Your Customers Are on Their Phones – Is Your Business Ready?
If you’re a plumber in Chermside or an accountant in the CBD, I want you to do a quick experiment. Look at the people waiting for a bus, sitting in a cafe, or even sitting on their couch at night. What are they doing? They’re on their phones.
When their hot water system bursts or they need a quick quote for a renovation, they aren’t walking to the home office to fire up a desktop computer. They are searching right there on their mobile.
For years, Google looked at the desktop version of your website to decide where you should show up in search results. Those days are gone. Now, Google almost exclusively looks at how your website performs on a phone. If your site is clunky, slow, or hard to read on a small screen, Google will bury you. It doesn’t matter if your business has been around for thirty years; if the digital version of your shopfront is broken, you won’t get the call.
At Local Marketing Group, we see this constantly with Brisbane businesses. A local law firm might wonder why they’ve stopped getting enquiries, only to find that their website requires a magnifying glass to read on an iPhone. In this guide, I’m going to break down why this matters for your bank account and how you can fix it without needing a degree in IT.
What Does "Mobile-First" Actually Mean for Your Profit?
Forget the technical jargon you might have heard from other agencies. "Mobile-first" simply means that Google uses the mobile version of your site as the primary starting point for deciding how high you rank.
Think of it like this: Google is a recommendation engine. If Google recommends a website to a user and that website is a nightmare to use on a phone, the user gets frustrated. If the user is frustrated, they stop using Google. To protect their own business, Google only wants to recommend sites that work perfectly on the devices people actually use.
If you want to stay top of Google as these rules change, you need to understand that your mobile site isn't a "secondary" version of your business—it is the main event.
The Direct Link to Your Revenue
When your site works well on a phone, three things happen: 1. You show up higher in search results: More people see your business name. 2. People stay on your site longer: They can actually find your services and pricing. 3. You get more phone calls: A "Click to Call" button that actually works is the fastest way to turn a visitor into a customer.The Cost of Getting It Wrong
I’ve seen dozens of Brisbane business owners waste thousands of dollars on fancy websites that look beautiful on a big 27-inch office monitor but are completely useless for a customer standing in their driveway.
If your mobile site is slow or hard to navigate, your "bounce rate" (the number of people who leave immediately) will skyrocket. In plain English: you are paying for people to visit your site, and then you’re slamming the door in their face. This is a massive waste of your marketing budget.
5 Practical Steps to Make Your Site Phone-Friendly
You don’t need to be a coder to check if your site is up to scratch. Here is a checklist of what actually matters for your bottom line.
1. Speed is Everything
People are impatient. If your site takes more than three seconds to load on a mobile data connection (like 4G or 5G in the suburbs), they’re gone. They’ll click the next tradie or shop in the list.Most of the time, websites are slow because of massive images. If you’ve uploaded high-resolution photos of your latest project directly from your iPhone, they are likely too big. You need images that look good but are "lightweight" so they load instantly. This is one of the most basic SEO guide essentials that most people overlook.
2. The "Fat Finger" Test
Have you ever tried to click a button on a website and accidentally clicked the wrong thing because the buttons were too small or too close together? It’s infuriating.Your buttons—especially your "Call Now" or "Book Inspection" buttons—need to be big enough for a thumb to hit comfortably. If your contact form has tiny fields that are hard to type into, your potential customer will give up and call the guy down the road.
3. No More Pinch-and-Zoom
If a customer has to pinch their screen to zoom in and read your text, you’ve already lost. Your text should be large enough to read at arm's length. Your website should automatically adjust its layout to fit whatever screen it's being viewed on. This ensures that whether someone is using a small older Android or the latest massive iPhone, the experience is the same.4. Content Must Match
Some people try to be clever and show less information on their mobile site than their desktop site to make it "cleaner." This is a mistake. If Google is looking at your mobile site to decide what you do, and you’ve hidden all your best information on the mobile version, Google won't know how good you are.You need to ensure your best selling points, your testimonials, and your service descriptions are visible on the phone version. Don't let outdated content or hidden details cost you a lead.
5. Ditch the Pop-ups
We’ve all seen them—those "Sign up for our newsletter" boxes that take up the whole screen and are impossible to close on a phone because the 'X' is too small. Google hates these. They call them "intrusive interstitials." If you have a pop-up that blocks your content on mobile, Google will penalise you. If you want people to sign up for something, put a clear section at the bottom of the page instead.How Long Until You See Results?
If you fix a broken mobile site today, you won't see a flood of calls tomorrow morning. Google needs time to "re-crawl" your site and see the improvements.
Typically, for a local Brisbane business, you can expect to see an improvement in your search positions and your customer enquiries within 4 to 8 weeks of making these changes. It’s a medium-term play that yields long-term profit.
What Is a Waste of Money?
Don't let an agency talk you into building a separate "Mobile App" for your local business unless you’re running a complex booking system or a massive loyalty program. For 95% of small businesses in Queensland, a mobile app is a total waste of cash.
What you need is a website that works on phones, not an app that people have to download. Nobody is going to download an app to hire a locksmith once. They just want a website that works.
Also, avoid "automated mobile converters." These are cheap tools that try to turn a desktop site into a mobile one. They usually look terrible and break half the features on your site. Do it once, do it properly.
A Real-World Example: The Morningside Electrician
We worked with an electrician in Morningside who had a very old website. On a computer, it looked fine—classic 2010s design. But on a phone, the menu didn't work, and the phone number wasn't a link (you had to try and copy-paste it).
By simply rebuilding his site to be "mobile-first," ensuring his phone number was a big, clickable button at the top of the screen, and making his images load faster, his phone enquiries increased by 40% in two months. He didn't change his prices or his services; he just made it easier for people to give him money.
Summary: Your Action Plan
If you want more customers from Google, you cannot ignore the mobile experience. Here is what you should do this week:
1. Test your own site: Open your website on your phone. Try to find your contact page. Try to read your services. Is it easy? Be honest. 2. Check your speed: Use your phone on a mobile connection (turn off Wi-Fi) and see how long it takes to load. If it's more than a few seconds, you have a problem. 3. Check your buttons: Are they easy to click with a thumb? 4. Look at your competitors: Do their sites work better than yours? If so, they are winning the customers that should be yours.
If your website is failing the mobile test, it’s costing you money every single day. In the competitive Brisbane market, you can't afford to have a digital shopfront that's boarded up to half your customers.
Ready to get more calls from your website? At Local Marketing Group, we specialise in making websites that don't just look pretty, but actually work to grow your business. We know the Brisbane market and we know what makes local customers pick up the phone.
Contact Local Marketing Group today and let’s make sure your business is the one they call.