Google's Mobile Search Changes - Are You Ready for Mobilegeddon?

“Mobilegeddon!”–as it has been so dubbed–is an algorithm that will make mobile-friendly websites in Google’s organic search a priority. As mobile usage increases by the multitudes on a daily basis, it is the logical choice for Google to want to provide their mobile users with mobile websites.

So now you’re asking… ”How do I know if my site is mobile or not?” Check things out for yourself by simply searching for your site on Google. With a mobile device, check to see if your site has the “Mobile-Friendly” label by it in the organic search results. In addition, the Google developers didn’t want users to feel completely alone in this, so try out their mobile-friendly test:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

If you get the “Mobile-Friendly” label by your site when you search, or if you receive the “Mobile-Friendly” analysis in Google’s test, then congratulations! You’re good to go for April 21st.

However, if you receive the ‘Not Mobile-Friendly’ diagnosis, then it’s certainly time to make some changes.

It goes without saying: ideally your website should be mobile-friendly. It is 2015 after all and more than half of all web viewers are surfing on a mobile device.

However, there are still a large number of businesses and organization that do not have a mobile website. With knowledge of Google’s recent announcement of a pending update, paired with the continued expansion of mobile usage, it is undeniable that your site must be mobile-friendly.

“Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”

So what does this really mean? In short, if your website is not mobile-friendly by the end of April, your site will suffer from diminished search rankings – which will lead to less site visits, and which will, in turn, ultimately lead to fewer customers.

To make things crystal clear: Make the change, or suffer the consequences.

There are a number of methods for creating a mobile-friendly website – one simple approach is to use the Qfuse mobile website builder to easily create a full-featured mobile-friendly website. Another approach is to invest in building a “responsive” web presence using responsive web design–an approach that scales a single website to the screen size of the device displaying it. Whichever option you choose, do it fast. The deadline is around the corner.

Posted in Mobile Marketing Best Practices, Mobile Sites, Mobile Technology, Qfuse News |

2014: The Year of Mobile

According to a recent Forbes article on mobile technology, 2014 is going to be ‘the year of mobile.’  What is meant by this is that mobile will finally become a “mainstream marketing solution.”

Mobile has been largely adopted by consumers, and yet it has taken marketers a few years to catch up, or really to even put themselves in the race.  The numbers though are getting to a point where marketers must take this increasing gap seriously.  According to data from IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark, mobile traffic is driving 25% of total online traffic to retail sites, is accounting for more than 20% of all online sales, and mobile sales are up 55% over last year with exponential growth appearing very likely.

According to the Forbes article, the average firm invests only two to three percent towards their mobile budgets, but the leading mobile firms are beginning to increase their mobile budgets to 10 or even 25%.  Indicating that some firms are finally starting to take mobile as seriously as they should.

As Jay Henderson, Strategy Program Director at IBM, states in the Forbes article, the best strategy for firms is “to take a ‘mobile first’ approach,” and he “encourages marketers to build mobile sites form the ground up, rather than force fitting an existing website into a smaller format.”  This is also what we would advise at Qfuse.

This is an important point, because rather than viewing mobile as separate and relatively insignificant, it should be viewed as vital to how business will be done in the near future, and integrated into the overall business plan.

As Henderson is quoted in the article, it is forward thinking marketers that “are investing in their mobile apps to include maps of the store, special promotions, and location based targeting.  Companies are adding QR codes and NFC to their in-store display to help bridge from physical to mobile.”  These sort of integrated plans will go a long way for the firms which implement them earliest.  Helping to increase in store sales, prevent lost sales from showrooming, helping increase brand interaction and awareness, and simply creating a better experience for the customer.

For marketers, 2014 should be a year of transition to mobile, and a year of mastering mobile technology and its existing tools.  Creating a strategy to build mobile from the ground up, and then connecting mobile to your physical marketing plan—through tools like QR codes, NFC tags, and mobile apps—will greatly increase the efficiency of the overall marketing strategy and enhance the end objectives.

To read more on this issues check out the Forbes article here, and to get started on, or improve upon you existing mobile strategy, check out Qfuse here.

Posted in Mobile Marketing Best Practices, Mobile Sites, Mobile Technology, QR Codes |

The Importance of Mobile Marketing in an Infographic

With the ever exponentially growing mobile usage it can be difficult for companies to keep up, and in fact few are.  This means that if a company can quickly move to mobile, and do it right, they can potentially find themselves filling that market hole over their competitors and reaping significant rewards.

As you will see in the Infographic below, brought to you by Surge, you will notice that as of 2014 mobile web browsing will account for half of all browsing.  If half of web usage is on mobile, and you aren’t—or you are only dipping your big toe into the mobile waters—then you are missing out on connecting with half of the entire market.

It should be pointed out that it isn’t JUST about getting onto mobile, more importantly it is about doing mobile correctly.  This means ensuring your mobile optimized site functions flawlessly since “46% of consumers are unlikely to return to a mobile site if it didn’t work properly their last visit,” and if you site takes more than 5 seconds to load, 74% of users will leave the site.    Advertisements or search results that mention a location also see a 200% increase in click-through rates as mentioned in the infographic below.  This means that if you are not doing mobile correctly, it might be as bad, or even worse, than not doing mobile at all.

In regards to e-commerce one in five smartphone users scan product codes like QR codes to access information or make purchases.  This means that using things like QR codes or NFC tags might help ensure you capture a greater number of sales than you otherwise might without these codes on your physical marketing or packaging.

The future of mobile around the world looks promising, and the growth is very much exponential.  So take a look at the infographic provided by Surge, consider where you and your company’s mobile strategy currently stands, and begin to develop a plan and make the necessary changes to match where the mobile market future is headed.  You will be far ahead of the competition.

Posted in Mobile Marketing Best Practices, Mobile Technology |

From Browsers to Buyers: Increasing Retail Sales Through In-Store Displays and Mobile

Posted in Mobile Marketing Best Practices, Mobile Sites, Mobile Technology |

QR Codes and Short URLs - Choose the Best Tool for the Job (Not bit.ly or goo.gl)

When creating a QR code that resolves to a URL it is generally advantageous to keep your URLs short, so that the code only needs to hold minimal data and can therefore be sized smaller and will scan more reliably. Codes that have long URLs embedded within them require the data to be more dense and therefore need to be somewhat larger.

To easily create short URLs for QR codes, many people opt to use a URL shortening service such as bit.ly and goo.gl . The obvious advantage being that such services allow you to take a long URL and immediately make it short, meaning your QR code is nice and small, with only minimal data. Another advantage is that these services will provide some basic stats on how many times the link has been clicked over time, so if you only use the link for a QR code you can get a sense of scan performance.

While URL shortening services like bit.ly and goo.gl are extremely practical for generating short URLs to share as links on the web, in email and social media posts, they are not well-suited for professional-grade QR code publication and management. Sure, these services are preferable compared embedding a long URL directly into a QR code, but it’s important to understand that they are not ideal.

The reason that bit.ly and goo.gl are not ideal for QR code campaigns, is because the destination URLs cannot be changed once your QR code is published. This means that the QR code you create using one of these services will always go to the same place and is locked forever. It’s not hard to imagine how this can be problematic when you are producing printed materials with QR codes (e.g. advertisements, displays, packaging, labels, business cards, brochures, publications, etc) – what happens if you want to change the destination of the code at some point after it’s printed? If you’ve use bit.ly or goo.gl to create your QR code you’re out of luck.

In order to maintain true control over your QR codes, even after they’ve been printed and published, you need to use a professional system (e.g. such as Qfuse) that generates dynamic QR codes. Dynamic QR codes allow you to change the code’s destination at any time, according to your business needs. Such management features, combined with powerful qr code scan analytics, is the only way to ensure that you can maintain complete control and measurement of your code’s performance throughout its lifecycle.

If you simply need a QR code for personal use than bit.ly and goo.gl are probably sufficient for your needs. But if you’re planning a professional campaign with any longevity, you’ll want to make sure you use the right tools for the job, so look elsewhere.

Posted in Mobile Marketing Best Practices, Mobile Technology, QR Codes |