The first time more consumers shopped online than in-store was Black Friday 2015. Since then the graphs of online shopping are exponentially increasing. Perhaps greater shocking statistics is- more than half of that online traffic comes from mobile rather than desktop. Last year 70% of Wal-Mart’s Black Friday traffic came through mobile devices only.

It’s clear – Mobile is above all. You can not afford to ignore the importance of effective mobile strategies. With the holiday season on doorstep, mobile presents a huge opportunity for you to attract, engage with and reward numberless customers online. So how can you adopt mobile-first approach for your website? Here are five essential things to consider:

1. Is your website responsive:

First thing first, your website must be capable of reshaping itself in various screen sizes before you can focus on making it mobile-first. Audit your website for mobile-friendliness (responsiveness). See if your mobile website meets Google’s standards. And don’t forget to keep all of your resources crawlable so you can detect potential problems such as:
– Improper size of touch targets. (Google recommends minimum 48 CSS pixels)
– Elements can not align themselves.
– Horizontal scrolling present.
– Zooming capabilities are disabled.
– Improper size of fonts.
– Slow mobile loading speed.
– Broken links or incorrect redirects.
– Uncompressed images.
– Missing meta descriptions.
– Blocked resources including JavaScript, CSS.
– Redirecting chains.
– Intrusive pop-ups.
– Unsupported or unplayable content.

As you examine your website for mobile friendliness issues, Google Search Console will be a handy tool to monitor your progress. Go to Search Traffic > Mobile Usability to track the number of pages on your website that still have problems.

Nowadays shoppers not only look for a flawless mobile experience but they also want to browse and buy on mobile just as easily as they can on desktop. Specially in the holiday seasons when they are at their busiest and don’t have time for sitting in front of desktops.

2. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs)

More now than ever, online consumers expect things to be available instantly. Slow speed causes frustration among them. The ancient rule of 3 second response time isn’t applicable anymore. According to Nordstrom’s lead architect at the fashion retailer, they have seen a 11% fall in online sales when their website’s response time slows by just half a second. Bottom line is – Our mobile websites need to be lightning-fast.

To create such amazingly fast mobile websites we use AMPs i.e. Accelerated Mobile Pages. They’re approximately 4x faster than a regular mobile page.
All the more search engines (such as Google) promote them. AMPs offer mobile users exactly what they’re looking for: instant results that solve an immediate need.

AMPs are ‘web pages’ which use stripped down HTML coding and custom tags to achieve this lightning-fast loading speed. AMP version of web pages doesn’t contain any JavaScript, embedded content and lead forms, etc.

3. The Voice Search:

Voice search is the fastest growing type of search according to Behshad Behzadi, Principal Engineer at Google Zurich. He also believes conversational search is the future. By now, 55% of teens and 41% of adults use voice search on a daily basis, and that number is rising only.

So how can you optimize your website or specific pages for voice searches?
The most important thing while you go for this process is to understand this concept – How and why people verbally query a search engine differs from how they type queries.

This is How people use voice search: Queries typed in Google are usually ‘shortened’ whereas people ask ‘full questions’ when they use voice search. For example:

Now let’s see Why people use voice search: Google gives four different type of moments in which voice search is most commonly used:
– When people want to know something.
– When they want to go somewhere. (looking for a local services)
– When they want to do something. (the “how to” moments)
– When they want to buy something.

Each of these queries are directed towards an immediate need. The best way of optimizing for voice searches is to provide fast and accurate answers.

4. The Local Search:

Majority of mobile searches are performed while on the go. People carry mobile phone everywhere and as soon as any question strikes their mind, they do a mobile search. Every time they want to know about any local business, services, people, reviews or anything else, they simply do an instant mobile search. This trend of rise in the local searches is growing only. According to Google, searches for “businesses near me” have increased 2x in the past year. This rising trend simply tells what our consumers really want. Most of the times they are only interested in the local businesses and services when performing a mobile search. If you truly want to be mobile-first, you need to be one of the top results whenever a potential customer do a search in your area.

5. Native Apps:

Native apps as you know are installed to mobile phones through an application store (such as Google Play or Apple’s App Store). They provide the quickest, most effective way to engage with, reward and transact with customers. Now what critically matters in using them fruitfully is ‘the way’ how you use all your online resources (in order to drive traffic as well as sales). One of the best strategy is-
Use every promotional emails, social media links and website content to drive the traffic back to your native app. Linking everything back to an exact page on the app (deep linking) is The KEY – consider it the new and improved SEO.

Enhancing the user experience on mobile website is of paramount importance. Let us take this approach of deep linking one step ahead. Instead of using native apps for this purpose, we can use Progressive Web Apps. You might have heard of them before, also that Progressive Web Apps being the future of mankind.
Progressive web apps are browser based mobile websites that bring features from the native web apps to the web browser. They are faster to build and less expensive. By using them you can make your website work offline, handle patchy network scenarios gracefully, update background content, send push notifications, do content caching and a lot more.

Final Words:

With every passing moment, we’re getting closer to the biggest shopping season of the year. Take a critical look at your mobile strategy and capitalize on what promises to be a banner Holiday 2017. Let us know whenever you need any help, either small or big, we will be happy to stand with you and make this holiday season one of your BIGGEST successes. Happy Holiday Season?

With every passing moment, we’re getting closer to the biggest shopping season of the year: November and December. Once upon a time, Black Friday was the kick-off day for brick and mortar stores to promote holiday sale. More recently, the Internet has changed many things, including the how and when companies interact with their customers. The holidays seem to come earlier and earlier every year and the clock is truly ticking. While the rest of the world is thinking about Halloween, use these tips and you’ll end the year with a bang:

Upgrade Your Website’s Look and Feel:

Even before Halloween customers start their holiday shopping online. This time demands the site to be FESTIVE, dressed up like a Santa Claus. It puts them in mood to buy. Brick and mortar stores always set up detailed and stunning displays. A website is no different. And what prove to be Magic for this purpose are “The LANDING PAGES”, The Holiday-Specific Landing Pages. You need a bunch of them. Start designing, developing and testing them now, so that the top level performing pages will be ready on time for the holiday shopping. They will spotlight special promotions, gift packages, seasonal products, gift ideas and will miraculously boost your sales up. It’s reported that 74% of shoppers are influenced by coupons and offers online. Use the landing pages to showcase your coupons and greatest offers.

Promotional Content Creation:

It’s all about getting your customers excited. October is the correct time for Generating, Collecting and Spreading promotional content. A content that will raise the excitement in your prospects and get them aware of the offers you will be featuring during the Holiday Season. They will get prepared for it and excited already to shop from your website. Ultimately on the days of the holiday sale you will end up having huge amount of traffic. After producing appreciable amount of promotional content, you should MARK THE DATES on your calendar. Start spreading this content through your website, email and social media channels as per your decided schedule.

Promotion is just one aspect. You also need to solve the technical issues of your website before entering the season:

1 Mobile Friendliness:

During the holiday season, people are at their busiest. They simply want to get their holiday shopping done as conveniently as possible. Not all of your customers will have time to sit in front of their computers to shop. In such circumstances if your website is not mobile-friendly, it will not properly display on their smartphones or iPad screens, then there is a huge risk that customers may leave it just because of the frustration. Ask your crucial questions here regarding Mobile Friendliness of your website.

2 Loading Speed:

It’s reported that 44% of shoppers cancel their online orders mid-way just because of a website delay. Also, better the loading speed, better will be the Pagerank of your site on the Search Engine Results. Few of the essential steps to take you can find here in order to decrease your website’s loading speed.

3 Checkout Flow:

On an average, three out of every four people who are ready to buy something on a site decide NOT TO just because the checkout flow of the website is improper. This silly mistake can change the whole game at the last moment! Work on it, make the checkout process simple to follow. Test it again and again.

Don’t let this precious time go. Arise and start working. Let us know whenever you need any help, either small or big, we will be happy to stand with you and make this holiday season one of your BIGGEST successes. HAPPY HOLIDAY SEASON ?

Google search is shifting to Mobile First Index. Soon google search results will be based primarily on the Mobile Index rather than the desktop. Which simply means that those websites which give fantastic mobile experience will possess a better page ranking in google search results. They will be prefered over the other websites.

IT’S THE TIME

Finally the time has come to bring your website’s mobile version in order. Yes, you heard it right! If your website is not mobile friendly, then your page rankings are surely going to suffer.

But why?

It’s a known fact that mobile phones are easy to carry, light-weight, powerful and are always connected, so no doubt more and more people are shifting on mobile phones these days from desktops and laptops for net surfing. In simple words, market is shifting on mobile phones nowadays and this trend will continue in the coming years. As result 60 to 70% google searches are being done from mobile phones everyday. So to make customer experience better google is soon going to prefer those websites which amazingly work on mobiles.

But wait, my website isn’t mobile compatible, what should I do?

Within no time, make these necessary changes:
1. Optimize the images. (compress them)
2. Made the code easy.
3. Use browser cache.
4. Remove most of the redirections on your site.
5. Make proper navigations.
6. Arrange the site properly.
7. Remove flash on your website. (iPhones don’t support flash)
8. Get rid of pop ups.
9. Consult the professionals. Contact us for one on one help.

Will it be beneficial for me?

If your website is responsive, fast to load and delivers a high quality mobile experience, then yes, surely it will be fruitful for you. Since now the mobile index will act as google’s primary index and will assign page ranking of the search results preferring it over the desktop index. In simple words, your site will appear on top results of search when it will be compatible for Google’s First Mobile Index.

It’s the right time to act. Keep pace with the current technology and convert your website to be finger friendly rather than mouse friendly. Because future don’t belongs to damn big desktops and mouse, rather it belongs to FINGERS and SMARTPHONES.