5 tips for mobile-friendly content
Does it matter if your content is optimized for mobile?
I’m always taken aback when the only computer someone has in their home is their work laptop, but I get it. If your job isn’t “in tech”, and your hobbies aren’t video games or speed-typing your novel on Google docs, why would you need your own computer?
Everything you could possibly want to browse, research, watch, or otherwise consume is on that nifty handheld device right there in your back pocket!
We know the vast majority of what we need to do online can be spent on our phones (for an average of 7 hours a day in the U.S. 😬). Add to that statistics like “smartphone conversion rates are up 64% compared to desktop conversion rates” and more than “55% of website traffic comes from mobile devices”, and you’ve got yourself a pretty clear-cut reason why businesses should care about mobile optimization.
Here are 5 actionable steps for making sure your website is mobile-friendly enough to score a segment of the 92.3% of internet users who are accessing the web on their phones.
1. Don’t overdo lengthy content
There’s a time and place for long-form articles and in-depth blogs, and you can definitely structure even the longer piece to be super engaging and interesting.
Unfortunately, the more common outcome is that most of your readers aren’t reading most of your longer pieces. The average time a person spends on a page is less than a minute (this isn’t specific to mobile). For blogs, it’s a bit more—2 to 5 minutes. So write your long thought pieces, absolutely, but find ways to give your readers what they want in more bite-sized options, too.
2. Keep your paragraphs nice and tight.
Maybe you’ve seen this tip before, but a lot of the push toward shorter paragraphs in web content comes from the rise of mobile readers.
If you think “wall of text” is overwhelming on a desktop, imagine it on a screen, where it’s also a much smaller font. Try to limit your paragraphs to one or two sentences. If you just can’t, it’s possible you need to fine-turn your argument, anyway.
3. Keep your language concise and readable
Reading level also has a direct link to mobile. These days, there is so much going on that we’re rarely giving anything 100% of our attention. Think of the usual situations where you pull out your phone. You’re on the bus, or waiting for an appointment, or killing time on a work break, right? None of these particularly lend themselves to hyper-focus.
No matter how capable or vocabulary-rich your reader is, chances are they aren’t committing the brain power needed to parse a super technical article on their phone. There are lots of free and inexpensive options to figure out your reading level (Grammarly, for example, or Hemingway), and the general level to shoot for is around grade 7 or 8. Some sources even say grade 6, but I’ve found it’s incredibly hard to hit that. This post is grade 8, according to Grammarly.
4. Keep formatting in mind
For the same reasons as the last tip, make sure your articles and blogs are formatted so that they’re skimmable. Sure, it might sting a bit to admit that most of your readers aren’t going to read every word you painstakingly wrote or paid for, but if that’s the reality, then the least you can do is make sure they have the most important takeaways when they click away.
This means opting for informative subheadings rather than just pithy ones (unless you’re a whiz and they’re so catchy they make your reader pay attention) and embracing short bullet points and lists (remember the screen size—a long bullet point is just going to be one more paragraph).
5. Prioritize the most important information
Another way to make the most of the short time most readers spend on-page is to organize your articles to quickly tell them what's coming, and make sure they get something out of the first few paragraphs. You can go into more detail on each point further down.
That way, even if the reader stops after the intro, they have already learned something that is useful enough that they’ll either a) remember you as a source of helpful info or b) keep reading.
Besides content choices, there are tons of other ways to make your site more mobile-friendly. Talk to your developer, your SEO pro, your graphic designer...they'll all have great suggestions.
What do you think? Which of these practices are you already implementing? How has improving your mobile site improved your conversions?
I’d love to hear about your experience. Drop me a line!