Whether your audience consists of Red Sox fans, wannabe athletes, or knitting aficionados, chances are (very) good they all have something in common: when they have a question or immediate need for information, they turn to their mobile device first.
Whether it’s a smartphone or tablet, today’s world operates primarily via handheld gadgets, not the desktop or laptop computers of days past.
Reaching that audience means optimizing your content for those mobile users who’d, for instance, prefer to learn how to K2Tog from their sofa than from their home office.
Keep Titles and Meta Descriptions Short and to the Point
Smaller screens mean less space to filter through fluff. Of course, industry best practice is to keep everything concise and on-topic when marketing content online, but this is even more vital when optimizing content for mobile users.
Keeping titles, meta descriptions, and even URLs short and sweet makes it easier for mobile users to find your content.
Cut Page Load Times
Your content strategy for mobile should involve getting that page up and running in as few milliseconds as possible. Google favors responsive web design that delivers the same content to devices on a variety of different screen sizes; a responsive design could be a powerful tool in your SEO strategy and reduce loading time for your audience.
Web design should also keep things simple to avoid redirects, popups, and other distractions that make it difficult for mobile users to see what they came for.
Keep Content Task-Centered
Most of the time, when your audience searches for something on his or her smartphone, they’re looking for an immediate answer to an immediate problem or question; how-to articles, specific product searches, and similar task-centered operations are most likely to form the majority of your audience’s mobile searches.
You know your audience best, but if practical, making task-centered content readily accessible to users might just result in a spike of conversions.
Make Mobile Marketing Part of Your Overall Content Strategy
Marketing to mobile users doesn’t mean developing a completely separate marketing strategy. In a perfect world, mobile marketing is a branch of your existing content marketing plan designed to make your content and web design as accessible as possible for your entire audience.
Quality content is quality content, whether it’s viewed from an iPad or a laptop. Show-stopping headlines are still vital to snag reader attention. In short, best practices remain the same; their execution just needs to be tweaked from time to time.
The face of mobile devices has changed in the last several years, both inside and out, so be prepared to keep re-learning how to optimize for mobile and implement new marketing strategies on a regular basis. Want to learn more?
Check out the keynote speakers at the 2016 Content Marketing Conference in Las Vegas.
Experts in their fields will cover a slew of content optimization strategies to help you reach your entire audience–desktop and mobile users alike.