If you are a working voice over talent, you know it’s imperative that you have your own personal website to showcase your talent. Everybody knows that, right? But did you know that your site’s “mobile-friendliness” is going to become a more and more important factor when it comes to your search ranking and visitor interactions?
With the state of technology today, just having a voice over talent website isn’t enough. It also needs to be easily viewed on mobile devices.
Failing to address this aspect of your web design is likely going to hurt your search results at some point in the very near future (“Does Not Having a Mobile Site Affect Your SEO?”) as well as cause issues for your visitors when they can’t access your demos or get the information they need to determine if they’d like to hire you.
What a bummer it would be to spend of the time, effort and expense to get visitors to your website, only to have them leave immediately simply because they can’t access your site on their smartphone or tablet.
If your site isn’t easy to read, or the features aren’t working as they were intended, or visitors can’t listen to your demos quickly… They are going to bounce, and move on to the next voice over talent website on the list. Opportunity (and potential income) is lost, just like that.
How Many Voice Over Talent Searches Are Now Initiated From Smartphones?
According to the January 2014 Pew Internet Research Project, 90% of Americans have a cell phone and almost 60% of American adults have a smartphone.
A solid 60% of adult cell phone users access the internet from their phones.
If you’d like to know how many of your visitors are accessing your voice over talent website via a smartphone, you can get a pretty good idea of that number in your Google Analytics account. I just looked at the past month’s data for my site, and 40% of new users were on mobile devices (30% smartphones, 10% tablets).
On a side note, if you haven’t yet set up Google Analytics for your website, do yourself a HUGE favor and get it done ASAP. There are plenty of articles online that can walk you through the process, or just use Google’s step-by-step checklist. You might need some help from your web designer to get the GA tracking code installed, but if your site is on WordPress, that step will be a breeze! My site is still in HTML so when I set this up originally I had to copy and paste the tracking code into every page manually (eventually I just put it in my footer section so that it would appear on every page). It took a little time but it was easy to do and totally worth the effort!
There’s An Easy Way to Test Your Voice Over Talent Website For Mobile
Just this morning I learned about this Mobile-Friendly Test created by Google. You can plug in your voice over talent website URL and get it analyzed quickly to find out if your site is indeed, mobile-friendly.
Give it a try right now and find out if your website is mobile-friendly. Please tell me what result you got in the comments section below. We can do a little informal survey.
If your website passes the test, then you can rest easy knowing that you are in good shape when it comes increased traffic from mobile users.
If your voice over talent website doesn’t pass the test, there are a few things you’ll want to consider:
You will probably need to redesign your site a bit to make it more mobile-friendly.
Currently, there are two common ways to go when it comes to upgrading for a more mobile-friendly design:
1. Create a separate mobile website that is designed specifically for mobile devices.
OR
2. Redesign with a “responsive design”, which will allow you to have just one site to manage and it will configure automatically to adapt to whatever device is being used to view it.
You can do a little research on this topic and get a good understanding of the pros and cons of both approaches (“The Pros and Cons of Responsive Web Design vs. Mobile Website“). I recommend you read several articles and talk to your web designer.
My Voice Over Site Needed an Upgrade This Year
I went through this process myself a few months ago. I had my designer create a mobile version of my site back in 2010 but it was not quite up to snuff for 2014. So, I had it redesigned again this year. You can check it out from your mobile device (just search for Debbie Grattan on your mobile browser) or from your desktop computer.
If you do take a spin through my site, please let me know what your experience was like and if you encountered any issues along the way. User experiences can vary a bit depending on what device is being used to view the site so it’s important to test it on several different platforms (iphone, android, windows phone, various tablets, etc.).
I opted to create a separate mobile site that looked like my desktop voice over talent website, but was streamlined and built more for speed. My regular site has a lot more text than the mobile version and by creating the separate mobile site, I had total control of how the site would look on a smartphone.
I’m actually planning another redesign in 2015 to move to a totally responsive design. That seems to be a better way to go for many business owners, including voice over talents, since it is generally easier to manage one site than two. More on that in the coming months.
Please share your comments below. Is your website passing the mobile-friendly test?
Deb,
Great article. If you don’t mind…could you tell me how many new users you had for the 1 month you mentioned ?
regards,
dc
Hey DC – I’m going to have Paul contact you directly with more info on your question. Maybe we can compare notes!
really helpful article Debbie. Thanks for sharing. I’m alarmed to discover that Google doesn’t consider my site to be mobile friendly! I thought it was!!!
Hi Corie, thanks for reading the article and trying the test. As another check you can try viewing it in several different devices and see how it renders. I have a web designer I’ve worked with who did a site analysis on our mobile site and she checks it from multiple platforms and gives a report. If you find issues on especially android and iphone platforms, you probably will want to talk to your design person and see how you can improve things a bit. Cheers!
So true and so important. I’ve gone through 5 different platforms of my website all in an effort to make it mobile friendly. There are so many tools out there for site development now! After finally finding the CMS I liked, my site automatically flips to mobile when browsing with a device. It’s made a huge difference in my traffic! Thanks for sharing the test link!
Yes, trial and error Tony. Seems like the more advanced we get with technology, the more we have to continue to go back to the drawing board. Glad you finally found something that has boosted your traffic on mobile. Happy to hear the tool is helpful to you.
Hi Debbie,
Cool find! Mine actually came back with this message:
“Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly.”
The true test is what people think… feedback on mine is always welcome. It’s at http://www.tomconklinvoice.com
Thanks!
Tom
Hi Tom,
We took a quick look at your mobile site and it looks good on our iphone 4s. It didn’t render properly on our Windows Phone, but since that platform is under 4% of the smartphone market, I wouldn’t worry too much about that, unless there is some easy way to improve appearance. We usually are most concerned about how it appears on android and iphone for smartphone platforms. I also pulled up your site on our Windows Surface tablet and got your desktop site layout I think, and that looks very good as well. Great job!
Yikes! My site is not too mobile friendly. Thanks for sounding the alarm on this, Debbie. I sent the results to me web guy.
Thank you Debbie. I appreciate you having a look. I’m an Android user and it looks fine to me on my phone. It does need some tweaking here and there. It is interesting though. Similar to what you mentioned about the Surface tablet, my son’s Dell tablet loads up the desktop site. I’ll have to see what it looks like on a Windows phone at some point.
Thanks so much for the feedback!
Tom
Hi Tom, What I found when we were upgrading my mobile site was that you can control which site comes up for the viewer based on the screen size they are viewing on. There’s a little line of code on all pages of desktop site that say basically “if screen size is <800, the go to mobile site." So tablets don't get redirected. But you can adjust the settings if you want tablets to see the mobile version. Your site looked very good on the tablet though, so I'd leave it as it is. Cheers! Debbie
Yes, Tom, I know it can get kind of exhaustive, checking out how your site will look on all different platforms. It’s helpful if you have a designer or web guru who can make those checks for you and assist if things are not showing up the way they should. And Larry, I’m glad you were able to assess your mobile compatibility, and see that it could be losing you business. It’s kind of like a health problem, which left untreated, can cause hidden damage. But if you find it early, you can fix it. At least with a website, it’s never too late!
Thanks Debbie!!!
Hi Larry, Your site is viewable on my phone, print is kind of small and hard to read unless I expand screen (which is very easy to do). It’s pretty good though, I would think most viewers can still get what they need without too much difficulty. Your demos play very quickly! Of course, what google thinks does matter in terms of search rank, so probably a good idea to try to upgrade if you can. Good luck! Debbie
Thanks much, Debbie.
Great article, and it’s spurred me on to update my site.
Cheers,
Joe
Hey Joe,
Your home page looks great on my phone! Clear and easy to read.
The other pages are smaller type and harder to read, but I imagine you just haven’t optimized those for mobile. Glad the article inspired you to take action. It’s always something, isn’t it!?
Hi Debbie,
You’re correct – I just did the home page to get the format set in stone before updating the rest of the site.
Adapt, Adopt and Improve!
Joe
Way to go Joe! You’re right, we’re in a constant state of adaptation. I saw you post on FB about this too. Maybe it will inspire others to do the same!
Hi Debbie, Thank you very much for your interesting and very useful article! I checked mine and…ouch…it seems not very mobile-friendly! I’ll see what I can do…
Hi Paola – thanks for your comment. I think it’s good to find out things that are keeping business from finding and/or hiring you, so you can take action to change them for the better. Everything is always a work in progress, and staying up with current technology is a race for all of us. Good luck with making some changes to get your site a bit more mobile friendly!
Thank you Debbie!