The Case For Mobile in Hearing Healthcare

The Importance of Mobile in Hearing Healthcare Just Grows

I read a great article recently by Kathy Roy Gaughran, 10 More Compelling Reasons. It detailed the reasons that made it imperative that healthcare think mobile. The article is as important to us in hearing healthcare as it is to the wider healthcare audience. The shift towards mobile in all things internet continues gathering pace worldwide. More and more people are using mobile devices to surf, shop, research and find information.

On the websites we manage we are seeing increasing views via mobile devices. It appears to us that the importance of mobile in hearing healthcare is just growing.  Mobile devices are quickly becoming the primary device for web viewing and e-commerce. The question is have you considered the impact and is your web presence ready? Making your website ready for mobile viewing is based on using responsive or adaptive web design, lets look at both terms and what they mean.

Responsive Websites

Responsive websites are websites that have been designed to display well on any screen size. Responsive websites are not just a re-size of the entire website to the screen size, it goes far deeper than that. The website displays differently for desk top and mobile, even differently for mobile on landscape and portrait. In this way the different elements of the site are always displayed in the best manner possible. Responsive is simply optimization for mobile viewing.

Adaptive Websites

Mobile optimization can go further than responsive, it can also be adaptive. Adaptive sites display differing elements dependent on the viewing device. In this way you can ensure that only the elements that are suitable for differing mobile devices are displayed. For instance a slider that works well on a full screen or landscape view of a tablet may well not look so good on a phone. On an adaptive site you can just set the site to display a different phone optimized slider.

Mobile Ready Websites Are Imperative

It is now imperative for your web presence to be mobile optimized in particular if your business is in the US. CNN Money recently announced that in January 2014, for the first time, Americans used smartphone and tablet apps more than PCs to access the Internet. Pew Research says that virtually everyone in the US (91 percent of US adults) now own a mobile phone, and 61 percent of those are smartphones. in the United States, there are 143 million smart phones in use, and 71 million tablets. About one in four Americans use mobile devices (primarily tablets) exclusively to access the Internet.

If your website is not responsive, there is an increasing chance that people will land on it and leave immediately. When I am browsing on the phone in particular, it irritates me greatly when a site isn’t responsive. So much so that unless the information is something I will not get somewhere else, I will go somewhere  else. If you have analytics set up on your site it is easy to see exactly how many viewers you are getting on mobile technology. It is also easy to ascertain what your bounce rate from viewers on mobile technology is. If both these figures are high, you really need to consider how your site is displaying.

 Another interesting thing is that according to Catalyst Research, in online search, the first four positions receive 83 percent of first page organic clicks. For mobile devices, the average click through rate skews even more toward the first position. Those are very interesting figures for SEO strategy and optimization, something we can talk about another time.

You Need To Be Mobile Optimized

It is simple, your web presence needs to be mobile optimized if you want to remain a viable option for prospects. This is an imperative and it is only going to become more important.