From McCord Web Services – Google Partner and Web Visibility Experts
Watch me pay for food at McDonalds with my smartphone using Verizon’s Softcard app and my Galaxy S5.
Make sure to read the blog posts from earlier this week on how to set up Softcard and how to get it working. I have to say I think Mobile Pay is one of the most revolutionary changes since smartphones and the Internet. I believe it will change how we live our lives for the better. I personally love it, find it super fast, and feel that in the next year all retailers will embrace mobile pay.
I manage a large number of AdWords accounts for clients in a wide and diverse sector of businesses. In the last two months I have seen very marked trend – that is the importance of mobile for lead conversions.
Of specific note is that for some clients, mobile has become their sole avenue for lead generation. For some, no longer do people take time to complete the contact form on their website, it is all click to call and with nearly all leads coming in via mobile activity.
Specifically, I see this activity on accounts that have a very strong location specificity; such as accounts for doctors, dentists, lawyers, and heating and air conditioning service providers. If the product you sell is relatively expensive, typically the desktop and tablet arena is still where most of your leads will come from, but for many mobile is REALLY ramping up.
What I’ve found is by installing website call tracking from AdWords on a website, we are getting a fuller view of how clients are using AdWords and how the client is getting lead conversions. I am finding that AdWords is driving a huge amount of call traffic for clients that we previously could not track. With this information, we are also finding out that a call versus an email conversion is now your consumers action preference.
I find that the way people use AdWords, perform research, and how leads are now generated has changed, and significantly so. Make sure that your website and your AdWords account is set up properly to take advantage of this strong emerging trend that is mobile driven. This is the future for AdWords not just a short term trend.
If you need a savvy AdWords account manager, who just also happens to be a Google Partner to help you ramp up your conversion activity, you’ll want to look over our service offerings today.
Newly introduced into the Google Webmaster control panel is a new section found under “Search Traffic” called “Mobile Usability”. With Google flexing its muscles and readying to penalize websites that are not enhancing the mobile viewing experience your site may be getting flagged as not having the viewport configured.
In fact, if you are using WordPress plugins to render your blog or website as mobile friendly, you may need to manually add in a meta tag too stop Google from flagging this issue.
The viewport is a meta setting that helps a device determine how to display the content properly. Without a viewport setting your site can not render as you had expected. Visit this page online to see images where the viewport is set and is not. It is an eye-opener and once you see it, you’ll know why you MUST update your code to show the viewport properly. (Without the viewport set images may be small and the site may not fill the device screen properly. With the viewport set image that you had wanted to be full screen will be and your site rendered maximized for that specific device.)
Adding a meta tag to the head section of your code is easy. Just grab this snippet and install it using the Editor in WordPress or Dreamweaver on your responsive website.
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no” />
Make sure you are using the code snippet that has the attributes separated with commas and not semi-colons. This little detail will assure maximum compatibility. Read this great article to find out why.
This is a great way to try out the mobile web for your own website for free from DudaMobile and Google. Just visit the link and DudaMobile creates a free mobile version website for you and hosts it for one year all for FREE! At the end of a year, if you like it, you’ll pay about $100 to $150 for each year after.
It is easy to create your own mobile website. I let the interface just create mine and then colored it and added my logo. At the end of the process code is created that I then just installed on the home page of my website that redirects my mobile viewers automatically to my new mobile friendly website.
What’s great is that I even get stats from DudaMobile showing how many visitors came to my mobile website to allow me to review if I feel it is important to keep.
I have to say that having experimented in mobile design and having had problems with sniffing out the various phone types to deliver a mobile page, that this application is really foolproof and has done quite well.
If you’ve wanted to test mobile but didn’t wanted to either get into the code, pay a premium for a special design, for now the service is free thanks to Google and DudaMobile. Just visit my site www.mccordweb.com with your smartphone to see my DudaMobile website.