Welcome to the Digital Toolbelt, our new content series on the latest digital marketing trends affecting home service businesses. Today we are going to discuss why home service professionals absolutely have to start paying attention to mobile!

Remember Gordon Gecko’s infamous quote in the 1990’s movie Wall Street—“Greed is Good”?  Well here at the Digital Toolbelt we are going to coin our own phrase—MOBILE = MONEY!

Here is what we mean…

When Google decides on your site’s search rankings, they have bots crawl your website to see how it stacks up against Google’s best practices. Traditionally, Google would index your site’s desktop version. But now they’re ready to roll out a mobile first search index. Which means having a mobile optimized site is going to be key in dominating search.

Let’s be honest—you are probably on your phone quite a bit. Chances are you are even reading this article from your phone! That’s why Google is making this switch. They are paying attention to user behavior, and they realize it’s time to start mobile first indexing.

Why Mobile First Indexing Matters for Home Service Businesses

So why should home service professionals care?

Mobile first indexing means Google is going to take a closer look at how quickly your mobile site is loading. If it doesn’t load quickly, then you could be losing a significant amount of REVENUE!

When I search on my phone, and a website takes more than 4 seconds to load, I get frustrated. And Google has noticed a lot of other people feel this way too. They want people to have the best user experience possible, so sites that load slowly are going to be ranked lower on search.

Here’s an example of how a home service business site could lose a ton of revenue with a slow mobile website:

Let’s say you are a remodeler with a website that gets 1,000 monthly viewers. About 25% of those viewers will make a phone call inquiry (250). Then you might set 70% of those phone calls (175). Of those sets, you issue 80% (140). And of those 140, let’s say you close 40% (56 closes). With an average sale of $12,000, your revenue would be $672,000. But with even 10 less site viewers, you are losing thousands of dollars in revenue.

Here’s the bottom line

If your mobile site takes too long to load, you’re going to be leaving revenue on the table. And your competition is going to pick it up.

Here at Spectrum we build lead generation software and websites that provide the mobile-first experience Google wants. To help you figure out how this mobile change will impact your revenue, we put together a handy revenue calculator! Download it below to get the numbers driving your business.