Do you have an ecommerce website or a shop that sells products online? If you aren’t already, you should be focusing your efforts towards mobile users first, and desktop users second.
The number of mobile users is at an all-time high, with that number projected to keep growing each year. The average person aged 16-24 spends roughly 34.3 hours a week on the internet, where they’re not only shopping online, but researching what to buy and which brands to trust.
Your ecommerce store needs to be optimised for mobile so your target audience can find you when they’re looking online. Your goal should be to make their shopping experience simple and quick, and allow them to find what they’re looking for while ensuring it comes from you. Here’s how to optimise for mobile users.
Speed up your website
Having a website that loads slowly will deter users from sticking around. It takes approximately three seconds for someone to decide distinguish if your website isn’t loading fast enough before they bounce off the page and onto another one, so having a website that takes too long to load will hurt the mobile experience.
You can speed up your website by using a responsive theme, which means that your website design will work on all devices, rendering the pages efficiently and optimise them for different platforms and device sizes. You can also use a caching plugin to generate the static HTML pages of your website and save it on your server, so whenever a user logs onto your site, instead of firing up the full script, it loads the pre-saved light version of your page. This helps it load much faster for the user.
Usually the speed of your site is determined by how it’s built, but having a reliable web hosting provider can ensure good loading speeds as well. You can check your site’s loading speed yourself using an online tool if you want to be cautious.
Optimise for mobile search
When people are searching for information on products or services, they search using keywords. Your goal is to find out what those most-used keywords are and integrate them into your website content as naturally as possible. This is called SEO, or search engine optimisation. It differs between desktop and mobile, so be sure to pay attention to mobile SEO practices.
Optimise page titles by using popular keywords and integrate keywords into your content and product descriptions. The trick is to make the content sound conversational, not robotic. It’s painfully obvious when content is stuffed with keywords, as it sounds unnatural, and there are speculations that search engines will penalise websites for this. You want the mobile user’s experience to be positive, so try and make it feel as though they’re talking to a customer service representative, not browsing on a static website.
You’ll also want to optimise for voice search, since 50% of mobile users are predicted to use the voice search feature to help them browse and seek out information by 2020.
Ignoring mobile users and their usage patterns is akin to ignoring a large part of your market, so make sure you’re up to date on recent trends and mobile marketing tips and tricks, so that you can stay ahead of the curve, and capture the audience you want.
