Mobile Matters: Your Customer is On their phone

00:00 Introduction To The Podcast
02:11 Making A Blog Post Mobile Friendly
05:34 How To Convert Traffic & Why Mobile Matters
09:00 Mobile Specific Errors
12:47 Mobile Optimization
18:23 Types of Page Speed Test

Pip: [00:00:00] Now, who wants to have a conversation about mobile marketing? Hi, Tim! Hi! It's Phelan and I today, so Pip, Seymour Digital Media, Phelan, what, Fuzz Marketing, Phelan, Seymour Digital Media? What's going on there? Yeah?  

Phelan: It's still the same, yeah. Seymour Digital Media. Yeah.  

Pip: Look and I've dressed up a little because we're going we're going to a good meeting after this with one of our best clients, so I'm very excited. 

But, in between then and now we're talking mobile marketing. Sorry about the hiccups. And the hiccups with the live, we figured it out. It's cause I was testing zoom yesterday with Ecam and I'm almost perfect. Phelan, like our names are so close to being like, even, but let's get into the mobile marketing. 

I got a whole list of things we want to talk about. So Phelan is a stand in for Greg because Greg got Caught in traffic I think, and so we didn't want him on his phone driving. We were trying to be all cool. Yeah.  

Phelan: Yeah. [00:01:00] We don't want to, you don't want to do a live while you're sitting in your car. 

That's not preferred.  

Pip: No, especially without air conditioner right now in BC right? So I've got my handy dandy notes up and because we do search engine marketing and Greg does websites and Phelan does websites, we've a lot to say on the mobile, mobile first issue. Phil, and maybe we can look at this like a standpoint. 

You have the standpoint of like the SEO and I'll do Google ads or we'll just switch back and forth. I have a number of things I want to get to Google with its mobile first indexing. And so I want to talk about ads and SEO. You're going to do more, of the knowing the website stuff. 

Cause I have an issue sometimes when I go and I make an image and say the image Text in it, which is, something I might have because we do SEO and I like numbers. When I go and add that to a blog post, a lot of the time, like if I don't check it on a mobile phone, it looks like [00:02:00] crap. If then, two weeks later, go look at it on a mobile phone. 

Do you, is there an easy way as a user that someone can make sure it's a 100 percent accurate? Mobile first, when I'm adding stuff to my website.  

Phelan: Yeah. So most like Shopify, WordPress, they now have a preview button in the top right hand corner. So you usually see it set up by default in desktop mode. 

And so you could easily switch to mobile and see how the spacing works with like your images and make sure to like your cutoff points, like you. You generally want to have if you got a big landscape picture, that you have all the important stuff in the center, so that if the other stuff gets cut off, that it still has it's, that's the rule of thumb that I would go with. 

You can, Shopify makes multiple copies of your images, like 26 different copies, and so it'll insert the one that's correct, but they'll still do cutoffs and stuff like that as well, so that's just something to keep in mind. Yeah, nowadays it's a lot of these website builders have a default like, Hey, do you want to see [00:03:00] this on mobile? 

And then you can just easily switch over and so you can get a really good feel for it without even having to whip out your phone.  

Pip: And why do we want to think mobile first?  

Phelan: Like you said at the top if you're doing SEO, you want to be looking at making sure it's optimized for people on their phones. 

You'll go through the analytics. I haven't seen a website. I think there's been one or two that have, That are very B2B, but most of the time, if you have any sort of like end user, or you're bringing in like lots of traffic, you're going to get at least 50 percent of it's going to be mobile. 

Pip: At least, and we're seeing, so I think it's, I think it's a new, really smart strategy to focus on mobile. Because the most people have their phone in their pocket. Most people go from their phone to the computer. How many people have their phone sitting right by them? And phones convert better as, as well. 

Phelan: I would also say that there's an unintentional side effect of focusing on mobile [00:04:00] first, which is that phones aren't as powerful as desktops. So if you're optimized for a phone, you've already by default optimized for a desktop because like the speed and loading issues that are going to be ranking factors and user experience. 

And that also goes to the ads because it counts as landing page experience. So all these things, if you optimize for mobile, you're in. And unintentionally optimizing for the whole website overall, because you have to do all these extra things to make it run very efficiently, which is a good thing. 

We want that. Like you want the end user to have a fast loading, even on mobile website.  

Pip: It is true. And we see it like if it's, that's such a good fact. So if everybody actually, we should drop the everybody probably knows, but the speed test from Google, that's where you go, and and you. Test it, it'll give you the desktop, I think, back first, which is really funny because if you actually optimize for the mobile and get that solid in and out of the way, and this is where we see most problems, right? Is the [00:05:00] loading of websites and the load, even in Google ads, we'll stop doing your Google ads, your pages don't load, right? 

Cause you're just wasting money. And so it will give you the competitive advantage to think mobile first. And we're not talking today about Hey, Shoot people a text for advertising. I'm not the biggest fan of that. I don't like even getting reminders for text. Text is I don't know. I just keep it a little less dingy. 

It's always dinging. So we're not talking about that today. We're talking about how to convert traffic and why mobile matters and how, if you want to win with your marketing, how you should be thinking about it from a search perspective, of course, I think it's pretty searchy.  

Phelan: Yeah. Yeah. I would say that it's it's definitely worth it to think about it as well as like your conversion rate optimization stuff. 

So once they're on the page that you have things ordered in the right way that because like in desktop, you can let yourself get too busy. like too smart by half and then make it too busy. Whereas mobile is you've got to be pretty clear [00:06:00] and get people through a land on their on a page on their phone. 

You want to get them from point A to conversion as quick as you can. And so making sure that you've optimized for that as well will be beneficial for you in the long run of how to Optimize your website and get it to convert.  

Pip: Especially if you have like automatic things set up in your phone, you're just, or or a human has their automatic things set up on their phone, right? 

Cause you could instantly fill things in. Some people can instantly pay for things like it, and it just helps from every angle and from a perspective where if you're, so I think. Speed is the most important. That's what we'll say. I think, and from a Google ads perspective and a conversion rate optimization perspective, phones convert better and more people have them. 

Lots of people don't have computers, like older people might have iPads. It's all right. So yeah. And then there's a mobile first content so shorter paragraphs, more bullet points, clear headings. So the same thing as SEO. [00:07:00] Like that you want on your page. And then many mobile search searches, this is local SEO, right? 

Have local intent. So if you're a local business I would definitely be focusing on this. And checking everything. Like every time you update your website, check it on a phone and we all forget. Who doesn't forget, it's funny cause I, we do check it now all the time, but I don't think even with clients, it's something that I think we need to train ourselves to do more and more. 

Phelan: Yeah. Yeah. And I would say as well to trade to look at it on multiple devices, you can inspect element and then it will let you cycle through different types of devices to see how they all interact.  

Pip: Ooh, one day we'll be able to show people that because I'm working on my Skittles with video, right? 

Because I can be like, I'm talking now. And then I can be like, Oh, I'm talking again. 

Phelan: Yeah, let's not. We're back.  

Pip: We're back. Sorry. Got excited there. Got excited about showing my skills, but where were we? We were talking about mobile, and what were you just saying, [00:08:00] Phelan? I'm so sorry.  

Phelan: Yeah, so I was saying that with yeah, now I've actually lost my train of thought. That's okay, I got,  

Pip: yeah. 

Phelan: Talking about inspecting element. And so that's another way that you can test it's a little more advanced as a feature, but generally nine times out of 10, if you just use one of those preview mobile it's still, it's worth it to check on a phone because sometimes how the preview on mobile renders versus how your phone actually renders it, not always. 

So it is still good to have a backup to check those just in case, because they do render sometimes a little weird with like mobile browsers and stuff like that. They they're not a perfect, what your desktop is trying to imitate is not always a perfect reflection of what's actually in the real world. 

Pip: You want to check your phones, your friends phones. Other people's phones fail and I both have different phones. We work together and so we can see differences. That was on purpose. But it is interesting because no matter what you do, it might be off somewhere, but if you're optimizing for it Then it'll work out better. 

There's [00:09:00] like mobile specific errors on say Google search console failing. We're going to see things like blocked JavaScript. Is that right? And CSS issues, right? Image files. And so those things, if we optimize for those. I think it'll make our phones better. No, you know this, but I like block JavaScript. 

You can, you got to explain that more.  

Phelan: So yeah what happens is so JavaScript, which is like how you interact with it, you click a button, the button does something that's all done through JavaScript The images is the other one. So images, yeah, we definitely, we've talked about that. You want to have them optimized, but for the JavaScript, one of the big ones is that I've noticed is Chrome. 

We'll just straight up, not render something. Cause it's yeah, that was a lot of work and we don't have enough bandwidth. So we're just not going to render stuff. Which is, what does that  

Pip: mean?  

Phelan: It means Oh, this function was going to take up too much compute power. We're just not going to run that function. 

And so that's why [00:10:00] when I talked about at the top of optimizing for mobile and like getting a lot of that heavy work and making sure you don't have like extra plugins that are just bloating your website, you don't have extra code on there. That's again, the PageSpeed Insights will tell you a lot of that. 

It'll say  

Pip: people look at those, but people look at the page speed insights. And they look at it and honestly it's pretty overwhelming. It starts with the first paint and the second paint and, people don't even know what paint is , yeah. So it's hard for a regular user.  

Phelan: Yeah, it is. 

It is something that's gonna be a little more technical, especially in fixing the issues. It's go, it's not. It's not as simple as resizing an image and it's just like you resize it and you're done. This is much, a little more complicated but it's well worth it again, because the faster you speed up your phone for mobile where it helps across the board. 

Cause your desktop's also going to get those improvements.  

Pip: And so  

Phelan: I think that's good.  

Pip: That's a huge win [00:11:00] right there in and of itself. We can close the podcast now we've done it all. Said all the things. Yeah. . Yeah, that's fair. But with I think there's also, I also learned some information about email opens it's more likely that people read e email newsletters on their phone. 

I don't read email newsletters often I read, I'm on my desktop a lot. Yeah, but I am going to start I think we're going to be implementing this strategy ourselves. Because not only do more people have phones than have computers, but if we focus on mobile first for all that we're doing, we know it converts better on ads, which means overall, if you do mobile first, I bet you'll convert better, right? 

Phelan: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.  

Pip: Yeah. We should test that. You can see in Google Search Console mobile devices and what's going on there. You can do page speeds tests. You can look in Google Analytics and you can separate out your traffic. You would segment it, right Phelan, to look at [00:12:00] mobile and look at the comparison. 

Phelan: Yeah. In the new system, the way they've laid it out, it used to be that you go to a tech tab. But now what you would do is I would. Go to reports and then acquisition and then traffic acquisition. And so that shows you the traffic and then just above, there's a plus icon in the, just above the names of each of the different platforms. 

So you can put a secondary filter and that filter can have tech. Interesting. So you can do I've got, for my Google organic traffic, I've got 60 percent desktop and 40 percent mobile. You can start to see that and see it by the different channels and then see how you're, You want to be optimizing for each channel, or maybe there's one that's bringing you a lot more mobile traffic that you weren't anticipating. 

Pip: So this is where the data driven insights really do help and affect everything we do. And is, I think, when you get right into the nitty gritty of this, Optimizing things for Google ads or [00:13:00] SEO. You're in there looking at this type of data, right? You're cross comparing. 

And there are so many industries and so many businesses that have done marketing that we can learn from what they've done. So finding industry specific things like what converts better for. Say coaches like and do mobile convert better like I know people test longer and shorter form. 

Everything's a test but when you get to go and try to optimize for this specific thing and if it could the knockdown effects That can help it. If you optimize for mobile technically, I think you're also optimizing for voice right  

Phelan: there. There's gonna be a lot of the best practices that'll make it easy for all those systems. 

Sorry about that. .  

Pip: It's pressing buttons. Say that again.  

Phelan: Okay. I was gonna say that 'cause going back to your earlier point of like you're talking about semantic, HTML, basically laying it out in a structure that's easy for. Systems to read it and then in and [00:14:00] digest the information and so that's going to be good for crawlers whether it's like voice content or pretty much anyone the easier you make it to read and to analyze the easier it's going to be for someone else to share that information because that's just Kind of the way these callers work. 

Pip: And when you look inside like Google Analytics, can you see, can you look at a phone and then the pages they land on, can you do the whole path? Can you look at the whole path and segment?  

Phelan: Not anymore. That's one of the reports that people were really hoping was going to get brought over, but it wasn't 

Pip: Analyze and measure the way we want to measure on mobile devices. Wasn't that the whole reason?  

Phelan: It was designed for apps. And so the apps would have specific events of login screen reached payment screen reached. Um, like it would have it as the event would be the page that they make it to. 

Pip: Okay. Oh, okay. And So you'd think it'd be all [00:15:00] mobile first and they'd give us as much data as possible. Who am I kidding? They try not to tell us some things, right?  

Phelan: Yeah, it's one of the more annoying reports that they didn't create was like each step. So you could see if maybe there's a drop off so you do landing pages to completion. 

One of the pages that they see along the journey, they don't really tell you that information. If someone does know of how to get there. Report then feel free to let me know in the comments, but I haven't found  

Pip: it. New things show up there every day.  

Phelan: This is also true. Yeah.  

Pip: Which is exciting. 

And so the whole thing with Google ads is that we want to, and with SEO is we want to help people make purchases faster or get the information they're looking for faster, right? And if they're on their phone and yeah, we're going to have such an easier time of it. The thing is, it is hard. 

To optimize for a phone because it is hard to speed up your website, right? It is a lot of technical stuff that the regular Joe can't do and not like you have to be a [00:16:00] technical SEO to keep plugging away at it And there's some things in there that aren't great. Like the number goes up and down  

Phelan: Yeah, and also that, uh, in this current age, there's actually a lot more resources for how to do stuff. 

So I just helped out someone else yesterday that we're consulting with, and they were asking how do I speed up the website for mobile on Squarespace? And sure enough, there's a, I typed it in and they had a help doc on going through here's a list of things you can do for Squarespace that will help you speed up your website. 

And they were all reasonably easy things for anyone. Yeah, they were simple things to get done. I wouldn't say that they were gonna, yeah, they weren't revolutionary. It wasn't like you were having to write JavaScript or anything like that. It was more kind of all the things we've been talking about. 

As well as some setting things that you wanted to have checked off in certain ways. And but that tells you that Wix and Squarespace and Shopify, they all have like ways that you can speed up their websites. And you gotta play by their  

Pip: rules, right? So here's the thing. [00:17:00] You get a Shopify site or a Wix site or Squarespace sites and you're like, oh, okay, I don't have to worry about images. 

And you just upload images, but they actually have image size recommendation, even though they size them down for you, but you, a lot of people go over that anyway, right? So we spend a lot of time fixing the weight of images.  

Phelan: Yeah. There's still that. It's still a function of limitation on the speed of light, right? 

Like at the end of the day if the website's load is determined by how much like bits can go through the internet and Like the more you could do to reduce those bits that are going through the better It's gonna be especially for mobile phones that are you know? You're on a 2g network for a little bit because it's You just happen to be shifting between two towers. 

And so you got to be thinking in all those different use cases as well.  

Pip: Yeah, we did have the experience a few days ago of one of our team members downloading Screaming Frog. And the next day it took the [00:18:00] next day it was very strange because they said to us basically, Oh my God it's taken a day and I was like that's weird. 

And that's when I call you in failing. And that's when we checked it was the. Speed of their internet connection. That was the main issue. So that was pretty interesting to pay attention to you. Cause you could get pretty frustrated as a user. And that's one thing to check. So it, it's all connected. 

Phelan: Yeah. I would say one last thing as well that I didn't get to touch on. there's actually two PageSpeed tests. so there's one that if you go to PageSpeed pagespeed. web. dev which is the PageSpeed Insights. Also, in your browser, you can also do a PageSpeed test. So it localizes it to your internet connection, connecting to their website. 

So it's not like this so what you do is you go to the developer tools, and it's the last option on your Chrome. It's called Lighthouse.  

Pip: Wait, so how we get to the developer tools is go to our website, or go to our computer and right click, [00:19:00] right?  

Phelan: That, or the other one is to open up so we're getting, we want to  

Pip: inspect, right? 

Inspect. Right click on your computer and then inspect and that takes you to the developer tools. Is that correct? Okay. Or can you just right click on your computer and then go to, no, you can't just go to developer tools. Damn. So inspect. Correct.  

Phelan: The. The second way is you go in your browser menu along the very top where it says Chrome, File, Edit, View, you go to View, then Developer, and then Developer Tools. 

That's another way.  

Pip: Developer, okay, Developer, yes, and then Developer Tools. Oh, bam! Look at that, Sunshine. So those are two great ways to get there, and I, it might look like a lot of gobbledygook. But it is very interesting because this is how you find out what website somebody's on or I have, we have this in our spying on the, on, on our competition class which is a, oh, I don't think that's part of the free section of our [00:20:00] course. 

So yeah, it's part of the paid course, but you can learn how to do this very easily.  

Phelan: Yeah but yeah, once you're in there, you'll see something that says Elements, Console, and then there'll be a bunch of options like Network, but the very last one says Lighthouse, and then you can just run it from there. 

Pip: I have Lighthouse, Recorder, and then Performance Insights. Lighthouse, and then, yes, and then analyze low page load. Nice. Oh, it turns it into kind of a phone. Isn't that interesting? Is this what you do, Phelan? Because I haven't done this. This is exciting.  

Phelan: I do it if there's like a big discrepancy. 

From what I'm seeing to what PageSpeed Insights is seeing, then I'll bust out this tool as well. But that being said, we have to go. We do!  

Pip: Hard out at 1130. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so sorry. We were a little bit late. That was me connecting Zoom and Ecamm for trying new things. 

We will be here next week. On Thursday at 11 [00:21:00] Pacific, if you want to join us live and ask your questions, we are, we pay attention to our Facebook group, Cyberpunk Geeks, Marketing Mixer, and YouTube and LinkedIn. We'll be here next Thursday, 11 AM Pacific time talking about Dun, do you know what we're talking about? 

Phelan: You and Rena are talking about Google ads. Yes.  

Pip: All about Google ads. I think that's because of our upcoming class. Anyway, we will see you next week. Lovely to see y'all here today and we'll chat soon.  

Phelan: Bye.