As many already know, people aren’t going to the yellow pages anymore to find service providers, restaurants, gyms, and other local places of business. Searches in Google, Yahoo, and Bing for local service providers have skyrocketed over the last few years.

Many companies are familiar with the ideology that you need to be in the search engines, in order to reach your customers by whatever means they want to use to find you. A big part of this in the upcoming year is going to be via mobile devices.

In today’s ever evolving world filled with demands for instant gratification, people are using their smartphones to find where to go and how to get there. It’s crucial in the upcoming years that your company is mobile device friendly. We’ll take a look at a few ways you can ensure you are!

Mobile Websites – The biggest and most crucial component to being mobile device friendly is of course a mobile website. A mobile website is a website that is optimized for smartphones and relies less on heavy imagery and more on plain text, to give your visitor the information they need. People aren’t going on your website from a mobile device for any reason but to get crucial information – who you are, what you do, how to contact you.

Recent studies show that the most visited pages from a mobile device on a website are about us, location, and contact us. While your content shouldn’t be limited to those pages, it’s important to make sure that the content for those pages is readily available and in plain text that’s easy to read and see.

If you want to see an example of a mobile website visit www.BaschSolutions.com from your smartphone! Our sister company, eMobileMenus.com, is responsible for the mobile design and development.

Search Engine Directories – Google Places and Yahoo! Local are just a few of the search engines that allow you to create local listings. These local listings will showcase your company name, services, hours of operation, phone number(s), location, and other important information to on the go users. Google takes this information and uses it in different ways.

One of the most important ways Google will display it, is when people are doing a local search for a place of business around them, Google will show its Google Places listings that are around that area. You might have the best pizza in upstate NY, but if your pizzeria isn’t in Google Places and someone’s searching “Pittsford NY Pizza”, you’re not coming up on that map of nearby pizza shops!

Many other social networks, search engines, and apps have similar listings of nearby places of business that you should look into being a part of.

Speed and Code Optimization – Whether it’s a mobile website or a regular website, you’ll need to make sure your code is optimized and that the speed is as fast as possible. There are many different techniques you can use to optimize a website, which is a blog article of its own, but it’s realize that a slow loading website can deter a visitor from hiring you or coming to your place of business. A few obvious, easy elements to look for are:

• Normal sized images – Don’t take a picture straight from a camera and use it at that quality. It serves no purpose but slowing down the load time of that image. A phone doesn’t allow you to see a picture in its’ full definition.
• Contact information – Make sure you have your contact information everywhere. If someone is on their smartphone, they can easily click on an address and open it in Google Maps, or click on the phone number to call you. If this information is in the form of an image, the smartphone won’t realize what it is – the phone isn’t THAT smart!
• No Flash – We’ve said it 100 times and we’ll say it 100 more times. Flash sucks. Flash doesn’t load on mobile devices. If you have something designed in Flash, keep in mind that it will NOT be visible on any mobile device.

It’s also important that you host with a credible host. Using a GoDaddy $2.99/month hosting plan will guarantee a slow load time. As a general rule of thumb when looking for hosting, keep in mind that the cheaper the hosting is, the more people you are going to share that server with.

Try to keep as much money in a budget for hosting as possible. Proper hosting will cost you anywhere from $20 - $300 a month, depending on your needs and traffic. (FYI - We offer semi-dedicated hosting at a reasonable price!)

Having a mobile friendly company is not something we recommend you trying to tackle on a rainy afternoon. If you have a rainy afternoon free and you want to explore being mobile friendly, give us a call and we’d love to chat with you and explain it all in more detail to you! Don’t just take a 500 word blog article and draw up a corporate plan!

Basch Solutions, LLC has been making businesses of all shapes and sizes mobile friendly since the existence of smartphones! From Website design to website development, and social media strategy to website hosting, Basch Solutions covers the spectrum with online services, so don’t be shy, give us a call or send us a message and see what we can do for you today!