A responsive design means a website that changes it’s layout out according to the size of the device it’s being viewed in by each user. The site reformats itself according to the screen size and looks optimized on different screen sizes like desktops, laptops, tablets or smart phones.
This means you don’t need to have a separate mobile optimized website with different URL’s and duplicate pages. A responsive website presents the same content on tablets and smart phones as it displays on computers.
After checking over six hundred disaster restoration websites so far this year I found that a very small percentage of them are responsive.
5 Reasons to Switch to a Responsive Design and Get More Leads
1. Reach more prospects searching on tablet and mobile devices
According to Pew Research, as of April 2012 over 88% of adults in United States own a cell phone and more than half of these cell phone owners use their phone to go online. Due to speed and convenience almost half of the cell phone users prefer web browsing using their tablets or mobile devices. These numbers will continue to grow as 163 million mobile phones will be sold in the U.S. this year.
It’s a no brainer that more and more people are searching for your services on their hand held devices especially in an emergency situation during flood or fire. If your website does not have a unified responsive design optimized for conversions, these prospects may not be able to find your contact info immediately and will leave your site to find help elsewhere.
2. Increase conversions and revenue from Google Adwords
Although conversion is an e-commerce phrase, a conversion in the cleaning or disaster restoration industry can be counted as a telephone call from your prospect or an inquiry using the contact form of your website. Since a responsive design provides consistent user experience to your website’s visitors, the conversion rates increase so you get more leads from your site’s current traffic generated by SEO or Pay Per Click.
In other words your business revenue increases without increasing your pay per click marketing budget which means higher profits for you.
3. Higher search engine rankings
If your website has a responsive design, you don’t need a separate mobile site. That means you don’t need to create similar pages with duplicate content for a separate site optimized for hand held devices.
By avoiding duplicate content and instead focusing on high quality content you increase your chances of higher rankings in search engines, especially Google.
As of June 6th, 2012, Google recommends having a website with responsive design as it is easier for Google bot to crawl those sites. Google also agrees that mobile optimized websites rank higher in local search results which results in more relevant traffic, thereby increasing your call volume.
4. Cost effective
With a responsive design website one does not need to have a separate mobile optimized site. This saves marketing dollars as you don’t need to have separate maintenance and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaigns for two sites.
SEO campaigns can be very time consuming and costly. However a responsive design allows you to have one unified strategy that can help you get higher search engine rankings much faster thus saving you time and money.
Responsive design also saves you time and money by not having to maintain functionality and performance of multiple websites. However keeping your site up to date helps you generate more leads from it.
5. Stay ahead of the competition
In order for you to succeed in today’s world you must stay ahead of the competition. As more and more users are searching the web on mobile devices you will need to provide them with quick and easy access to you, especially if your prospect is in an emergency situation.
You may be losing leads if you are making your potential customers scroll through an entire site on a small screen trying to reach you. Instead give them “one touch call” buttons with a responsive design to call you so all they have to do is tap on the phone number from their smart phone and your website will automatically call you. This helps you get more flood jobs.
If your local competitors are not taking advantage of responsive design then they are surely sending prospects away. You can get their potential leads by having a high performance optimized responsive design.
