Digital Summit: Google: the time for mobile is now

May 18th, 2011

Tom Lowry, Google Inc.

By Peggy Duncan

ATLANTA – Research shows that businesses could increase consumer engagement by 85% with a mobile-specific site. To develop a site the right way, you’ll need to change the creative, the landing page, and the call to action.

Specifically, here are five things you can do right now from Google’s Tom Lowry, head of Industry for the search giant’s Media Sales Team, who spoke at TechMedia’s Digital Summit in Atlanta Tuesday.

Five things you can do now:

Keep the site simple. Don’t try to incorporate everything in the mobile site that’s on your Website. Users want the site to load quickly and have been known to throw their phones when they don’t.
Design for thumbs. You should design to avoid accidental clicks and so that scrolling will be in one direction.
Prioritize the content. You’ll have to decide what content will work best for the results you want. Add the information that’s most valuable for users who are on the go.
Use uniquely mobile features. Display content based on a user’s location, help them get from mobile to your location, and leverage other phone functions such as GPS.
Make it easy to convert. Reduce the number of fields to the finish.

Trends he noted include: two hundred million online videos show every day, and by 2017, there will be more people connecting via a mobile device than a desktop. And one in three searches are local with 61% of users actually calling the business, and 59% visiting.

You can start small, he said, but you should make a plan to develop a mobile strategy within the next ninety days.

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