As we gear up for the 2011 Holiday Shopping Season, the extraordinary growth of smartphone usage will have a major impact on your e-commerce SEO strategy. Consider these stats:
- A full 70% of Americans now say they look at product reviews before making a purchase.
- 79% of consumers now say they use a smartphone to help with shopping.
- 83% of moms say they do online research after seeing TV commercials for products that interest them.
You can’t afford to ignore smartphone users in your holiday strategy. You can be sure that your competition won’t be ignoring them.
The first step in developing your smartphone SEO strategy is to use your Analytics data to determine how much of your audience is coming into your site from mobile devices, either through smartphones or more traditional web-enabled phones.
Once you determine whether there is enough volume to consider optimizing your site for mobile phones or smartphones, you need to determine what to focus on. You can use the Google keyword tool to see what keyword queries are coming from mobile users. Google offers three different mobile options:
- All mobile devices
- Mobile WAP devices (feature phones)
- Mobile devices with full Internet browsers (smartphones)
Data from smartphone users suggests that search queries are evolving. Initially mobile queries were not as diverse as those found on desktops. Recent Google research shows that searches on smartphones such as the iPhone are mirroring search behavior on desktops and laptops in terms of the length of the query (approximately 3 words per query for computer and iPhone queries, compared to 2.5 words per query for mobile feature phone queries)
Once you’ve determined your mobile strategy and keywords to target, you need to focus on optimizing your site. For smartphones, there are a few things to keep in mind:
- You don’t need a subdomain or subdirectory for mobile content; you can redirect smartphone users to a mobile version of the page. Even better would be to use the same URL and show the appropriate version of the content without a redirect.
- Content can be on a normal HTML page, just tweak the layout to be visible on a smaller display.
- Use the rel=canonical tag to point the URL to the desktop version.
- Consider local optimization. Many mobile queries are location focused, so if your business has a local angle, make sure you are optimizing your Google Places listings. Also, Google Places will more frequently show up in mobile search results. Google admits to having a separate mobile algorithm to provide a better mobile user experience. This was confirmed in a NY Times feature in late April 2011, in which location was one factor that changed the search results for mobile versus desktop searchers.
- If you want to target feature phone users, be sure you are targeting pages to be visible to the Googlebot-Mobile crawler.
- According to the Google’s Zero Moment of Truth ebook, “First position matters even more in mobile. That’s true whether you’re talking about search results or ad positions. The digital shelf gets really small on the mobile screen! A drop from first to fourth position on mobile phone can mean a CTR drop off of more than 90%.”
- Continue to focus on SEO best practices such as title tags, Meta descriptions, good URL structure and quality content.
If you need to reach your customers in all stages of the buying cycle then it is critical that you fine-tune your mobile SEO strategy for the holidays and make sure that you are appearing at the top for your most relevant mobile keywords.
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