Marketing Insider

A few weeks ago (April 21), Internet search giant Google adjusted its algorithms to play more favorably to mobile-friendly websites, which are rapidly growing in popularity.

Apartment marketers adapted mobile-friendly sites many months or even years ago and are experiencing stronger traffic. Others are in the process of doing so, or plan to in the near future. Google provides a simple test that determines if it views a site as being mobile-friendly. Alternatively, another test is available at mobiletest.me.

When Google announced two months ago that it had planned to take its algorithm in this direction, there was some fear among the website marketing industry that they would experience a Mobilegeddon on or around April 21. Just a day later, Google reported that it measured a 4.7 percent increase in the number of mobile-friendly websites that are part of its overall crawl.

Apartment owner/manager WinnCompanies built its individual community sites with a mobile version, and is in the process of converting to a responsive design. Responsive enables the page to load automatically to fit the device the end-user is using.

Transition to Responsive Design

“We receive a lot of positive feedback from prospects and residents about our websites’ compatibility, even more so now as we’re transitioning to responsive design across all of our sites,” says Michelle Moriello, CAM, WinnCompanies’ Executive Project Administrator.

“Our property websites offer online rent payment and service requests, allowing busy residents to complete functions from handheld devices,” Moriello says. “This brings convenience that they wouldn’t have experienced with non-mobile sites.”

She says that during Winn’s initial rollout, configuring mobile compatible sites added a step to the process, but it was worthwhile to reap the benefits of a mobile site. Now, with responsive design, setup is more streamlined.

“The majority of prospective residents browse websites from mobile devices,” Moriello says. “One lesson learned during our process was that these consumers expect to be able to click on a phone number and have it auto-dial, use location-based browsing and access all functions of a full desktop website without having to click on the dreaded ‘View Desktop Site’ link.”

She says responsive design can prevent visitors from leaving the site because they had to “pinch” or scroll awkwardly to get info they wanted.

Kettler transitioned all of its property websites to responsive design in the past year to make its prospects’ experience seamless, whether on a desktop, tablet or mobile device and because of increasing visits via mobile per its website analytics, says Laurel Howell, its CMO.

“The increase in mobile sessions occurred across the board in our portfolio, but we saw some of the largest increases on our Class B and Tax Credit communities—not surprising based on the rise in smartphone ownership.

Currently Kettler’s corporate website is using an older mobile version (m.), “But we are in wireframe stage to transition that site to HTML5 or responsive design,” Howell says.

Sheri Killingsworth, Vice President, Marketing & Communications at Lincoln Property Company, says Lincoln has used a mobile version of their corporate site for over five years. It has separate sites for mobile and desktop, and it plans to launch its responsive site later this year. There has been a real emphasis over the past three to four years on each of Lincoln Property’s communities to have a mobile website. She says converting most of Lincoln’s community sites from separate mobile/desktop sites to responsive has been an easy change when using her website provider’s responsive design template options.

Bill Szczytko, Maryland Management, says his company has a separate mobile site that auto redirects based on the device and he is currently working on a new responsive-designed version, which should be up this month.

“We’ve had a mobile site for three years,” Szczytko says. “We did it very inexpensively using jQuery Mobile. The look won’t win a Webby Award, but it’s functional.”

—Paul R. Bergeron III, NAA