How to optimise your mobile commerce site for SEO

Last year Google announced that it was seeing more searches taking place worldwide on mobile devices than on desktop.

This unerring shift towards mobile over the past few years has meant that retailers now need to think about mobile commerce as much as desktop ecommerce.

We’re now at a point where most established retailers have dedicated, optimised mobile presence in order to attract customers, though it’s fair to say that many sites are far from perfect.

Another key trend is Google’s focus on mobile, with a mobile-friendly algorithm in which many UX factors are measured. Bing also accounts for mobile optimisation when crawling and ranking sites.

So how can you make sure that your m-commerce site is as visible as possible to searching shoppers? Using insights from our recent ClickZ Intelligence report, ‘The DNA of a Great M-Commerce Site’, here are some practical steps that you can take to make sure your m-commerce site is optimised for search.

Make sure your site is fully responsive

Having a responsive site is essential even when you aren’t looking at SEO.

A properly optimised mobile site means a better experience for your customers, who will be more likely to convert and complete a transaction instead of getting frustrated and abandoning the process.

AsMobile Dreams Factory CEO Salvador Carrillo writes in the report:

“Be clear that consumer behaviour is different in mobile, so everything is about UX and design – fewer clicks, prioritised search, short description, click to buy etc. The more frictionless the experience (payments, confirmations, refill, and so on), the more conversions.”

Source: Google Resources for Webmasters

If you want to improve the search ranking of your m-commerce site, proper mobile optimisation is step one. So how can you make sure that your site is mobile-friendly as per Google’s standards?

Andy Favell, the author of the ClickZ (Read more...) report on m-commerce, has laid out how you can comprehensively test the mobile usability of your site when you’re done.

Implement app indexing and deep-linking

You don’t necessarily need to have an app in order to have the best possible mobile presence for your retail business.

At our last #ClickZChat on what makes a great m-commerce experience, our intrepid tweeters discussed whether businesses should invest in a mobile site, or a dedicated app, for commerce, and concluded that it can depend on their needs.

@ClickZ A1 Both can be useful. It depends on their goals, their audience, their budget, etc #clickzchat

— Tereza Litsa (@terezalitsa) June 8, 2016

@ClickZ depends what the product is. App if you have an account and make regular purchases. Low frequency use should be onsite #ClickZChat

— Stephanie Bellis (@steffi_j_b) June 8, 2016

But if you do have an m-commerce app or think that building one would be most suitable for your business, app indexing and deep-linking will give you a huge competitive advantage in search.

App indexing is when Google’s search ‘spiders’ crawl an app in the same way that they do a website, and present content from the app directly within search results. Tapping on that link will launch the app, if the user has it installed, and take them directly to the content.

App indexing is a ranking factor in search as well as being a great way to promote, yet only a minority of brands are making use of it. A study by Searchmetrics, conducted on the 100 most visible websites in Google US searches, found that only 30% of those with an Android app and 19% with an iOS app had implemented app indexing.

So in case you needed any more reasons to set this up, it will almost certainly allow you to get ahead of your competitors who aren’t yet using it. To get started, Dan Cristo has written a step-by-step guide on how to set up app indexing as a developer.

Speed up your site

Aside from a poorly adapted user interface, one of the biggest issues that can kill a mobile audience’s interest is a slow site.

This will become more important from an SEO perspective, as Google has confirmed that the next mobile-friendly update will include page speed as a ranking factor.

According to Kissmetrics’ stats on how website performance affects shopping behaviour, 40% of web users will abandon a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load, while a one-second delay (or three seconds of waiting) tends to decrease customer satisfaction by about 16%.

So the loading speed of your m-commerce site can have a real impact on your bottom line, as well as on your search visibility.

Image by Alan9187, CC0 public domain image

As Andy Favell writes in the ‘DNA of a Great M-Commerce Site’ report:

“With mobile, less is more. Less clutter. Fewer clicks. Fewer, smaller pictures. Easy navigation. If your responsive site is sending everything from your PC site to the mobile device, it will slow down load times and chomp through the customer’s data allowance.”

This is great advice for improving user experience and site load time alike: the less clutter, the better. It’s important to note that this does not just apply to your mobile site (or app): site speed has long been a search ranking factor on desktop, so decreasing load times for all iterations of your site will improve your SEO across the board – as well as your customer experience.

Kristi Hines’ piece for Search Engine Watch on why page speed should be your next focus has some useful steps you can take to improve your site speed, including looking at your web host, website technology and content. And don’t miss Matt Owen’s detailed guide on how to optimise your page images to increase site speed.

There is one other option which can greatly improve the speed of your mobile presence: Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP.

Launched just four months ago, Accelerated Mobile Pages are specifically designed to load lightning-fast by stripping out much of the clutter that normally slows down page load times, like third-party scripts, trackers and in-line styling.

Google boasts that sites created with AMP can load between 15 to 85% faster than non-AMP mobile sites, which is bound to be a huge advantage for SEO; to say nothing of the fact that Google, as the creator of AMP, has a vested interest in promoting AMP websites in its search results.

The drawbacks include a lot of extra work for developers, as using AMP means creating an entirely separate version of a mobile site using Google’s new AMP-HTML web language.

SEO opinion is currently divided about whether or not to go all-in on AMP, and there is also the danger of spreading your web presence over too many platforms, which requires extra work and investment to maintain.

As with the mobile website versus app debate, ultimately it comes down to where you want to allocate your resources, and what you think would best suit your business.

Learn to ‘think mobile’

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when designing and optimising for mobile is to assume that mobile users have the same wants, needs and behaviour as desktop users.

Think about the way that you yourself browse, search and shop on mobile: you’re likely to be doing so in fundamentally different circumstances, and for different reasons, than if you were at a desktop computer.

Andy Favell recommends reading Google’s search quality evaluator guidelines (PDF), specifically the section on Understanding Mobile User Needs (page 56), to gain a feel for how and why mobile search queries can differ from desktop queries.

Google breaks down mobile search queries into four main categories: know, do, website and visit in person queries, and explains how they may have different user intent than the same queries on a desktop computer.

Understanding the types of queries that mobile users have, and what they are looking for, will help you to better cater to them with your site.

It is also important to remember voice search, which is how some users interface with their mobile devices. Voice search queries use natural language, and it’s well worth looking into what this is and how you can adapt your site to better satisfy natural language and voice queries.

The best way to get a sense of what works on mobile is to use mobile yourself

The best way to get a sense of how mobile users navigate the web, of course, is to do it yourself. As Favell writes in the report:

“There are tools that can help, but for m-commerce sites there really is no substitute for getting your mobile device(s) out and conducting web searches.”

Try out different search terms, using both keywords and natural language, and see how well your site ranks for each.

Google has confirmed that it is developing a separate mobile index to better answer queries on mobile devices where the user intent may differ. So the better you optimise for mobile now, the more of an advantage you’ll have with visibility when the new index, as well as subsequent updates to Google’s mobile algorithm, are launched.

For much more insight into the DNA of a Great M-Commerce Site, as well as other detailed reports and best practice guides on achieving digital dominance, head over to ClickZ Intelligence or browse our Reports Library.

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