Hello
I have a few clients looking into investing into converting their websites into mobile.
Part of that investment would include optimising the site for mobile search.
Does anyone know on average what sort of growth in organic search traffic that a corporate client can expect to receive if they invest into converting their online website for mobile?
Thanks if you can help
Christian Strutt
Hi Christian,
I have recently converted three clients to mobile that have paid close attention to their stats and sales derived from their web channel as a start. Across these companies approximately 35% of their traffic is via mobile. They have seen an increase of sale roughly 21%, so the mobile conversion has grown their average sales by 21%.
One thing that is NOT known, is if this is a temporary growth based on the excitement of the new sites or will with continued investment in new content on the mobile and desktop platforms will maintain this growth. Each of these companies are very happy with this switch.
Regards,
Steve
Depends on what the value proposition is for using the site on a mobile device, e.g location based services, social media check ins etc, versus using the standard desktop view. In most cases there isn’t one, so page views on mobile are just replacing a page that would have been viewed normally, there’ll be no magical net increase in traffic.
Steve, a 35% proportion is very high - most global stats put mobile use at about 5-10% of overall traffic. If there has been marketing or promotional activity associated with a mobile launch, then chances are the traffic increase is a by product of this activity rather than purely attributable to mobile capability.
Hi EastCoast,
The two site I referred two; one is a family owned gym membership club, the other is an provincial automobile association site. Both customer bases are exclusively Canadian. I am not sure what the Canadian stats are, but I do know that we are one of the most technologically connected countries in the world - especially when we hibernate in our houses throughout the Winter. I just pulled the stats for these two sites again and one was down by about 2.5% and the other 4% so it is too early to see if this is a result of the new site (people curious checking it out) or if this is sustainable.
All I know is that the increased business they have both had from their first few months pays for all my web work plus has made them money so they are happy they did it.
Regards,
Steve
Did you add any specific functionalities to take advantage of the mobile format? Or was it the ads showing up better (if they had any)?
Hi MBmobile,
The sites were built using CSS3 media queries and using javascript to move ads to appropriate places for the mobile devices so that advertisers did not get upset that their right-column ads got (by default) wrapped to the bottom. Instead I had target placeholders when the screen reaches a certain size the javascript hides the column ads and injects them into the target placeholders.
Other than that I really focused on getting good quality content for the site. I challenged the companies to provide better information about their products and services and to reduce clutter - give the site more space to breath. I also made consistent how people can phone or sms the facilities. the SMS site was all PHP driven.
In the Auto Association’s case I converted their static site into Worpress and have made use of the ads and other SEO type features of Wordpress. As I developed the template from scratch the code is very clean without div-itis and all scripts, plugins, and functions gracefully degrade if javascript is not turned on.
That’s pretty much it.
Regards,
Steve