Advisors: Time to Optimize Your Website for Mobile

If you’re a financial advisor, be aware that starting April 21, your website will need to be optimized for mobile devices to rank high in Google search results.

That’s because Google’s new algorithm will have a preference for mobile-friendly websites, which will help Google filter through an enormous amount of content on the web every day. The change will impact mobile searches worldwide, and will affect how easily customers can find and view your website on a tablet, mobile phone or other mobile device.

Get Ready to Update Your Web Presence

Many advisory and lending firms haven’t kept up with recent mobile technologies and have websites that were designed for desktop computers.

However, you likely have many customers (and prospects!) who access websites from their mobile devices. It’s time for your business to accommodate for that, so people can easily find your business in search results, and have a frustration-free experience navigating your site from their tablet or phone.

There’s no need to worry too much about the Google search change. Since you’re probably already updating your website every few years (or even more often), you can incorporate the move to a mobile-friendly format in your next refresh.

Here are three key steps you can take to ensure your website is mobile-friendly:

1. Figure out what your customers want from your website. Do your customers want to gain insight and ideas from your blog posts, quickly find your telephone number or address, or set up an online consultation with you? Help your customers accomplish their objectives by first and foremost designing your website to help them complete tasks.
2. Outline the specific stages in your customers’ journey to make sure the precise steps to accomplish a task on your website are simple to follow on a mobile device. How quickly can mobile customers accomplish their goals? Focus on ease of use and consistency on your website interface here. Having website content that is easy to find on search engines is also a major plus.
3. Use responsive web design. This means that your website pages use the same URL and code, whether a customer is using a desktop computer, tablet, or mobile phone. The display and text adjust according to the screen size. A big benefit to responsive web design is that you only need to perform upkeep forone version of your site rather than two (you can do away with having one for mobile, and one for desktop).

If you want to test a few pages of your current site to see how it performs on a mobile device, try out Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

If the results show your website has a lot of room for improvement, it may be time to move to a site that will lend itself to more interaction with your customers.

You can make the move to a mobile-friendly site now by contacting Smarsh Sites, which provides website and digital marketing solutions for financial advisors, lenders and insurance firms.