to install your app as possible, and those interested buyers will readily do business with you if they can easily access your services.

Creating a More Direct Marketing Channel

Like a website, an app can provide general information about your brand. Customers can use it to find prices, search for other services you offer, and access other features. If you want to introduce new features, you can release app updates that will be available instantly to potential customers. Unlike a website, however, an app makes it easy to market services directly to your customers. Whereas websites tend to be impersonal and informational, apps can more easily facilitate personalized interactions between customers and brands.

We hope this article has made you re-think the relationship between mobile apps and responsive websites. It’s not always a one-or-the-other situation; they can both be valuable parts of a robust digital marketing strategy.

It’s extremely important to have a working mobile site in a world where more and more people are using mobile devices to search. Many people won’t even so much as use websites that lack mobile capability. As the saying goes, first impressions are everything, and you have to use the first few seconds of someone viewing your site to make a good impression. If the website does not work on mobile, the majority of mobile viewers will back out. There are a couple different types of mobile websites, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, and different approaches to each of them. In our last article, we went over responsive websites and some of what makes them unique. Now, we will be going over dedicated mobile websites, how to use them effectively, and some key ways they differ from responsive websites.

Device-Specific Features

Mobile sites are different from responsive websites in the fact that they usually utilize different code, and redirect to a different site altogether. Sometimes they can take advantage of “responsive” code to rearrange the site size to fit it to the screen, but it is normally not to the same extent as a pure responsive site would. Mobile sites are especially useful, and almost necessary, doubly so for feature-heavy websites. Because not all content works on mobile devices, the content from the desktop version disappears in favor of something that will work on mobile. And for websites whose design on their desktop version would limit the user experience, having a separate mobile website can be useful.

Unrestrained Desktop Sites

When designing a responsive website, the site has to be able to work across all devices, which means sticking with jQuery, HTML5, CSS3 and other similar cross-platform code. But with a mobile website, you don’t need to limit the power of your desktop version. If any features don’t work, you will be able to make a replacement. If you need to have the same features for your mobile users as you do your desktop users, there is a solution still. You can have the basics available on your mobile site, but for any features or tabs not available to mobile, you can have them redirect to a companion mobile phone app. This way, you will be able to have everything available without having to find a way to make it work in a browser.

Less Arduous Testing

Another potential pitfall of responsive websites is the need to test new features on all kinds of devices. While basic edits like changes to text, new images or new blogs can take less work to implement with a responsive vs a mobile site, any big changes require testing across all devices again. Any interface changes to the desktop site will still need testing to make sure they work on mobile. And because the added features must take all devices into account, it is possible that they will run slower on a given device because they are not optimized for it. Finally, since 3rd party services do not always make mobile-friendly content, you oftentimes will have certain features that become broken on a responsive site.

Either way, developers often need to strike a balance. Elements of both, and the ability to block certain content off mobile for responsive design will likely be needed to make it work.

This is the last in a three-part series we’ve been writing on Google’s upcoming Mobile-First Index. If you haven’t read the previous two parts, we recommend starting at the beginning before reading this entry.

Previously, we covered what changes Google is making to its indexing system and why these changes make sense. It’s an important change that will affect the rankings of nearly every site on the web. As such, the final part in this series will be going over what you can do to your website to make sure your rankings change as little as possible. Is your site ready for the Mobile-First Index?

Best Practice: Invest in a Responsive Website

Ask any web developer, and they’ll likely tell you that the best approach to any website is responsive web design. This is an approach to web development where the same content is served across all devices, with the layout of that content rearranging as needed to suit different screen sizes. This is in contrast to sites that serve different content altogether depending on the device that’s accessing the site. Responsive websites are by no means a new thing, but their advantages are even more clear with the Mobile-First index in mind.

The strongest of these advantages is that responsive web design is the best way to ensure that all visitors experience your site the same way, no matter what device they’re on. Desktop and mobile browsing will always have their fundamental differences, but responsive web design ensures that the quality of the browsing experience will remain largely the same. And because the content is the same on mobile as on desktop, responsive sites will see no change to their rankings once the Mobile-First index rolls out.

Second Best: Make Your Mobile & Desktop Content the Same

If your website isn’t responsive and making such a change is impractical for your business, then the next best thing is to make sure all versions of your site have identical content. Chances are, your mobile site might currently have certain sections missing, altered, or rearranged to help streamline the phone browsing experience. While these aren’t necessarily bad practices from a usability perspective, that difference in content means your site’s rankings will most likely change once Google begins to look at your mobile site instead of your desktop one.

To make sure your rankings change as little as possible, go through your mobile site and make sure its contents match that of your desktop site. This includes headlines, text, images, and all of the meta information this content might have.

Minimum: Make Sure Your Primary Content is on Mobile

If your company is pressed for time and can’t go through every piece of content to make sure the desktop and mobile versions match, you should at the very least shift your content and SEO focus to mobile. This is what Google will use to rank your site, so treat it with the appropriate thought, care, and considerations. If you only have the resources to focus on one screen size, make it mobile.

Recommended: Hire Professionals

Websites are an increasingly complex medium, and the sheer amount of devices available to access them today only compounds this complexity. Making sure every single one of your visitors sees the site you intend for them to see is by no means an easy task. As these technologies become more sophisticated, it’s becoming increasingly important that sites are built and maintained by qualified professionals with specialized knowledge in their fields.

Rather than preparing for Mobile-First on your own, our recommendation is to hire web professionals to help your site make this transition. Business owners have enough to worry about without having to make sure their site fits in with whatever whim Google has next. Save yourself the time and stress, and prepare your site for the Mobile-First Index the right way.

In our last blog post, we took a look at the Mobile-First Index, the looming shift in Google’s focus from indexing desktop content to that of mobile instead. If you haven’t read it yet, you should start there; it gives an introduction to what mobile-first means and how Google is planning to apply this philosophy to its search engine rankings.

In the second part of this series, we’ll focus on why Google is pushing for mobile-first design, as well as when you should expect the change in their ranking system to occur.

Why Google is Making the Change

So what’s the point of all this emphasis on mobile devices? Why would Google use its huge influence over web developers to push the focus from desktop to mobile? Simply put, more people are accessing the web through their phones than ever before. This has been a trend ever since the inception of the first iPhone, so it shouldn’t be surprising that mobile use has finally surpassed desktop use as a means of accessing the internet.

In a study released by Stone Temple Consulting in 2017, researchers examined 77 billion different website visits. What they found was that nearly 56% of all traffic came from mobile devices, leaving well behind the 44% of traffic from desktop users. This suggests that for any given site, more visitors are accessing the content on their phones than on a desktop computer. And it doesn’t look like this trend will slow anytime soon.

In this light, it actually isn’t too surprising that Google would make such a bold move. If mobile users make up the largest percentage of website visitors, it makes sense to focus on this demographic when designing websites. We all know how frustrating it is to be browsing the web on a phone and encounter a site that doesn’t take mobile users into consideration. Google has been penalizing these sites for years, and now the transition to thinking of the mobile web experience as the default seems like the next logical step in this progression.

When The Change Will Happen

Now for the answer to the question you’ve no doubt had since beginning this series. When should you expect the Mobile-First index to take effect? The answer isn’t as simple as we’d hope. On this matter, Google executives have stated that they’re making the change once they feel the new indexing system produces “quality neutral” results. This means that they’re not flipping the switch until the Mobile-First index creates search results that are as good as or better than the current system.

This too makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Larger sites with the most credible content are often the ones that tend to be slowest to catch up to major changes in web standards. Smaller, more agile sites on the other hand can easily adapt to changes like the Mobile-First Index, giving them an advantage over their larger, more established counterparts. It’s easy to see how, at least at first, the Mobile-First index could create a search result filled with nothing but small, less established sites with dubious credibility. Best design practices don’t always signify the best web content.

A Tentative Timeline

While they may not have given us an exact timeline for this change, Google has indicated that it’ll likely take place sometime in 2018. This may be a far cry from the original 2017 dates they had hinted at early on, but it’s an indication that we should be ready for Mobile-First sooner rather than later. This is especially true considering the discussion that they may roll out the new index in batches rather than all at once.

Is your website ready for the Mobile-First Index? What should you be doing, or have already done, to prepare? We’ll be discussing all of this in part 3.

If you’re a business owner with a website, chances are you’ve already made some changes to your site for the purpose of ranking better on Google searches. And if you’ve been doing this a while, you no doubt know how adaptable you have to be to stay on top of all the latest changes the folks at Google make to their ranking system. The latest of these changes you may have heard of is the “Mobile-First Index”, a dramatic shift in search ranking priorities that Google has been warning for some time now.

What exactly is this looming paradigm shift, and why is Google planning to roll out such a huge change? Should you worry about it? Read on to learn all you need to know to stay on top of the next big change in the search engine giant’s ranking system.

What Mobile-First Means

Before we discuss Google’s ranking system, we’ll first go over what exactly we mean when we call a website “mobile-first.” Simply put, a mobile-first site emphasizes the user experience for small-screened, touch-controlled devices rather than large-screened desktop computers. Traditionally, websites were a medium developed for and viewed on large desktop screens. Even now, the desktop experience is often the optimal way a site should be viewed, with the mobile version often ending up an afterthought—a watered-down compromise for small screens.

In the case of a mobile-first site, on the other hand, mobile devices aren’t an afterthought at all. All of the designer’s thought, resources, and time go into the mobile experience, which they then adapt and altered appropriately for desktop use after the fact. This results in a site designed specifically for small screens and touch control, and you can easily tell the difference when it comes to the site’s usability on smart phones.

How the Mobile-First Index Works

Google has never been one to ignore these trends of moving towards mobile rather than desktop. It’s well known by now that for quite some time, Google has been penalizing the rankings of sites that aren’t “mobile friendly,” or aren’t easily usable on phones and other touch-based small devices. So what will be changing when Google rolls out its new Mobile-First Index?

The change lies in the content the search engine looks at when determining its rankings. Previously, Google has used content pulled from the desktop experience to rank a site, and generally ignoring the mobile experience as long as it didn’t have any glaring usability issues. Once the switch to mobile-first takes place, however, Google will completely flip the script. The search engine will ONLY take into account content displayed on mobile devices, completely ignoring the desktop experience.

What this Means for Web Developers

This might sound simple on paper, but the consequences of this decision are huge. Sites that feature their main content for desktops and treat the mobile experience as an afterthought will find it much more difficult to remain competitive in the rankings, and sites that place priority on mobile content will reap the rewards of higher rankings. In effect, Google will be putting its foot down and essentially forcing designers to prioritize mobile users.

Why is the search engine giant making such a huge push to emphasize the mobile experience? When should we expect the Mobile-First Index to roll out? We’ll be revisiting this topic to answer these questions in our next blog post, so be sure to check back later this month. In the meantime, you can brush up on your knowledge of the mobile web in some of our related articles, listed below.