- Mobile SEO is the way to make mobile websites rank better on the search engine results page.
- Mobile website SEO practices and mobile-first design is an important tool to improve rankings.
- Google adopted a mobile-first indexing strategy for handheld devices.
Mobile phones have been a center stage for so many things as far as eCommerce is concerned. Initially, people used to browse the internet using a laptop or a bulky personal computer. With the advent of a mobile phone, gradually people started using mobile phones to check anything on the Internet. This is true for eCommerce stores too. These days, it is not new for the youngsters to check the price of something and place an order for the same through a mobile phone. Due to this, Google’s SEO policies are also constantly evolving.
Google’s Moble-first indexing strategy
Earlier, Google put a lot of emphasis on website SEO and its ranking factors. But as the users increasingly turned towards browsing the Internet on mobile phones with each passing day, the importance of mobile SEO increased. In addition to this, Google put up a mobile-first Indexing strategy in place for mobile phones. Users these days are used to checking their handsets for everything that they are looking for. It could range from news, messages, price of a product, or buying a product from an online store.
This is the reason Google started emphasizing mobile-first indexing. Such indexing explains the increasing importance of Mobile SEO. Mobile SEO has started gaining a lot of traction since users these days do a lot of things using a mobile phone than just making a call. So if you own an eCommerce store, it is important that the users are able to visit your online store using their mobile phones. To enable this, employing the right mobile SEO strategies for your eCommerce becomes extremely important. Without effective SEO, all the expenditure towards setting up order management, shipping & inventory facilities cannot be fully put to good use. Hence, this blog lists out the strategies for mobile SEO for an eCommerce store in detail.
Mobile SEO is the way to make mobile websites rank better on the search engine results page. This does not mean that the importance of traditional SEO is over. But, helping your mobile website rank better using mobile SEO is also important. Let us take a look at these strategies:
1. Make sure the eCommerce store is configured for mobile use:
According to Google’s understanding, you can take up one of the three basic ways to implement a mobile website or your eCommerce store website:
- Responsive design
- Dynamic serving
- Using separate URLs
All three approaches work the same. But when it comes to Google, the best option to take up is to use the responsive design with your eCommerce store. The reason behind this is, that it is easy to render a website using the same HTML code regardless of the device the user uses to browse your website. The appearance and the coding behind the website remain the same regardless of the device. You have to make sure that your eCommerce store is visible on any device. To ensure that, your store needs to have a responsive design.
2. Understand everything about mobile-first indexing:
Google rolled out the mobile-first index after it observed increased use of mobile phones to browse websites. When a user browses a website through his or her mobile phone, the webmaster at Google is notified. This leads to an increased crawl rate of Smartphone GoogleBot. But if your website is responsive, then you don’t need to worry much about it because the coding does not change.
But, the websites should take the following consideration seriously when practicing mobile-first indexing:
- Images with its attributes, texts, videos for mobile as well as the desktop version.
- Well-structured data.
- Title tags, meta description, and other metadata.
- Correctly defined canonical tags.
- Make sure that Smartphone Googlebot can access the webpages of your website.
3. Speed optimization for the mobile page:
As far as SEO is concerned, the speed at which a web page renders has been of utmost importance. In 2010, Google announced the website’s speed as one of the factors that contribute to the rank of the website. In 2017, it officially declared that mobile page speed is also one of the ranking factors for the websites. We all know the pain of dealing with a website that takes years to open or so it seems.
This can lead to user bounce rate. Bounce rate is the concept where a user decides to leave the website and “bounce” to another website because of a slow website. With this concept in mind, it is easy to see that the users will bounce off a website if the website takes eons to load. Moreover, a higher bounce rate makes a website drop from the Google search engine results page. To prevent a user from bouncing off your website, you can consider the checklist provided by Google, to make sure your website is spic and span:
- Avoid redirection from the landing page.
- Include compression.
- Try improving server response time.
- Use browser caching to increase the speed.
- Minimize the use of the resources.
- Optimize the images on the website.
- Optimize the CSS of the website.
- Offer priority to the visible content.
- Remove render-blocking JavaScript.
4. Using Google AMP:
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is a Google-designed project to help the webpages on the mobile phone render rapidly. AMP is not a direct ranking factor for mobile websites. But, indirectly it can make sure your website ranks well. AMP is understood to improve the user experience and page speed for mobile websites. Because of this, the user is more likely to stay and come back to this website for his requirements. This indicates to Google that the website is relevant.
As this relevance increases, the website tends to rank better on the search engine results page.
5. Emphasize mobile usability:
Usability is a very important factor, as far as mobile websites are concerned. According to Google, one extra second taken by the website to render itself hurts its rank by 20% if it is a retail website. As we saw the importance of a low bounce rate, we can see how it can affect the ranking of the website in a negative or a positive way. This means that the more a user decides to stay on your website, the better your website will rank.
These are few things that make sure that your mobile website offers a great experience to the users:
- Easy navigation system
- Good readability
- White space between clickable components
- Make sure the users don’t have to pinch and zoom.
- Large enough buttons
- Ensure nicely designed contact forms are placed.
- Use CRO to see how the users interact with the mobile version of your website.
6. Use structured data markup:
Structured data markup is used by Google to understand the content of the page and to collect more information about the web. It is also useful in enhancing SERP to help with the click-through rate.
Following are the data markups according to the website you have:
- Reviews
- Products
- Events
- Local businesses
- Articles and others.
As the structured data markup increases, Google will be able to understand everything about your website in a better way. Make sure you implement it properly using Google’s structured data testing tool. Also, don’t create a spammy markup to fool Google. Google can take an action against your website which can hurt its rankings.
7. Stick to the basic concepts:
Mobile SEO is important, but it all boils down to the basics of SEO. Using the best SEO practices namely right keywords, meta tag optimization, high-quality content, and more can rank your website better. You should study the basics of SEO before you can switch to mobile SEO for an eCommerce store.
8. Prepare for the voice searching:
Voice search has been more popular these days. Users prefer using the voice command in the search box instead of using a mobile keyboard to type in their query. Voice commands are taking up the world by replacing the old commands that the user used to give through tapping on the mobile screen.
Conclusion:
With the increasing use of mobile phones, mobile website SEO practices and mobile-first design remain essential. This means that a user can be lounging AND shopping for a few products from your eCommerce website. Hence, it is imperative to have the best SEO practices for your eCommerce mobile website as it is for an eCommerce website.
