Use Mobile Search To Ramp-Up Holiday Sales

This holiday shopping season is predicted to the the biggest ever for mobile commerce. A new survey from Deloitte expects that holiday sales from mobile devices will hit $36 billion this year, accounting for 5.1% of the $925 billion online total.

Your Holiday To Do List

So, if you have a mobile store up and running, you’ll want to make sure your mobile store is ready to attract, inform, and convert incoming shoppers. Here are some great tips from past columns that should be part of your to-do list:

If you have a responsive design mobile site, you’ll want to take a second look at the Tune-Up post from June. Responsive design websites are ones where the same code is driving both the desktop and mobile experiences. Definitely a good way to go, but using this kind of one-size-fits-all approach can lead to issues with long downloads.
If you’re hosting your mobile site as an m-dot subdomain, you might see better performance, but will have a tougher time measuring it accurately. Check out the post on mobile search metrics to get up to speed on common pitfalls.
M-dot sites will also want to take advantage of the latest switchboard tags offered by Google. These tags are essentially the mobile equivalent of the canonical tag: they tell Google which mobile pages correspond to your desktop pages. This helps get the right pages listed in the mobile SERPs, leading to a better user experience and increased sales.
A second look at the keywords used on your product pages could be beneficial. Aside from the obvious choices — product names and their equivalent generic terms — you’ll also want to consider review-type keywords and (for electronics and B2B) part numbers. Check out this post on mobile retail strategies for a deep dive.
Holiday travel is the busiest time of year, and businesses need to be aware of the differences between desktop searchers and mobile searchers. Check out this post on mobile search for the travel industry to see how restaurants, tour guides, and other destination businesses can attract tourists.

Responsive design can be a great way to use one website to satisfy both mobile and desktop users. But care needs to be taken to prevent long downloads.

Planning For 2012/2013

There are a couple other trends to watch for that won’t impact this holiday season, but are sure to play a role in next year’s shopping landscape:

As Apple sells more iPhone 5 and 4s models, Siri will continue to grow in popularity and capabilities. Learn more about Siri’s preferences and quirks, including its lack of reliance on Google, in this post from last October.
Siri isn’t the only thing steering attention from Google. Microsoft is making a big push into mobile phones this fall, and will put all its marketing muscles into the new Windows Phone 8 platform. As you might expect, all the preset search functions point to Bing rather than Google, so this is likely to spread search traffic more evenly across the engines. Definitely something to watch as you plan PPC budgets for next year.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.