One of the fundamental things business owners need to understand right now is how to leverage their online presence to attract and retain customers. This isn’t true for just large or national companies. According to a recent survey, 82% of consumers will research local small businesses online before approaching them.

Additionally, 57% of companies find they have acquired new customers through their company blog and over half of all business-to-business marketers assert that SEO has the biggest impact on their ability to generate leads. These statistics help illustrate the importance of online presence to the success of a business and its customer acquisition. However, the process doesn’t end here.

Over the last decade, there has been a significant shift in the way websites are built and designed. Websites have changed towards a responsive design, which allows them to be viewed on all mobile devices. In the United States alone, half of all cell phone users have a smartphone. To acquire customers and stay competitive, a business’s website must be searchable and viewable on a smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device.

A study showed that 61% of customers who try to visit an unresponsive website get frustrated, leave the website, and go to a competitor’s site. A mobile friendly website design will ensure easy navigation with automatic resizing, panning, and scrolling to accommodate the device being used.

The majority of online customers will only wait about three and a half seconds for a website to load before going back to their search and looking for another site. This is, of course, after the customer finds your website, which is also part of the challenge for business owners.

Searchability is why SEO marketing and content creation are so necessary. It was already mentioned that over half of businesses acquire new customers through their blog. That is because they utilize content marketing strategies, which include creating valueable content that uses SEO techniques. A marketing approach to content development along with a mobile friendly website design can drastically increase traffic coming to the website.

Keyword phrases are the words and terms that customers are searching for online that may lead them to your website. Knowing keyword rankings that will impact your business is essential to the marketing of your website. This is why many companies opt to hire SEO services. While it is something that can be learned and trained in-house, it is often more cost effective to hire a service that already has all the knowledge and tools to market the company successfully.

Creating a mobile friendly website design is essential, but it is also only one piece of the puzzle. For many small business owners, knowing how to build a mobile-friendly website design is like trying to understand a foreign language. The good thing is that the web design industry is fully committed to responsive website design, so finding a web design company that can create a mobile-friendly website is easy.

The vast majority of newly released WordPress themes are responsive and completely mobile-optimized. Based on the current trends, quickly building a website without a mobile-friendly design won’t even be an option. All websites will be responsive in the near future. Soon, the focus will be entirely on the business’es ability to utilize SEO and keywords, increasing their search ranking, and successfully using content marketing techniques.