According to comScore, over 63 million people in the US use the mobile Internet, with 35% of those people accessing it on a daily basis. eMarketer says that over 70 million US mobile phone users will access the Internet from their device in 2009.
eMarketer also says that mobile e-commerce is still in its infancy though. While some retailers are ahead of the game, many are still “watching from the sidelines,” and planning their mobile commerce strategies.
Google gives some advice for optimizing your site for mobile e-commerce. On the Google Retail Advertising Blog, Amy Adams Harding of the Google Retail Team boils it down to three main steps, which she elaborates on:
1. Make it easy to use
2. Make it easy to save or send searches from phone
3. Make it easy to reach you
“You don’t need to have an iphone or android app to be effective with ecommerce online,” says Adams Harding. “In fact, comScore estimates that only 12% of the cell phone population in the US uses smartphones currently. So, the goal is to create an experience for your customers that is as easy and convenient to use as your regular website, no matter what type of device the user is on.”
Be sure to check out her post for more advice. Google’s Matt Cutts has also addressed mobile with his latest video upload to the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. He answers the following user question:
I have a server-side script that automatically redirects visitors to a mobile version of a site if they are using a mobile browser. My question is: What are some things to watch out for (if any) when serving different content based on the visitor?
Cutts says a lot of people think that just because they change content for a mobile browser, they become worried that they might be cloaking, which means showing different content to users than it is to Googlebot (which is frowned upon).
He says a typical user will be using a desktop browser, so you don’t have to do anything special for Googlebot. You can set it up so your site checks to see if a visitor is coming from a mobile browser, and if so, you can serve a different page. Cutts says this will not show different content to Google, so as far as cloaking is concerned, you’re safe.
