Is Your Website CMS Optimized for a New Generation of Mobile Devices?

Digital marketing is the fastest evolving profession that I have ever worked in. One of the biggest changes has been the disruption of mobile technology. As of 2016, mobile has had a larger market share than desktop. PwC reports that advertisers spent 51% of their marketing budgets on mobile ads in 2016. MarketingLand predicts that this figure is expected to rise to 72% by 2019.

While the sudden growth in mobile technology is miraculous, it also creates tremendous challenges for brands that are not well prepared. You need to make sure that your website is properly optimized for mobile traffic. For most brands, this means using the right headless CMS and mobile optimized web themes.

Perils of having a CMS that is not optimized for mobile traffic

A few years ago, I was an independent contractor for a digital marketing agency in my area. I was solely responsible for overseeing their SEO. I constantly had to warn them that they needed to update their clients’ websites for mobile users. They also had WP Blog Tips telling them to upgrade, so they could have upgraded to more mobile friendly themes. They discovered the hard way after they failed to heed my advice.

Neglecting to optimize your site for mobile users with the right CMS and themes is a tremendous mistake. Here are some reasons that you must make it your priority this year.

You will waste your advertising budget quickly

I started as an affiliate marketer for years ago. I still remember watching my first campaign. I was using PPC traffic from 7Search and driving it to a landing page that was hosted on WordPress, which offers a decent mobile experience if optimized properly. Unfortunately, my landing page manager wasn’t optimized for mobile users. 

I made the mistake of not limiting my ads to desktop users. The obvious consequence was that my mobile traffic had a horrific ROI, even though I was making money with my desktop ads.

Many ad networks, such as Bing, don’t even give you the option of not running mobile ads anymore. While you can use the bid adjuster to reduce the cost and volume of mobile traffic, you can’t avoid running it altogether. This means that you can’t afford to run mobile ads without making sure your site is optimized for the traffic. You will burn through money quickly if your traffic can’t convert.

Your search engine rankings will plummet

Google started using mobile optimization as an operating factor a few years ago. However, they have only recently started to really emphasize it. In the future, websites that are not well optimized will suffer in the SERPs.

Optimizing your site for mobile traffic isn’t enough. You also need to make sure to notify Google about the existence of the mobile version of your site, so that they can crawl it. Matt Cutts, the former head of the web spam team at Google, provided some feedback on how to accomplish this:

“You want to make sure that mobile versions – mobile users get to the mobile version of the page, and desktop end up on the desktop version of the page. So, there are a couple of ways that you can do this. Number one, you can do a responsive design. That just means that it is the exact same page served up to mobile users and to desktop users. The JavaScript and CSS will be able to handle this. Just don’t block JavaScript and CSS!”

Your customers will abandon you

Pay attention. This is the worst problem of all when it comes to having a site that isn’t optimized for Google – your customers will revolt against you.

Numerous surveys have shown that customers will not want to invest in a relationship with a company that has not optimized its website for mobile traffic. One survey found that 97% of all online shopping cart abandonments are due to unnecessary distractions on mobile ecommerce platforms. Surveys have also shown that 42% of customers will never return to a website that loads slowly with mobile traffic.

Hopefully, these statistics are enough to warn you about the need for a CMS that is optimized for mobile traffic. Your search engine ratings can be repaired, but your relationship with your customers cannot be fixed so easily.

Ryan Kh
 

Ryan Kahn, known as a career coach and television personality. Ryan Kahn is founder of The Hired Group, author of Hired!