It’s not news that more and more searches are being done on mobile devices. Nor is it news that many of our clients have not gotten around to making their websites mobile-friendly.

The time to do something about that is now — and that creates opportunity for those of in television, radio, or digital sales.

photo by tuomaslehtinen/dpc

 In August of 2014, Comscore released a study showing that a majority of US digital consumption now takes place on mobile apps. According to Telecrunch:

U.S. users are now spending the majority of their time consuming digital media within mobile applications, according to a new study released by comScore this morning. That means mobile apps, including the number 1 most popular app Facebook, eat up more of our time than desktop usage or mobile web surfing, accounting for 52% of the time spent using digital media. Combined with mobile web, mobile usage as a whole accounts for 60% of time spent, while desktop-based digital media consumption makes up the remaining 40%.

Here is some news that might give your clients a reason to mobile-optimize their websites now: beginning April 21, 2015, Google’s will start giving extra ranking credit to the websites that it considers mobile-friendly. In other words, even if your client’s site ranked well before, it could drop in the rankings if it doesn’t meet Google’s mobile standards.

This round will only apply to mobile search, so desktop search rankings will not be affected… yet.

How can you find out if a site passes? Google has a free tool that allows you to test any site. You can find the tool here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

A mobile-friendly page will bring back a result that looks like this:

My advertising, marketing and sales training blog passed!

A page that doesn’t pass Google’s test will look like this:

This blog failed Google’s test

How You Can Make Money On This Right Now

[bctt tweet=”Before every sales call, run the client’s website through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.”]

·       If it doesn’t pass, print out a copy of the result in color.

·       Take a screen shot of the client’s site on your mobile phone, email it to yourself, and print the image out in color.

·       Talk to your company’s digital department. Can your station offer help – for money — in making a site mobile-friendly?

·       If so, prepare a proposal. The proposal should include the results of Google’s test and the mobile screen shot of their site.

·       If not, bring the Google results and screen shot out to your client anyway. Doing this will help position you as a true consultant rather than a package peddler.

Keep the conversation going — share this post on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter!