Mcommerce revenue is expected to surpass 430 billion in 2022 and 710 billion USD in 2025, in the US alone. Optimizing e-commerce for a seamless mobile shopping experience is essential for several reasons. Mobile usage while online shopping is increasing rapidly. And since half of the world’s web traffic comes from mobile devices, it is important for e-commerce businesses to invest in creating a great mobile shopping experience.
In this article, we’ll cover why the mobile shopping experience matters and the benefits of optimizing your e-commerce for mobile shopping.
Half of the world’s web traffic comes from mobile devices, so it is important for e-commerce businesses to invest in creating a great mobile shopping experience.
Optimizing your mobile shopping experience doesn’t only mean complying with the search engines' requirements. It also means providing the best navigation experience for your visitors: Leading them through to the basket without disruptions. So, it’s a win-win situation: your business does everything to ensure a sale and the customer has a pleasant experience (best way to convince them to come back, right?).
This is where the value of optimizing your e-commerce for search engines comes in. Google has a mobile-first approach, which means that the search engine uses the mobile version of your webshop and website to decide on your ranking and indexing the page.
Google always considers visitor first and decides on ranking based on the value and page experience your e-commerce business provides. That’s why you should always focus on the customer-first approach when optimizing your e-commerce for better search results. Only by creating an optimized and seamless experience will it positively impact your search results and lead customers to check out without disruptions.
Why do organic search results matter?
First, search engine optimization (SEO) is a free tool your business can utilize to appear in the right place at the right time. Let’s say you’re selling flowers in Notting Hill, London, and your customer is searching Google for a flower shop in that area.
Your webshop will appear on the first page of Google search results if properly optimized. In this case, Google will use the “mobile-first” approach to rank your webshop. Essential to you is that from day one of your e-commerce business, you have to think about mobile users and Google’s indexing and ranking requirements.
Suppose you aim for a successful ranking position or increase your e-commerce site traffic. In that case, you should consider complying with SEO best practices to avoid any possible pitfalls. They are painful for your business and cause inconvenience.
For instance, Google cannot find half of your website, or the crawlers pick up different titles and meta descriptions from what you’ve written.
Our Silver Partner CTI digital has covered different solutions to optimizing your website if Google can’t find parts or half of your website. The solutions that CTI digital offers in the article are SEO best practices that you can consider while optimizing your webshop for mobile.
You may ask: How do I optimize my webshop to provide a great mobile shopping experience?
A great mobile shopping experience consists of a responsive page display, readable fonts and style, shorter distances from point A to B, proper size buttons, page speed, or content that fits into your visitors' viewpoint. Your e-commerce goal should be to provide an easy, understandable flow that doesn’t cause any disruption from entering the store to getting to the basket.
We recommend that you start with the basics, and we’ve lined them up for you here:
Think about yourself & your customer: what is the first thing you notice when visiting an e-commerce site?
If you have to wait for 10 seconds until the webshop loads, you might change your mind and check out other webshops. Therefore, you need to optimize your webshop’s page speed.
Usually, you can use tools like Pagespeed Insights or Lighthouse to identify issues, such as page speed and get tips on improving your user experiences on both – mobile and desktop. Your site should load in up to 4 seconds; otherwise, the risk of losing the visitor increases.
How many times have you clicked on a button or a link, but it took you to a completely different page? Such a process is not only massively inconvenient but also adds up to a lower ranking because your page experience isn’t optimal. Optimizing your website with proper page display and viewpoint that fit into your visitor’s mobile screen will ensure their seamless experience navigating your site, and your page experience scores will go up. The outcome? Better ranking = more traffic = more closed sales.
Above, we mentioned the irritating situation of clicking on something and being directed to a completely different (and wrong) site. The page experience matters for mobile e-commerce because Google focuses on navigating your guests through the best page experience possible. For example, Google Core Web Vitals can help you improve a site's user experience.
You can measure and act upon your Core Web Vitals using tools such as Google Search Console, Google Lighthouse, and Chrome UX report.
Don’t be afraid if your numbers are low. Google still prioritizes excellent and valuable content over perfect page experience scores. However, if your competitor publishes excellent content but has poor page experience, Google will be in your favour if your e-commerce site has great content and page experience metrics.
Optimize your product description to bring you relevant traffic. How? Try to walk in your customer’s shoes; if you were them, think of phrases or keywords you’d type into a search bar to find what you’re looking for. Be specific and cover all the main points customers might look into when searching for your product.
The mobile shopping experience is essential for your e-commerce success. Once you provide a seamless page experience for your customers to be able to surf on mobile, Google “sees you” and “awards” you with better rankings. And as mentioned a few times: better rankings = more chances for a massive increase in traffic to your online store.
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