A slick and optimized website is a good starting point for spreading brand awareness online. But these days more and more people are using their mobile phones to make purchasing decisions- especially when deciding where to eat. So if your landing page is not mobile friendly, your restaurant is missing the boat. Here are 9 tips for optimizing your restaurant website or landing page for mobile use.

Keep it Simple

Make sure your site easily opens on mobile devices. That means no Flash, frames, PNG-24 images, and plug-ins. Those objects will hinder the loading speed of your mobile site. Instead, use mobile-friendly options for your mobile landing page such as, HTML5, jQuery, and JPG and GIF image formats.  Have your items scaled to fit to your page. If someone has to zoom into the content on your page, you might be doing it wrong.

Keep it Short

Reduce the size of your headlines.  Instead of a seven or eight word headline, make it three or four words.  You don’t want the words of your headline taking up half of your mobile site. Keep your text content concise and clear!

Speed it Up

Your mobile landing page should load quickly, in five seconds or less. If not, you risk losing visitors. Try to keep the data on your pages under 20 kilobytes to speed up your load time. Keep content short and sweet. Not everyone has the time to read a long article on a mobile site. Consider using bullets to get to the point.

Make Calling Easy

Add a click-to-call capability. Having a click-to-call button available on your landing page will generate some mobile conversions. Also, have your opening hours on your site. No one wants to waste their time on the phone only to realize that no one is there to help them out. Do not forget to include the international prefix number for those calling outside the country.

Stay Above the Fold

Have your content available on a single column. If you can, have your call-to-action located above the fold, located within the top 100 pixels for smartphones. If you cannot have your CTA above the fold, perhaps you can add a teaser to lead users to your call-to-action?

Be Finger Friendly

Do not give your users the “fat finger” syndrome. Be finger friendly! Make sure your clickable items have padding to avoid mis-clicks. To make things even more friendly, you can add a plug-in so that users can do swipe gestures on your site.

Support Your Local

Localize. People are on their mobile devices and on the move- especially when trying to find somewhere to eat. People think that they can easily hide their location, but some of the broadest geotracking systems can locate devices from within 5 to 20 miles of where they are. You want your landing page to be relevant for those people that are in your area. Make local deals and offers available.

Don’t Ask for Too Much

If your landing page has a form to gather information (say for online reservations or accessing a coupon) make sure you keep it as simple as possible. Gather the minimum amount of information needed to accomplish the job. If you have a long form on a mobile site, you risk losing visitors to another site with fewer fields. This is good marketing practice anyway, as asking for too much information will scare off visitors and lower your conversion rate. If you can’t slim it down any more and it’s still too long, divide the form into two pages.

Test it Out

After all is said and done, test out your mobile landing page. You should make sure it is built the way you would want it to look. Have a go at how fast your pages load. Click around and see if you have problems accessing items. Once you are satisfied with your product, you can finalize it and then launch it.

Do you notice a theme here? The key to a successful, mobile friendly landing page is ease of use. Smart phones are all about convenience and your web page should be too. Make your page handy to use and easy to read and you’ll experience better conversion rates.

Now that you’re optimizing for the mobile diner, check out this article on the top restaurant apps. Are you registered with any of them?

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About Restaurant Hospitality Marketing

Restaurant Hospitality Marketing is a full service, marketing firm that specializes in online digital media for the restaurant and hospitality industry.  We create beautiful, socially shareable, search optimized, content-driven, responsive websites that will bring you more customers and reservations. We also offer mobile marketing, social media content marketing, search engine optimization and marketing, reputation management, video production, and print media.