Mobile devices, including tablets and smartphones, are outselling PC’s. What does this mean for your local business?

Your website needs to be easy to use on a smartphone. Navigating a website designed for a desktop on a smartphone is cumbersome, to say the least. Nobody wants to zoom in and out and scroll endlessly to find what they need. If you make your potential customers do that, chanes are they will leave your site before you’ve even had a chance to get your message across—business lost.

You need some responsive design. Responsive websites work on all devices, meaning that no matter what kind of device a consumer is using to view your site it will look good. Responsive web design makes use of a fluid grid-like design concept with web page elements derived from percentages, as opposed to fixed units. A website’s layout, text, and images are configured to perfectly fit a viewer’s browser, optimizing their viewing experience whether they are on a smartphone, tablet or desktop/laptop.

You need to grab mobile searchers. According to Google, approximately 20% of Google searches contain some kind of local reference such as a state, city, street name, neighborhood, etc. However, roughly 50% all mobile searches are local, meaning that the individual who has initiated the search has done so with the intent of finding a local business. If you want to convert these mobile searchers into customers, a mobile optimized website is a must.

It will help your search engine rankings. Mobile optimized websites rank higher in mobile searches on search engines like Google and Bing. Google, in particular values websites that have been optimized for mobile devices (because of all the reasons above.)