Going Mobile. (It’s Time for You to Redesign Your Franchise’s Website.)

The Who may have been quite prescient for 1971 when they penned this decade's theme for online franchise lead generation:

But in all seriousness, as the calendar settles into 2016, it’s time to seriously reconsider whether or not your franchise’s website is ready for the way the people are actually looking for information.

Before we get into some pretty compelling new information from FranchiseHelp’s traffic, I encourage you to take a look at all the other articles we’ve published on the subject of mobile web design to date:

• How FranchiseHelp Makes Our Site Look Different On Your Phone
• What’s the deal with this “Social, Local, Mobile” thing? And what should franchises do about it?
• Mobilegeddon for Franchises

If you’re _still _not convinced that your website needs to be re-tooled with a mobile user in mind, then take a look at some of this data.

Here's the share of Google traffic that visits FranchiseHelp using a mobile device (phone or tablet.)

The reason I start here is that we so commonly hear from our franchise partners that they’re focusing their efforts on SEO. And if that’s the case, then here’s the trend that you’re going to see. From January 2014 to January 2016, FranchiseHelp has seen Google traffic increase from a measly 30% mobile to peaking at 61.5% two months ago!

We’ve blown past the “majority” of our organic traffic being mobile and are likely headed in the direction of a VAST majority!

(I will note that it’s unlikely that your franchise’s organic traffic is this mobile-centric as Google rewards websites that are mobile- friendly. So if yours is not, then your overall traffic as well as mobile % will be muted.)

Secondly, here’s a look at mobile traffic as a percentage of total traffic on FranchiseHelp. So this includes all the organic traffic as well as paid advertisements, email, referrals from other websites, as well as the litany of other places where FranchiseHelp generates traffic.

Here you’ll see that we’ve increased mobile % from 20% to peaking all the way at 69% this past January. I would call this a cataclysmic shift in the average user experience on FranchiseHelp in two years.

(It should be noted that your franchise’s marketing mix is highly unlikely to mirror ours, so this chart is probably slightly less useful than the previous one.)

But enough with the graphs. Here’s the skinny.

Your website needs to be redesigned.

Ok, maybe your website doesn’t need to be redesigned. BUT I’m confident that the average franchise’s website absolutely needs to be redesigned. And I’m not speaking about being “mobile-friendly.” I’m speaking about being “mobile focused!”

Think about it this way. Let’s assume your franchise redesigns its website every three years. (Seems like a bit too infrequent, but let’s go with it for now.) Three years ago, you would have designed a website specifically with a desktop user in mind because it was the vast majority of your traffic. If you look three years from now, it’s possible that desktop traffic is into the teens or even single digits of your traffic!

Don’t constantly be stuck behind the curve! Recently, Eric and Tim sat down and spoke about how to think about designing a landing page. You can read their chat here.

If you’re interested in FranchiseHelp’s lead generation programs, click here to learn more.