What Does the Mobile Update Mean for Fashion and E-Commerce Brands?

It’s just over a week since ‘mobilegeddon’ and brands have been scrambling to make sure their site is mobile friendly before the Google mobile algorithm update catches up with them.

When Google announced that the 21st April would see the search engine favour those sites with mobile responsive designs, it set the internet ablaze with panic. Some were calling it the worst thing to happen since Panda and Penguin arrived, but personally I think it’s a fantastic opportunity for brands to create a better experience for their customers and ultimately increase their conversion rate.

Before I discuss how much I think this update will benefit the fashion and e-commerce industry as a whole, I’ll walk you through Google Webmaster tools so you can see for yourself how easy it is to determine whether your site is ready (or not) for Google’s algorithm update. Here, I’ve used mytheresa.com (where Industry member, Paula Reed in the creative director) as an example to show how Google actually helps you to find out where you could improve.

Google’s mobile friendly test tool not only determines whether your site is mobile friendly (the clue is in the name), but also shows you exactly how you could improve in detail. Aspects such as text that’s too small to read or links that are too close together will turn customers away. In addition, content that is too large for a mobile viewport will potentially ruin a user’s experience – a risk you should not be willing to take considering the visual nature of the fashion industry.

To validate that the results that you get through the testing tool are correct and to give you 100% confidence your site is ok complete a search for your site in Google and you should see a tag next to the results that says ‘mobile-friendly’.

Also it’s a good idea to search multiple pages on your site, at least all your top landing pages, and make sure they have the tag as well. This mobile update is on a page by page basis so it’s possible that some of your pages will be mobile friendly but others have problems. Any pages that are not mobile friendly are at risk of mobile de-indexing.

Site speed is also a major factor in conversion rate optimisation and one of the big influencing elements that drives conversions. By reducing the load time of your mobile site, you present the relevant content to your users quickly and increase your chances of reducing bounce rate. This example shows how mytheresa.com could improve.

These changes to the Google algorithm update should not be seen as a negative thing, especially for those in fashion and e-commerce. In fact, this update offers brands the chance to make sure they’re appealing to mobile and desktop users at the same time and presenting both with a seamless experience. Considering research from eMarketer states that adults in the UK will spend more time on mobiles than desktop computers in 2015, content will be more biased towards mobile friendly aspects with a focus on capturing a user’s attention quickly. Whether it’s short videos that can be viewed on mobile, scalable images that work across smartphones and tablets and short snappy blogs and product descriptions that get the message across instantly, the online fashion industry as a whole is evolving in this age of instant information.

I predict that fashion brands will explore a vast amount of ways to improve the speed of sites on mobile devices. For instance, they could serve up different content or remove slow loading content from mobile browsers to enhance their experience without affecting the full visual impact for desktop browsers. One of our top tips would be to look at your server response time, this can be a big factor, and make sure you are on a fast dedicated server.

The SEO industry as a whole is still awaiting the full impact of this new update from Google. The promised ‘mobilegeddon’ has not yet transpired but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s not in the pipeline, Google has been quite clear with all businesses that full mobile optimisation should now be considered essential. Fashion brands need to evolve if they want that edge over the competition.

Andy Donaldson is a fashion and retail digital marketing specialist and the director of Hit Search, an agency specialising in SEO, PPC, CRO, social media and content marketing.