Why Your eCommerce Site Needs a Mobile-first SEO Strategy to Stay Competitive?

Mobile-first SEO Strategy for Boosting eCommerce Sales

Every day we see a new innovative mobile device launched in the market. Today we have all types of mobile devices, from smartphones to wearable devices like smartwatches. Mobile devices have become so popular that most people use desktops for work and watching Netflix.

This shift also means that users use mobile devices for their eCommerce needs. Here we look at why your eCommerce site needs a mobile-first SEO strategy to survive and thrive in 2023. Besides that, we also discuss tips for optimizing your eCommerce store with a mobile-first approach and the benefits of doing the same.

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eCommerce Mobile SEO

Online store owners use eCommerce mobile SEO to boost the ranking of their mobile websites on search engines, including Google. Mobile SEO for eCommerce involves using best practices and tactics in Search Engine Optimization to boost mobile website traffic and visibility.

According to Statista, 59.16% of global website traffic in the last quarter of 2022 was via mobile devices. It means more than half the people browsing online using mobile devices. However, companies can still not ignore traditional SEO. Rainmaker.UNO is an SEO expert specializing in the changing trends in SEO.

eCommerce Mobile SEO
As a leading expert, Rainmaker.UNO can predict that not prioritizing your mobile website’s SEO will negatively impact your business in one way or another. More importantly, you must understand that eCommerce mobile SEO differs from traditional SEO. It would be best to have the expertise of a reliable SEO services company like Rainmaker.UNO to help you understand the difference and ensure effective eCommerce mobile SEO.

Google's Mobile-first Index

One of the most compelling reasons online businesses want to prioritize mobile SEO strategies is Google’s Mobile-first index. Google uses the Mobile-first Index for ranking websites based on how well they can perform on mobile devices. Initially, Google used the desktop version of websites to determine their relevance and assign ranking for specific search queries.

But with more than half the global audience accessing the web through mobile devices, Google quickly had to adopt the mobile-first approach. Your website can still run without a mobile-first SEO strategy, but it will only appear on the Google results page if the target audience is accessing the web through a mobile device. Google’s Mobile-first Index makes sure of it.

Google's Mobile-first Index

Tips to Optimize Your eCommerce Website With Mobile-first SEO Strategy

Optimizing your eCommerce website with an advanced mobile-first SEO strategy is easy with the help of Rainmaker. UNO’s SEO experts. Our experts can optimize every aspect of your mobile-first SEO and prepare your eCommerce store for better traffic and sales.

But don’t worry if you want to avoid hiring an expert team to handle your mobile-first SEO optimization. Ten tips will help you prepare your eCommerce store for advanced mobile-first SEO strategies.

1. Website Configuration for Mobile Users

The first thing to do to ensure a seamless mobile-first SEO strategy for your eCommerce store is to implement the mobile configuration. According to Google, you can configure your eCommerce website for mobile users in three ways. You can use responsive designs, dynamic serving, or separate URLs to configure your eCommerce store for mobile users.

Pro Tip: Google suggests using responsive designs to ensure effective website configuration for mobile users.

2. Page Speed Optimization for Mobile Devices

Another effective way to enable your eCommerce website to implement advanced mobile-first SEO strategies is page speed optimization. Everyone knows that Google uses website load speed as a primary metric for ranking websites. Page speed is even more vital for mobile websites because the user is easily distracted by push notifications and barely has the patience to let the site load.

Besides minimizing bounce rates, mobile page speed optimization can also help you boost conversions and sales. Some Google-approved tips to ensure a faster page load speed for your mobile website include the following.

  • Circumvent redirects on landing pages
  • Leverage compression and browser caching
  • Image optimization
  • Optimize server response time and CSS delivery
  • Visible content prioritization

Page Speed Optimization for Mobile Devices

3. Get a Comprehensive Understanding of Google's Mobile-first Index

Preparing your eCommerce store for advanced mobile-first SEO strategies is only possible by understanding Google’s Mobile-first Index. After all, Google processes over 99000 search queries every passing second. Hence, it is unavoidable for eCommerce businesses to understand Google’s Mobile-first Index and optimize their website accordingly.

According to mobile-first indexing, Google uses the performance of the mobile version of websites as the baseline. One of the best practices to ensure quality mobile-first indexing of your site is to use equivalent texts and media for both website versions. Besides that, you can also utilize structured data, title tags, meta descriptions, etc., to optimize your online store mobile-first index.

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4. Prioritize Mobile Usability

Merely scaling your eCommerce website does not qualify as efficient mobile usability, as more is needed to rank your website. You must understand how various users navigate your website and enhance the user experience. It involves everything from ensuring fast loading of your website. Hence, you must optimize the overall user experience to improve mobile usability.

We recommend that you suggest that you start by ensuring intuitive navigation in your eCommerce store. Pay special attention to the readability of your website pages and ensure sufficient clickable elements are on every page. You must also pay attention to your contact forms and how you use them across your eCommerce website.

5. Keep Following SEO Best Practices

Following a mobile-first approach for SEO does not mean you can ignore standard SEO best practices. People may be using mobile devices significantly more, but the traditional SEO best strategies apply in most cases.

Keyword research and optimization, meta tag optimization, quality content generation, etc., are still essential SEO practices you need. It is vital to have the expertise to navigate the changing SEO trends, including mobile-first SEO.

Fortunately, our experts can save you a lot of time and effort by creating a custom SEO strategy for your business. Moreover, our experts implement unique techniques, including mobile-first SEO, to maximize the traffic to your eCommerce store.

6. Efficiently use Structured Data Markup

Google utilizes structured data to understand your website content better and collect relevant information. You can use different types of markup depending on your website and its unique requirements. Some popular markup types include reviews, events, products, articles, etc.

It is also worth noting that structured data can help you improve your eCommerce website’s SERP position and enhance its click-through rate. We also advise using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to get the best results out of the markups.

Equip Your eCommerce Store for Voice Search

More and more users demand voice search capabilities from all their digital interactions, including eCommerce purchases. The immense popularity of voice assistants, such as Google Now, Alexa, and Siri, indicates the growing need for voice assistants in eCommerce. Moreover, voice assistants make life easier for every user, from Baby Boomers to Gen Z.

In other words, the voice assistant is one of the rare technologies that helps everyone. The best thing about voice assistance is that it is so easy to use. Users can speak out about what they want and get relevant results. Several big brands have already enabled voice commerce in their online store. It is only a matter of time before this trend becomes mainstream.

8. Content Optimization for Mobile Users

Content optimization is an integral part of any SEO strategy, mobile-first SEO. If anything, content optimization is even more crucial for mobile devices. A big block of text on a small screen is unlikely to help the user experience, and the chances of the user navigating away are high. The result could be even worse if the content is scattered or improperly displayed on mobile devices.

The goal of the content on your website is to keep them engaged and push them a step closer to the conversion funnel. A virtually endless article is more likely to discourage users from interacting with your content. Hence, your content optimization process should include ensuring shorter paragraphs, appropriate use of headings and sub-headings, etc., to enhance readability.

One of the things Google considers when ranking your mobile and desktop website is the internal and external links you use. It is vital to have an effective link-building strategy to ensure your mobile website appears on top of online search results. Link-building for mobile and desktop websites remains the same for the most part.

However, there is one thing you must always be careful about when using internal or external links to your mobile website. You must ensure that all the links you use in your mobile website also lead to mobile sites. Using desktop links in your mobile website could take the user to a poorly readable website, significantly impacting the user experience.

Page Speed Optimization for Mobile Devices

10. Utilize Touchable Elements Smart

One of the vital aspects of mobile-first SEO is the effective utilization of touchable elements in your mobile website. Implementing essential link-building for your website and clustering your website with numerous links are quite different. One of the most nerve-wracking things a user can experience is clicking on something, and an unrelated popup appears.

Since the mobile screen is significantly smaller, you must pay extra attention to the touchable elements. You can avoid clusters of links in your mobile website by replacing regular links with oversized buttons and maintaining the appropriate gaps between touchable elements. Besides that, you can also replace link navigation with mobile-optimized menus.

Reasons to Adopt Mobile-first SEO Strategy for Your eCommerce Website

There are numerous compelling reasons to adopt a mobile-first SEO strategy for your eCommerce store. Below we discuss some of these reasons and elaborate on the need for a mobile-first SEO approach for your eCommerce business.

1. The Changing Needs of Users and Search Engines

The primary reason for adopting mobile-first SEO strategies for your eCommerce business is the changing needs of users and search engines. More than half the online interactions now happen through mobile devices. It also pushes search engines, including Google, to adopt mobile-first indexing for ranking eCommerce websites.

2. Appeal to a Wider Audience by Satisfying User Intent

Mobile-first SEO strategy focuses on user intent to serve the most relevant and helpful results to users. As a result, you can appeal to a broader audience with your content. It is relatively easy to accomplish this by analyzing SERP results. For example, you can choose whether to use long or short-form content for your mobile website based on SERP.

3. Get Additional Layers of User Intent via Mobile-first SEO

Mobile-first SEO enables online businesses to understand user intent better and optimize their efforts. Moreover, the growing popularity of various mobile devices, from smart watches to mobile phones and tabs, has changed online interactions forever. Mobile-first SEO enables you to understand how your audience uses mobile devices and what they expect from them.

4. Define the Relevance of Your Content for Mobile-first Indexing

Google’s mobile-first index and its logic for ranking mobile websites change based on Google’s understanding of user intent. The algorithm for determining relevant content based on user intent is constantly changing. With a mobile-first SEO approach, you can better define the relevance of your content and efficiently use Google’s mobile-first indexing to your advantage.
Enhance User-friendliness

5. Enhance User-friendliness

Another critical reason to adopt a mobile-first SEO strategy for your online business is its ability to enhance your site’s user-friendliness. The mobile-first approach pushes you to analyze user intent better and make relevant changes to your website, including optimizing the user-friendly nature of your store. As a result, you can optimize your eCommerce store with convenient and user-friendly capabilities.

6. Ensure Better User Understandability

One of the amazing things about Google is its ability to understand user intent. It is also why companies always use Google’s guidelines to optimize their content. By meeting the user-intent standards defined, you are effectively ensuring better user understandability for your content. As a result, you can better connect with your target audience and meet their unique requirements.

7. Keep Up With Google's Consistent Algorithm Intent

Google’s algorithm is constantly changing and evolving to fit users’ needs. However, it is also worth noting that Google’s algorithm intent is always consistent. Google always tries to meet users’ needs and present them with the most relevant results. Mobile-first Index is also a part of Google’s effort to maintain a consistent algorithm intent. Following the mobile-first SEO strategies help you to align with this algorithm’s goal and appropriately respond to your target audience’s needs.

8. Get Higher SERP Ranking for Your eCommerce Store

Mobile-first SEO ensures a higher SERP ranking for your eCommerce store. With more than half of all online traffic from mobile devices, mobile-first SEO can significantly help you boost your SERP ranking. Moreover, a higher SERP ranking of your mobile website can also impact the ranking of your desktop website.

9. Ensure Better Communication With Customers and Form Stronger Bonds

You can ensure better communication with eCommerce customers and form stronger bonds with effective mobile-first SEO strategies. The mobile-first approach provides superior flexibility and unique functionalities for strengthening customer relationships. Moreover, the overall mobile-friendly facilitates convenient communication in their hands.
Leverage Customer Data to Your Advantage

10. Leverage Customer Data to Your Advantage

One of the attractive aspects of mobile-first SEO is the valuable customer data or insights you get with it. You can use customer data and insights to assess and improve your website’s performance and marketing efforts. Advanced solutions like location tracking, reviewing, etc., help you improve the overall user experience and ultimately boost your revenue stream.
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Benefits of Mobile-first SEO Strategy for eCommerce Websites

You get endless benefits from using mobile-first SEO strategies for your business. Although we can’t list all the benefits of mobile-first SEO strategy here, we can list the top 10 benefits. Following are some of the best benefits of using a mobile-first SEO strategy for your eCommerce website.

1. More People Access the Web via Mobiles Than Desktop

There are 5.03 billion Internet users worldwide, and 92.1% of them access the web via mobile phones. It means many people use mobile devices instead of desktops to access the web, including online stores.

eCommerce is all about convenience, and a mobile device is the most convenient way to purchase items online. Mobile devices allow customers to browse for products regardless of the time or place because they always carry their mobile devices with them.

2. Ensure a Customer-first Approach for Your eCommerce Business

Using mobile-first SEO strategies lets you put the customers’ needs ahead of everything. The mobile-first strategy analyzes the unique expectations and requirements of the users accessing your mobile website. Moreover, mobile optimization of your website shows the customers that you want to make the shopping experience more convenient for them.
Build a Visually Pleasing eCommerce Store

3. Build a Visually Pleasing eCommerce Store

Scaling down the desktop website to fit inside the small mobile screen requires rearranging the site. While this rearrangement is unavoidable, it does not have to impact the website’s aesthetics negatively. Mobile-first SEO ensures a minimalist design for your mobile website while maintaining all the functional capabilities of your eCommerce store.

4. Boost Your SEO Ranking

Although mobile-first SEO offers many benefits to eCommerce businesses, its primary goal is to boost your SEO ranking. The mobile-first SEO approach enables you to prepare your store for Google’s crawl bots. Rainmaker.UNO uses holistic mobile-first SEO strategies to improve SERP rankings and enhance user experience.

5. Highlight Your Content With a Mobile-first Design

Mobile-first SEO strategy also involves using a mobile-friendly design to highlight content on your website and optimize it for smaller screens. In effect, a mobile-first SEO strategy enables you to avoid clutter and enhance the readability of your content. It is an ideal way to optimize your mobile website because mobile users do not want to spend a long time on mobile websites.

6. Get the Upper Hand Over Your Competition

The eCommerce industry is ruthless, and competition is unavoidable. With a mobile-first SEO strategy, you get a competitive edge. It significantly boosts your reach by ensuring access to your online business via numerous mobile devices. Moreover, it provides features that let your eCommerce store meet all customer requirements.

7. Boost Your Overall eCommerce Revenue

Mobile-first SEO significantly improves the reach of your online business. It means more people start visiting your store, effectively boosting the number of quality interactions. Simply targeting customers who access the web through mobile phones can enhance your overall eCommerce revenue. But with advanced insights and tracking, you can grow your income to a whole new level.

8. Reduced Bounce Rate

Mobile users are often impatient, perhaps even more impatient than desktop users. Even a second’s delay in loading the page is enough reason for the user to abandon your site. Mobile-first SEO strategy ensures that this does not happen. Besides that, mobile-first SEO ensures all the elements load without compromising the site’s aesthetics or readability.
Faster Page Load Speed

9. Faster Page Load Speed

One of the primary functions of a mobile-first SEO strategy is to ensure faster page load speed. The page load speed is a critical aspect of determining the SERP ranking of your mobile website. Our experts can implement minimal page load time for your mobile website, effectively enhancing user experience and even helping you boost your store’s conversion rate.

10. Boost Your Store's Conversion Rate

Boosting your online store’s conversion rate is always a priority, and a mobile-first SEO strategy can help you with this—the effective mobile-first SEO strategy from Rainmaker.UNO optimizes everything from page load speed to the site’s aesthetics. As a result, you can boost the eCommerce store’s conversion rate.

How is eCommerce Mobile SEO Different?

At its core, mobile-first SEO and traditional SEO remain the same. Both try to improve various aspects, including page load speed, while ensuring relevance and user intent for online searches. However, desktop or traditional SEO focuses on the public or audience rather than the geographic aspect.
Google's Mobile SEO Updates​
Mobile-first SEO typically considers the geographic aspect. It means mobile-first SEO focuses more on local searches. This local focus is because most mobile searches are by users looking for local results. Hence, the mobile-first approach seeks to provide local results based on user intent.

Google's Mobile SEO Updates

Google tries to provide the most relevant results to its users based on user intent. Over the years, Google has (almost) perfected the art of presenting user intent-based search results. Google started prioritizing the mobile-friendly nature of websites as a ranking factor in 2015.
Mobile-first Indexing Best Practices
Google considers many aspects for ranking mobile websites besides the general mobile-friendly nature of the site. It is also worth noting that Google uses an URL-based algorithm and can automatically recognize mobile-friendly pages and results.
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Final Note

With more and more people opting to use mobile devices to access the web, including eCommerce, mobile-optimizing your online store is more important than ever. The experts at Rainmaker.UNO understands the significance of mobile-first SEO strategy more than anyone else.

We use advanced AI-assisted technologies to optimize eCommerce stores for better inbound traffic and conversions. More importantly, we ensure that your target audience can always access your online store regardless of location or device.

Importance of Mobile-first SEO Strategy for eCommerce Websites - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

With more and more online searches happening across mobile devices, Google is prioritizing mobile-optimized websites in their results. Not having a mobile-optimized website can have a significant impact on your traffic. It is best to seek the help of an SEO expert like Rainmaker.UNO to optimize your eCommerce store for better traffic and conversions.
Yes, eCommerce businesses inevitably need mobile-optimized versions of their website. More than half the people accessing the web use mobile devices, and you could miss out on valuable sales simply by not having a mobile website. Hence, you must seek the help of an expert like Rainmaker.UNO for a mobile-optimized eCommerce store.
There are three ways you can configure your eCommerce website for mobile. You can use a responsive design that works seamlessly on mobile. Besides that, you can also use dynamic serving and separate URLs to optimize your website for mobile devices. Of course, hiring an expert like Rainmaker.UNO would be the most convenient way to do it.
Expendable content is as good as standard content as long as it is on your mobile website. However, expendable content in desktop websites, including the hidden ones in tabs and expandable boxes, gets a different weightage. It makes much more sense to consider expandable content on mobile because of the significantly smaller screen size.
Mobile site speed optimization is an essential part of a mobile-first SEO strategy. The experts at Rainmaker.UNO follows a holistic approach to mobile-first SEO, which includes site speed optimization. We ensure that your mobile website has the best possible page load speed to improve your SERP ranking and boost traffic to your store.
Ensuring mobile usability for your eCommerce store is more than about scaling it. You must ensure that the mobile version of your website is intuitive and easily navigate the store and enhance user experience. Our team of experts can quickly implement this for your eCommerce store and ensure optimal mobile usability for your eCommerce store.
Yes, you must continue practicing SEO best practices for your eCommerce store. Mobile-first SEO is similar to standard or traditional SEO. Moreover, many SEO best practices in mobile-first and traditional SEO are the same. You can avoid all the confusion with mobile-first SEO optimization by hiring an SEO expert like Rainmaker.UNO.
Google uses structured data to crawl through your eCommerce store efficiently. Hence, it is in your best interest to use structured data for the mobile version of your eCommerce store. Using various markups, such as reviews, products, events, etc., can help you improve your SERP ranking. Rainmaker.UNO can help you with implementing structured data.
At Rainmaker.UNO, we help our clients implement advanced mobile-first SEO strategies using state-of-the-art technologies, including AI-based tools. eCommerce store owners should consider implementing advanced capabilities like voice assistance and AI chatbots to enhance the shopping experience on their mobile websites.
Content optimization is essential in every SEO strategy. However, it is slightly more complex in mobile-first SEO strategies owing to the smaller screen size and low attention span of users. Our experts can ensure a seamless loading of your content on your mobile website without compromising the site’s aesthetic appeal.
Link-building is another crucial part of mobile-first SEO that takes expertise to master. One of the things you must note about link-building in mobile-first SEO is that you must only use internal and external links to mobile websites. This task can be challenging if you have extensive content with multiple internal and external links.
Most people use mobile devices for accessing the web, including eCommerce. Advanced mobile-first SEO strategies include optimizing customer communication via advanced tools, including AI chatbots. Moreover, it is significantly easier for customers to access and communicate with your business through their mobile devices.
With a mobile-first SEO approach, you can access in-depth customer data and insights. People use their mobile devices to search for practically everything. You can access valuable customer data with effective mobile-first SEO strategies and relevant tools. We can help you set up advanced capabilities for better assessing your audience.
With users increasingly accessing eCommerce services and the web, in general, via mobile devices, it is essential to have a mobile-optimized website. However, the desktop version of your eCommerce website is still relevant. The trick is to have a fully optimized eCommerce store that can work seamlessly across all devices, and we can help you with this.
An effective mobile-first SEO strategy for your business allows you to target a broader audience. It will effectively enable you to increase inbound traffic and get quality leads significantly. The increase in traffic ultimately converts to more quality interactions which can lead to more people going through the conversion funnel.

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