Mobile Archives | Page 2 of 2 | Blog

For SEO, Check Off Mobile-Optimized Site Search (By Apr 21!)

Posted by Tim CallanMarch 23, 2015eCommerce, Mobile, Mobile/Tablets, SEO, Site Search

Now that more than half of all time spent shopping online is done via mobile devices, mobile commerce is growing three times faster than overall e-commerce. In its “Spotlight on Modern Retail 2015,” NRF found that during the first three quarters of 2014, retailers reported their mobile sales grew a whopping 87 percent!

To meet these quickly changing usage patterns, Google is again adapting its algorithms to help users discover more mobile-friendly content. On April 21, Google will expand its mobile-friendliness ranking signal to make it even easier for users to find ‘mobile-friendly’ websites in search results.

According to Google, “This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.” And if anyone wants to test mobile web pages, Google provides a handy tool: The Mobile Friendly Test.

Mobile-Optimized Site Search Boosts SEO

Heavily contributing to the ‘mobile-friendly’ signal will be whether or not visitors, after landing on a mobile page, can complete the tasks they wanted to accomplish by solely using the mobile site.

For instance, when visitors using tablets search for new running shoes on Sports Authority, the company’s mobile-friendly site helps them easily find and buy the shoes they want, which in turn will help Sports Authority fare better in Google rankings after the April 21 algorithm change.

Mobile site search is a vital part of delivering a satisfying shopping experience to mobile users as it helps visitors quickly and easily engage with the site. Given mobile’s space and speed challenges, the search box is the best gateway to finding products and content on mobile sites. That in turn has a big impact on engagement metrics such as conversion rate, bounce rate, average time on site, average pages requested per session and more, which has a direct domain-wide impact on its ‘mobile-friendly’ signal and mobile search ranking.

For a complete guide to providing mobile shoppers with a great user experience, download the new white paper Site Search and the Mobile User Experience.

Mobile 101 – New Webinar!

Join us on Tuesday, March 24 at 10:00 a.m. PDT for a new SLI Webinar, Mobile 101 – Best Practices, to learn more about how to convert mobile shoppers with an engaging mobile user experience (and in turn, boost your mobile search ranking!). Registration is open until 8 a.m. PDT on March 24, plus an on-demand version of the webinar will be available soon.

Five Site Features that “Speed Shoppers” Love

Posted by Dawn MortensenMarch 9, 2015eCommerce, Mobile, Navigation, Ratings and Reviews, Rich Auto Complete, Site Search, Social Media, User Experience

50+ years ago, futurists predicted that advances in technology would provide a life of ease. Instead, we use today’s technology to do more, faster – even with shopping. As an increasing number of online shoppers want to find, buy and get on with life as quickly as possible, here are five must-have features for e-commerce sites that want to meet the needs of these “speed shoppers.”

1. Learning-based Site Search

Speed shoppers are likely to go straight to the search box and expect relevant results within the first few items displayed. To deliver such on-target results, a site search provider needs to offer technology that learns from multiple aspects of user activity and continually re-ranks items that are most relevant. The smarter the technology, the better the accuracy and speed for shoppers.

2. Autocomplete with Graphics

A critical feature for speed in site search is the ability to auto-populate product results and images from the first letter a searcher types, as offered by SLI Rich Auto Complete^TM. If I want to quickly find polo shirts and I start typing “polo,” I appreciate a retailer who shows me “polo” shirts after just typing “po.”

In this example, the retailer also uses SLI Learning Search^TM technology, which intelligently infers that by typing “po” I was most likely looking for a polo shirt and not a “pocket tee” or “popover hoodie.” Smart – and fast.

3. Social Content and Reviews Integrated Into Search

Keep in mind that not all speed shoppers know exactly what they want when they search. A last-minute gift-buyer, for instance, may search for “makeup set” at e.l.f. cosmetics, but before clicking “buy” the giver wants to make sure it’s a quality product. Since e.l.f. incorporates a special “As Seen In” feature into its search, the gift shopper can see that this item has been featured in magazines like O and Woman’s Day. And if that doesn’t instill enough confidence to click “buy,” the shopper can see that it’s a 4-star product with more than 61 reviews. This quick-reference information, placed on the product page, can make a speed shopper giddy about the efficiency of it all.

4. Easy Payment Options

Online shoppers are quickly getting fed up with multiple-step checkouts that require them to provide personal and financial information. As more consumers experience the convenience of PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Wallet or similar payment options, paying with credit cards could soon become a relic. Be sure you offer the payment experience your customers prefer, or they’ll find other sites that do.

5. Optimized Mobile Experience

Speed and ease are especially critical for mobile shoppers. The smaller the screen size, the smaller the amount of patience a customer has before giving up. As John Tomich stated in a recent article for Multichannel Merchant, “A successful mobile interaction with your customer is one in which everything is obvious, easy and fast.” He cites that shoppers overwhelmingly prefer social logins for ease of use. Express checkout and easy payment options are as critical here as with any shopping site. Other critical features are those that will improve findability, like learning-based search and navigation.

The investment in meeting the needs of speed shoppers will undoubtedly pay off. Speed shoppers are usually searchers, which are 2-3x more likely to convert than non-searchers. And when you meet speed shoppers’ needs for efficiency, they’ll quickly become some of your most loyal repeat customers.

6 Ways to Optimize the Mobile Shopping Experience

Posted by Jason MillerOctober 16, 2014eCommerce, Mobile, Mobile/Tablets, Site Search Tips

The stats are in and the message is clear: people are shopping on their smartphones and tablets more and more every day. Mobile commerce in the U.S. is:

Growing 3x faster than overall e-commerce (BI Intelligence)
Grew 48% to $8 billion in Q2 of 2014 (U.S. Census Bureau/comScore)
Grew 113% in sales from smartphones and 86% in sales from tablets in 2013 (Shop.org)

Mobile shopping is outpacing desktop shopping; billions of dollars are on the line; and yet smartphone conversion rates remain at an embarrassingly low 1% or less for many retailers. Why? 80% of shoppers say they typically abandon a mobile site if they have a bad user experience (Limelight). To take advantage of this massive opportunity, online retailers need to provide shoppers with an excellent customer experience.

While there are many different ways to address all these different device formats, such as dedicated mobile or tablet sites or even a complete overhaul like Responsive design, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Whichever approach you choose, here are six tips to help you optimize your mobile customer experience:

1. Speed Matters

Nearly half of consumers expect a web page to load in less than two seconds (KISSmetrics). Remember that there is a distinct difference between what a computer calculates as page weight/load time and what a user will consider the page speed. Optimizing web pages for “visually complete” – or the user’s perception of when a page is complete – and optimizing actual page load times will create a better user experience. Tip: Use Google Page Speed Insights for overall comparison and WebPageTest to compare visually.

Image size also matters. Make sure to serve appropriately sized images and remember that even images hidden via CSS for a mobile view will still be downloaded.

If using a mobile site, make sure images are sized for that form factor; don’t simply reuse desktop images as they will force users to download excessively large images.
If the site is Responsive, make use of client side conditional loading (imager.js) or dynamic image compression (e.g. Akamai’s ION product line) to ensure users aren’t downloading unneeded bytes. Tim Kadlec found that by using a responsive image technique, sites could save up to 72.2% of image weight.

2. Reduce Customer Friction

Conversion rates on average are four to five times higher for people who use on-site search. Additionally, the type of visitors who utilize the search box are showing explicit intent and are more likely to purchase (PFSweb). Mobile users specifically are more likely to use search so make sure your search box is in an obvious place near the top of the page. Tools to ease the on-site searcher’s path-to-purchase include:

Rich Auto Complete – Ease the pain of typing in search terms on small mobile devices by adding Rich Auto Complete to your search box. Through predictive analysis, this will offer suggested keywords and products as the user is typing the search term. This saves the user time and frustration and is a great way to reduce a customer friction point.

Spelling Suggestions – One of the difficulties that come with shopping from a mobile device is that the keyboard may be small or difficult to use, and customers may not be able to type in search words correctly. Account for misspellings or similar words by employing autocorrect or synonym rules. These rules create linkages between words to show the correct products when a word is misspelled or a different term or slang is used.

Reviews & Social Media – Show ratings and reviews with your product results. Provide this social currency on site so users don’t need to leave your site to research products. Also, more shoppers are using social media to get ideas for gifts or find new items they’d like to purchase. Make sure you are catering to your mobile visitors by allowing them to share their favorite products easily among their social networks.

3. Touch-Enabled Devices

When designing for touch-enabled devices, it’s important to remember the size of the human finger and thumb. The touch target for an index finger is 57 pixels and a thumb is 72 pixels. Making touch targets smaller than these targets can lead to user frustration and incorrect clicks. Moreover, don’t require users to pinch and zoom in order to navigate pages as these actions also lead to a negative user experience.

A very common mistake in mobile development is attempting to port desktop features directly to a mobile device. With a touch-enabled device, the user is not navigating the page with a mouse cursor so keep in mind that functions like hover don’t translate into a positive customer experience. At best, the user will attempt to click the item multiple times to activate the link; at worst, the user will be unable to click through at all. According to Thomas Fuchs, “The easiest way to deal with this is simple: don’t use hover on touch-enabled devices.”

4. Make Checkout Easy

Smart e-commerce companies create as few steps as possible at mobile checkout. When you allow visitors to checkout quickly and easily, they’re more likely to complete the purchase. To speed customers through checkout:

Reduce form length (fewer than 6 fields); if multiple steps, show progress
Top Align form labels for easy readability while typing
Allow guest checkout (to again, “reduce friction”)
PayPal/Google Wallet payment options get customers through the process quickly

5. It’s Time to Revolt Against Sliders (on Desktop and Mobile)

There have been numerous studies showing that sliders are useless. Site visitors are highly unlikely to take the time to read each slide or interact with the slider. Notre Dame performed a test with a slider on their homepage, only to find that the first image was the only image to receive interest from visitors (and only 1% of visitors). Take a serious look at your analytics and evaluate whether or not the extra download time and screen real estate is actually providing your customer value or simply satisfying everyone on the committee. Instead of sliders:

Show relevant sales items, or personalized offers based on season or geography
Show returning customers something based on their shopping affinity or past purchases
Avoid banner blindness and focus on what you really want the customer to do

6. Without Testing, You’re Just Guessing

Mobile customer expectations are evolving at a rapid rate so adapting to these ever-changing requirements is critical for success in an extremely competitive e-commerce environment. Performing tests, whether A/B or multivariate, can identify whether a feature can help or hurt your bottom line and is the best means of identifying which tips will best improve your conversion rates. Looking at what your competitors do and industry best practices are only starting points; you also need to know what your audience responds well to.

To learn more about how to improve conversion rates and increase revenue from your mobile sites and apps, visit https://blog.sli-systems.com/solutions/mobile-site-search.

The Growing Global Need for Great Site Search

Posted by Shaun RyanJune 19, 2013Mobile, Navigation, Newsletter, Site Search

Every day we see how introducing great site search is one of the easiest and quickest ways to turn more visitors into buyers. Earlier this month our customers were telling their stories at IRCE 2013 in Chicago. These are businesses like Samuels Jewelers, which doubled the per-visit value of their site search users after implementing changes that make search results more relevant. And Party Supplies Delivered, which increased their conversions by 203% after switching from their platform’s default search to advanced search.

Al Gore’s keynote address was about the international opportunities that abound for eCommerce – an industry that is growing 15 percent each year, even during a period of global economic stress. “You need to think global,” he said, pointing out that the number of Apple iOS and Android devices activated in the U.S. was surpassed in January by those activated in China. The economic balance is shifting and we need to accept, and anticipate, change.

We spoke with many online retailers who haven’t yet optimized their site’s search and navigation, and his keynote hit home. As eCommerce grows internationally, SLI plays a pivotal role in providing the tools that enable the best shopping experiences for customers around the world. Whether for large online retailers with multiple international sites or family-owned businesses, we work to provide the best products, resources and customer service, so that all of our customers can focus on what matters most to them – their business.

Seizing the Opportunity with IPO, Expansion

As a company that has an established customer base spanning five continents, we understand the global opportunity. Brazil is one of our most recent, and fastest-growing markets, adding to our strong presence in the United States, the UK and Australia. We are working with some of the top Brazilian online retailers to improve their search and navigation, both on web and mobile sites. We are also starting to work with our first Japanese partners and customers.

The vast opportunity for further international expansion is one of the reasons SLI Systems decided to raise capital through its IPO on the New Zealand Exchange on May 31, 2013. It has been an exciting time for SLI’s founders and investors as we’ve watched shares rise since the original offer of NZ$1.50. You can hear more about our story in this June 4 interview.

We’ll use the investment to fuel sales, marketing and customer support as well as innovation, as we grow our engineering and product development teams. This will build on our tradition of bringing our customers the ongoing feature and product developments they need to make their eCommerce sites the most successful in an increasingly competitive marketplace. We believe that innovation and measured growth are the secrets of global success.

Today’s online shoppers are starting to see gorgeous magazine-like sites tailored for mobile browsing, interactive tools that aid decision making, and the convergence of social and editorial to create highly-personalized shopping experiences. More and more of our customers are eager to work with us to integrate these features into their site search and navigation. As technology advances and global opportunities continue to expand, we anticipate and remain at the leading edge of the many innovations in eCommerce yet to come.

5 (More) Ways to Enhance Your Site for a Better Tablet Experience

Posted by Kemberly GongFebruary 11, 2013eCommerce, Mobile, Mobile/Tablets, Site Search Tips

Practical Ecommerce magazine recently listed five ways to enhance your site for a smoother, more optimized tablet experience. They tackled many issues to optimize page load times, such as using “lightweight, beautiful images,” replacing graphics with CSS where appropriate, and optimizing the site for faster loading times. They also suggest using techniques to improve viewing and interacting with the site, such as using responsive design templates and making sure navigation is finger-friendly. (Another great article, The Pursuit of Tappiness, is here.)

Those are all great steps to take to improve the speed and navigability of your site. Additionally, we believe there are other details that should also be addressed when making modifications to your site.

Conduct Regular Usability Testing

We recommend conducting regular usability testing to continually review and understand how users interact with your site and where their pain points exist. Your customers may not know exactly the best way to design it but you’ll start to see trends in what they like and don’t like. As customers become more accustomed to online shopping and experience new and innovative features on other sites, both through laptops and mobile devices, they will come to expect these same or better features on yours. Additionally, search data can provide valuable user insights. Data from search reports can help illuminate product trends and indicate whether users can find what they’re looking for on your site. Usability testing makes sure you have your finger on the pulse of consumer behavior.

Direct to Product Pages Quickly

Take users to the product detail page as quickly as possible. Optimizing your mobile site’s search reduces the number of clicks needed to find a product and will make it easier for shoppers to quickly find and purchase an item. Remember that most users aren’t using their tablet in conjunction with a keyboard or mouse, so it must be easy to find products with fewer taps. Having a site search that returns the best results increases their chances of finding what they want.

Improve Navigation for Easier Browsing

Guide shoppers that are browsing to what they want… quickly. Many shoppers who use tablets to browse may enter a site without knowing exactly what they want. Being able to sort and refine large groups of products through the navigation can help whittle down your products to a manageable selection.

Save Information for Faster Transactions

Allow users to save important personal information on your site so they don’t need to type in a lot of basic content every time they make a purchase. Giving the user the ability to save mailing addresses and payment information, but also the ability to store items in a wish or shopping list can help speed the checkout process. Amazon does an excellent job at this with its “1-Click” ordering option. Additionally, showing “recently browsed” products can quickly show customers something they might be interested in seeing again.

Use High-Quality Content and Photos

Include better product content and many, high-quality images, to clearly display and describe the product. A common complaint among online shoppers is not having enough information to make an informed decision. By showing the product from a variety of angles and giving users the ability to zoom in and out, and clearly conveying product information, shoppers will have less reason to abandon their shopping session.

The eCommerce experience is continually changing, and customers will continue to push for faster sites with better usability. Taking a deeper look at these site search and display details, and conducting routine usability testing to assess and fix pain points are good habits that will keep your business on the cutting edge.

Is your site search speedy enough?

Posted by Shaun RyanApril 10, 2012Ajax, Mobile, Newsletter, Site Search

In light of all the transformations we’re seeing on the web, one aspect must be kept top of mind: speed. Consumers’ expectations for pages to load quickly – whether on traditional or mobile sites – are increasing all the time. If your site performs too slowly, you risk losing visitors to your competitors, possibly for good. Also, Google takes page load time into account as part of their ranking algorithm, so a slower loading page can undermine your SEO efforts.

There is an abundance of research that shows the impact – both good and bad – that speed has on e-commerce sites. Gomez.com issued some startling statistics not long ago, such as:

The average online shopper expects web pages to load in two seconds or less, down from four seconds in 2006; after three seconds, up to 40% will abandon a site — Forrester Research
78% of consumers surveyed went to a competitor’s site due to poor performance at peak times — Compuware and Equation Research
71% of mobile web users expect websites to load as quickly, almost as quickly or faster on their mobile phone compared to the computer they use at home — up from 58% in 2009 — Compuware and Equation Research
Conversion rate increases 74% when page load time decreases from 8 to 2 seconds — Gomez real user monitoring data (33 major retailers, 3 million page views, search transaction)

The need for speed applies to all pages of your site, including site search and navigation – and luckily, there are a few things you can do to make your search operate faster and more efficiently, adding to a satisfying online experience. Some initial steps you can take are outlined below.

1. Optimize your indexing for faster search

A modern search index should be able to return relevant results in a fraction of a second. Some sites make the mistake of querying directly into their product database which is not optimized for speed, or relevance. This can slow down the process significantly.

2. Utilize Ajax search

Ajax search speeds up search queries by removing the need for a page-refresh each time a user conducts a follow-on query, selects a refinement, switches between grid and list views, reorders the results or clicks to the next page. In any of these instances, only the data that is needed is requested from the servers so the results appear much faster. (See our video tutorial on using Ajax search here.)

3. Address mobile sites

On a mobile commerce site, speed is even more important. The mobile site and the mobile search should only have the content and functionality that is absolutely necessary. SLI has developed a set of best practices for delivering mobile search (see our video tutorial here). One way to significantly improve load time of search pages is to use thumbnails instead of full size images.

4. Use content delivery networks

Content delivery networks bring the files (images, JavaScript, etc.) that are being delivered on the page, closer to the end users. This local caching can significantly speed up the delivery of those files, particularly for your visitors that are physically located far way from your servers. SLI uses Akamai for this.

5. Only include what’s necessary on your pages

Is everything on your page necessary? If you can have less on your page it will be quicker to load and the page may be simpler for your visitors to use. Conduct A/B tests to see the impact of removing elements from your page.

6. Compress your HTML

All modern browers support compression – this can be enabled on your webserver and it means the data is delivered considerably more quickly. This is an easy win.

7. Have sufficient hardware and bandwidth

Monitor how you are utilizing your machines (servers, switches, load balancers, etc.) and bandwidth, and have plenty of spare capacity so you can handle peak loads and any outages can be handled by machines that are operational.

If you have any questions about ways to speed up the search on your site, please contact your CSM, or email us at info@sli-systems.com.

5 Quick Ideas for Holiday Merchandising in Search and Navigation

Posted by Shaun RyanNovember 14, 2011Mobile, Navigation, Newsletter, Site Search, Social Media

The process of prepping your online storefront for holiday shoppers begins earlier every year – but there’s still time for last-minute “quick hits” that can help boost conversions and encourage shoppers to browse (and shop) longer on your site. Along with FitForCommerce, we’re presenting several of these quick-hit ideas in a free webinar on Wednesday, November 16 – read on for a sneak peek:

#1: Optimize holiday search terms: Review your shoppers’ most popular search terms from last year, and make sure you’ve matched these terms to the best products. Also, optimize searches that include general holiday-related keywords (like “gift” or “dad present”) to make sure results are relevant.

#2: Use site search as “your ears to the floor”: Site search gives you a real-time picture of what your customers want from your site. Review site search keywords and adjust landing pages and home pages as needed.

#3: Merchandise search and landing pages: Don’t miss out on opportunities to highlight products and special offers when visitors come to search results or landing pages. Create a gift finder that can help shoppers find gifts based on recipient and price, or add a special holiday product category that’s powered by search.

#4: Add holiday messages to navigation and search: Allow shoppers to reorder search results based on holiday-related categories like “top holiday picks” or “best-selling gifts.” Also, promote special holiday deals using banners or other messages within search – such as deals on shipping or free gift-wrapping.

#5: Incorporate mobile and social into the holiday shopping experience: More and more shoppers expect to do some of their holiday gift-buying from their mobile devices, and they want to research products via their social networks. Add social content into search results, and make mobile search and navigation as user-friendly as possible.

Looking for more ideas as you ramp up for holiday shoppers? Register for the November 16 webinar.

Launch Your M-Commerce Website with SLI Mobile

Posted by Shaun RyanNovember 18, 2010Mobile, Newsletter, Site Search

Have you ever shopped for clothing, books, or sporting supplies on your mobile device? If so, was it an easy process, or was it cumbersome and time-consuming? While the numbers vary a bit from report to report, most experts predict that consumers will soon launch themselves into the mobile commerce revolution – possibly even during the holidays. You need to make sure your online business is ready for these shoppers.

If you’re ready to take the mobile plunge, we have some tools and services that can help you do so quickly and cost-effectively. We recently introduced SLI Mobile, which helps you create a mobile version of your e-commerce website, complete with search and navigation features. Our solution takes into account the special challenges of conducting e-commerce on a device with a small screen and varying data speeds, so we offer several tools to make searching easier, such as refinements and smaller images.

And just like the service we provide for regular e-commerce sites, we allow you to integrate your product pages with ratings and review solutions, as well as social media content. We can create mobile sites that work on all major devices and platforms, including iPhones, BlackBerrys, and Android phones. If you already have a mobile site, we can simply provide you with search and navigation functionality – or, we can provide you with search, navigation, and product pages and integrate them with your shopping cart.

For our existing customers, launching the mobile site is a fast and painless process – we already have all the data and can set up the mobile site with almost no effort from the customer. Our customer Century Novelty, whose mobile site is now live, found out just how painless and cost-effective SLI Mobile is: “SLI Systems did all of the heavy lifting to create the site, and at one-third of the cost estimates we received from other mobile vendors—and the entire process took just a few hours of my time,” explains Ian MacDonald, vice president and general manager of Century Novelty.

If you’d like to study up on mobile commerce, download our new white paper, Site Search and the Mobile Commerce Revolution. It’s free, and inside you’ll get fresh ideas on developing a mobile strategy, and making your mobile commerce site as user-friendly as possible. Click here to download the guide – and to find out more about SLI Mobile, contact your Customer Success Manager or our sales team at sales@sli-systems.com.

Mobile site search needs to be fast, streamlined and relevant

Posted by Shaun RyanApril 22, 2010Mobile, Newsletter, Site Search

Given the rapid adoption of smartphones, everyone in ecommerce knows the importance of developing a mobile version of their web site. What’s perhaps even more important is creating a mobile version of your site search.

Why is mobile site search so important? It’s a vital part of the web-browsing experience when you’re on a mobile device. Limited screen real estate provides little room for navigating from page to page or product to product. With effective mobile site search, people don’t need to rely on navigation – so it’s a space-effective way of getting people to the information they want to find on your site.

When you develop mobile site search, you need to take into account the unique challenges of browsing the web via these devices. Obviously, the small screen size will constrict the search choices you can offer to mobile device users. For instance, it’s very difficult to show options for refining search results. In addition, variable download speeds will limit how long these users are willing to wait for the search results to load.

These factors make site search even more crucial to a mobile website since it’s more difficult to navigate through a website via a mobile device. Therefore, you should consider giving site search prominent placement on your mobile site. Amazon does this with its own mobile site – as you can see when you visit the site, search dominates the screen.

Relevance of search results is particularly key for mobile site search, since it’s difficult to show facets to refine results – you want to make every effort to ensure the results are relevant after typing in a keyword. Users can’t or won’t scroll through pages of results to find what they need. It’s also important to keep the site search feature light in terms of images – any pictures should be small so as not to slow down page loads. On the other hand, you may want to include easy access to product reviews – people tend to use mobile devices when they are shopping, and they may want to access reviews on the spot.

We’re happy to offer advice on the best practices for mobile site search that’s fast and effective. If you’re an existing SLI customer and would like to develop a mobile version of your site search, contact your Customer Success Manager.

SLI Blog

For SEO, Check Off Mobile-Optimized Site Search (By Apr 21!)

6 Ways to Optimize the Mobile Shopping Experience

5 (More) Ways to Enhance Your Site for a Better Tablet Experience

About SLI Systems

Learn

Connect