Think you survived Mobilegeddon? Think again.

26th April, 2015

Think again. Because…

Your site is slow.

Thousands of visitors each month land on or reach error pages, ‘out of stock’ messages, empty URLs and dead ends.

Visitors frequently find the wrong products or services when they search, or content with incorrect or outdated information. They find pages targeted at the wrong country, currency or context.

Thousands of searchers don’t reach you at all, because you’re not speaking their language (literally, or metaphorically).

Everything you say, and every word on every page, is the bare minimum effort that you can put into scaling the harrying of people into converting.

Your checkout process – or your hyper-aggressive sales messaging – confuses and irritates every single one of your customers, so big chunks of them shop elsewhere.

Your retargeting is aggressive, unsophisticated, and persists after purchase.

Your messaging, systems, products and brand aren’t consistent between territories – or between digital and the high street – and the experience is disjointed; disappointing.

You’re failing to understand how to support, educate, empower and amaze your audience – or failing to deliver upon that understanding.

But you didn’t get hit by mobilegeddon.

Even though your mobile experience is crap.

When getting it right is technically, conceptually simple.

When there are clear benefits to getting it right, and every blog and news outlet in the industry has spent months producing cookie-cutter business cases, best practice examples, and resources to help you to provide a great experience.

Here’s the thing…

None of these factors exists in isolation. ‘Mobilegeddon’ is part of a larger question around how well you serve your audience what they want or need, in a format that is suitable to their context, in a way that builds a positive brand experience.

If you’re already getting that wrong in a thousand small ways, then maybe Google improving the way in which they measure one small part of it might not have a huge effect – not if you’re already scoring low across the board.

Not when you’re already providing a poor experience. When your competitors are providing a poor experience, too.

Imagine how much is on the table, in your space, for the first brands to win. To care. To surprise. To just get it right. To invest more than the minimum viable effort to survive the latest wave of algorithm updates.

So here’s the plan.

Sort your mobile experience out first. This week. Build a business case around the opportunity cost of bouncing visitors, checkout abandonments, and wasted media spend. Propose that all of your domains, pages and content is delivered responsively, reactively, or a hybrid of these as best fits your audience. Deliver the pitch whilst it’s topical, and whilst Mobilegeddon is all over the media which senior management are consuming. Strike while it’s topical, and while people are engaged.

Manage the implementation through, and measure the impact against the same metrics. Estimate the amount of money you’ve made. Be a hero.

Now go and fix everything else, or risk continuing to play Buckaroo with your brand.