It’s no secret that mobile devices now account for the majority of browsing and purchasing on e-commerce sites, with users increasingly accustomed to shopping online from their cell phones.
Paradoxically, few e-tailers (and cms!) take the trouble to really optimize their stores for this medium, despite the growing importance of mobile portability in the SEO criteria rewarded by search engines.
So let’s take a look at the best SEO practices for mobile e-commerce.
The user experience, again and again the user experience to boost your SEO on mobile
A different medium means different user behavior, and with mobile e-commerce booming (we’re even starting to talk about “m-commerce”) it’s only natural to look for ways to enhance the mobile user experience.
Mobile-first SEO increasingly rewarded by search engines
Naturally, the appeal of mobile browsing has not gone unnoticed by search engines, and Google in particular.
More traffic on mobile means more potential revenue for the web giant, and therefore the need to encourage mobile browsing that is particularly “user friendly”.
With this in mind, Google has introduced various rating tools, as well as a reward system based on the accessibility of sites on mobile, with “Mobile First Indexing” in particular.
With this system, the indexing of pages on an e-commerce or other site will no longer be based primarily on its desktop version, but on its mobile version.
It is therefore essential to optimize the latter in terms of navigation, display speed and adapted visuals.
In short, it’s all about mobile SEO!
More impatient users on mobile…
… and Google knows this, which is why it rewards fast sites first and foremost.
We sometimes see statistics circulating which claim that an extra 0.5 seconds of display time can cause an e-merchant to lose staggering percentages of potential customers.
While these figures should be taken with a grain of salt, the fact remains that the average web surfer’s attention span is very limited (who hasn’t left a site that took a few seconds too long to display, to go and look elsewhere?), and even more so on mobile devices, as they rarely sit quietly at home in front of their PC.
So you need a particularly fast display of your website on mobile, a clear structure and a more limited number of actions than on PC.
What are the best SEO practices for mobile e-commerce?
Now that we know why it’s so important to optimize the SEO of your mobile e-commerce store, it’s time to take a closer look at the best practices for upgrading your mobile SEO.
A few techniques for speeding up/optimizing your SEO site on mobile devices
As we all know, display speed is one of the most important criteria influencing user experience, and therefore SEO.
The use of suitable images, both in terms of size (with dimensions that allow for display on mobile devices) and format (for example, favoring .png formats for zoom-only images and .jpeg for banners and common visuals).
But also by reducing these same images using various software programs (like this one).
It’s also a good idea to reduce unnecessary scripts and CSS files directly from your back-office, and to use browser caching to optimize loading speeds.
Free tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix can be used to identify performance problems and obtain specific recommendations.
All with a view to improving the loading speed (and therefore the SEO) of your e-commerce site.
Choosing the right platform for an SEO-optimized mobile site
A mobile e-commerce site that works well (and is well referenced) also depends on the choice of platform used.
Certain products/services and sectors are particularly well suited to the mobile medium, such as the sale of affordable B2C products (requiring little thought and therefore little research) or fast entertainment services/products (music, videos…).
While many cms, such as Prestashop, offer a good level of personalization on mobile, some e-tailers may want to create a “from scratch” site, entirely designed for mobile in terms of functionality and display (with visuals optimized and automatically adaptable to the most commonly used mobile screens).
This solution, which calls on external service providers, is more expensive but offers a much higher level of personalization and SEO optimization on mobile.
It’s also possible to make a compromise by having a professional optimize an e-commerce store built from the ground up using a cms.
And what about mobile applications?
They may seem a tempting alternative to a classic site, since mobile market share is only increasing anyway.
However, they remain more interesting for large companies or particularly innovative services, as they are very costly and complex to develop and maintain, compared to a well-optimized e-commerce site on mobile.
Mobile SEO, the new El Dorado of e-commerce
Google has made no secret of the fact: we’re entering the “m-commerce” era, and mobile is clearly a priority when it comes to SEO.
Knowing the best SEO practices for e-commerce is therefore a guarantee of prosperity for the future.
With user experience, ergonomics and display speed as determining factors, mobile SEO is, and should be, a priority for any e-merchant concerned with the visibility of their store.
Whether hosted on a traditional cms or built from scratch by an external service provider.
Expert in e-commerce store creation and optimization for over 15 years, don’t hesitate to contact me for all your e-commerce projects, on mobile as well as on the “big” screen.
