Is your website mobile-friendly?

A major mobile milestone is just around the corner. On April 21, Google will update its search algorithms, and it will reward sites that are mobile-friendly. The search behemoth says that the change will have a “significant impact” on all mobile searches with a goal of providing online shoppers with higher quality results.

So while these changes are great news for mobile users, they present dealerships like yours with what can feel like a daunting challenge.

If you missed my colleague Bob McCann’s PSB blog post on Mobile Browsing posted last October, it’s definitely worth a read. In that post, Bob shared a quick checklist of the elements of an optimized, mobile-friendly site. Can you check all the boxes?

• —Do you have a dedicated mobile site and/or a responsive site design?
• — Is your full site coded to detect a mobile device and auto-load your mobile site?
• — Do you have a prominently placed link on your full site to link to your mobile site and vice versa?
• — Is it easy to search your inventory on a mobile device?
• — Can visitors quickly and easily find all of the pictures for the unit they have chosen?
• — Is your phone number always present and in a format that only requires a touch to make a call to your dealership?
• — Is it easy to send an email to your dealership while looking at a motorcycle or a service page?

So, is your dealership ready? While the checklist above is a great place to start to help you answer that question, I absolutely recommend that you also check out Google’s Mobile-Friendly test here: http://bit.ly/1EVi9R3. The tool will analyze your URL and report if the page has a mobile-friendly design. If you get a negative result, call your website provider immediately to correct this critical error!

Need more convincing that you need to think mobile? Check out these compelling stats on mobile usage:

• — 61 percent of American adults currently own a     smartphone (Innovative Thinking)
• — Over 50 percent of all mobile searches lead to a purchase (Rocket Post)
• — Nearly 50 percent of consumers say they won’t return to a website if it doesn’t load properly on their mobile devices (The Social Media Hat)
• — Local mobile searches are projected to exceed desktop searches for the first time in 2015 (eMarketer)
• — 3 percent of eCommerce website traffic comes through a mobile device (Shopify)

While these stats definitely got me thinking mobile, I also invite you to explore your own mobile analytics to see what percentage of your site visitors are coming in from mobile devices. Not quite sure how? Find a guide to tracking mobile usage in Google Analytics here.

So what were your results? Any surprises? Did they raise any questions? I’d love to hear about your dealership’s mobile user mix. Use the comments section below to let me know what you found and if you’ve got any questions.

Colleen Malloy is ARI’s director of marketing. Malloy has more than a decade of experience in the powersports industry and previously served as the editor of Motorcycle & Powersports News. ARI creates award-winning software solutions that help equipment manufacturers, distributors and dealers Sell More Stuff! — online and in-store. ARI removes the complexity of selling and servicing new and used inventory, parts, garments and accessories for customers in automotive tire and wheel, powersports, outdoor power equipment, marine, RV and white goods industries. More than 22,000 equipment dealers, 195 distributors and 140 manufacturers worldwide leverage ARI’s website and eCatalog platforms to Sell More Stuff!

Email: colleen.malloy@arinet.com

Phone: 414/973-4323

Website: arinet.com