1 Big Reason You Need to Evaluate Your Mobile Traffic

Are Industrial Buyers & Engineers Sourcing on Mobile Phones?

On April 21st, 2015, Google rolled out its much-touted “mobile-friendly” update. The change was designed to give priority to mobile-friendly sites in mobile searches.

Since then, you’ve probably received frequent — if not daily — calls from website marketing companies insisting that you need to make your website mobile-friendly or be left in the dust. Many of our clients have been bombarded with these calls and are skeptical about switching to responsive design. With good reason: many industrial companies offer the kinds of products and services that people don’t typically purchase using a mobile phone. But is that really true? The only way to answer this question (and by extension answer the question of whether to make your site responsive or not) is to find out what mobile users are doing when they visit your site.

Your site is probably experiencing growth in mobile traffic. By customizing Google Analytics to show exactly what users are doing when they find your site on a mobile phone, you can learn the answers to important questions, such as:

• Which pages do mobile users land on first when they visit your site?
• Which pages are users on when they exit your site?
• Are mobile users on your site because they’re searching for a product or did they find you by searching for your company’s name?

The answers to these questions will tell you what mobile users are doing when they land on your site. If you find that mobile users are, in fact, spending several minutes on your site, visiting multiple pages and converting, you should consider making a site that is easy for them to use.

Calls From Marketers: Red Flags

It’s true that the mobile-friendly update affects your site's rank in mobile searches. It does not affect your rank in desktop searches. If a marketer tells you that your site could be dropping in desktop rankings because it’s not mobile-friendly, you should consider this a red flag.