Mobile Optimization 101 for Your Salon: Why you need a website that is mobile responsive

The ultimate goal of optimizing your mobile site with different functions and features is to improve UX (user experience). If the user experience is improved, then the chances of a viewer staying on your website and becoming a new salon client are automatically higher. Making this decision for your salon’s website is step one in the mobile optimization handbook.

User experience (UX) is influenced by many factors. Improving UX implies that you are improving the interactions users have on your site, whether it be with simply finding their way to the site menu or throughout the process of completing a transaction.  All in all, improving UX by creating a responsive mobile web design reduces any complications that your potential clients may come across. Speedy access and easy navigation are two factors that greatly influence the user experience and show why you need a mobile responsive website. Here’s why:

Speedy Access

Improving the speed of your website means that your salon will have more page views, a higher ranking, and miss fewer opportunities to turn viewers into new salon clients. As a new year approaches and it’s time for Google to launch the next algorithm update, improving your page speed is more important than ever. If someone is searching for something on their mobile device, they want a speedier answer. If your mobile website is slow, then a viewer will more than likely move on to the next one that does.

Easy Navigation

Having speedy access and easy navigation are important on traditional websites, but even more so on mobile. The screen that you view a mobile website on is significantly smaller than that of a traditional site. No one viewing a site on their mobile device wants to spend more time than necessary searching for something that could be in plain sight if optimized appropriately. This is why your mobile site needs to be built in a way that displays what your potential clients need to see front and center.

Optimizing a mobile website for your salon is crucial for a positive user experience (UX). A positive user experience ultimately leads to a boost in your SEO rankings, as users will want to stay on your site for a longer period of time. The faster the page and the easier the navigation, the more traffic you’ll receive.

As new algorithm changes continue to drop, all you can do is optimize your mobile site to the best of your ability (or hire an expert to take care of it for you). Having a website that is responsive to mobile usage is one thing, but having a separate SEO strategy for mobile is something else entirely and can be too time consuming to handle on top of your salon schedule.

If you need help figuring out where your website could use some extra SEO love, head over to our free comprehensive website audit.

As previously mentioned, optimizing for mobile essentially means taking a look at the features and functions that are on your salon’s website and adjusting them from a mobile point of view. Can users easily find where to book an appointment? Does the menu need to be more centrally located or follow you down the page? Because all of these adjustments fall under the category of page speed or easy navigation, here are some suggestions for optimizing your mobile website:

Optimizing for Page Speed

1. Make sure your images are not larger than they need to be on a mobile screen.
2. Structure your HTML so that the main content of the page loads first.
3. Eliminate render-blocking CSS in above-the-fold content.
4. Install an Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) plug-in to solve slow loading and take the mobile page back to its basic HTML framework.

(We know this sounds like a foreign language, which is why we recommend letting the marketing experts handle the website and the styling experts handle the salon!)

Optimizing for Easy Navigation

1. Navigation buttons must be larger because you’re tapping on them rather than clicking.
2. The responsive mobile design must be thumb-friendly and intended for scrolling.
3. Fonts must be readable on a smaller screen.
4. Menus should be adjusted to be clear and responsive.
5. Create clear navigation to return to the home page.
6. Any CTA’s (call-to-action buttons) need to be in clear view and should immediately be spotted on your site to increase conversion.
7. Add a fixed-position menu, so that users don’t have to scroll back to the top to navigate. This menu could be a collapsible hamburger menu or partially hidden on a sidebar.