Mapping URLs on your Mobile Site

First published on TalkingWeb.co.uk in 2013

A well optimised mobile website can be great – but you’ve got to remember how your visitors might get to you.

Google is light and fast. Therefore if I’m out and about, using my phone on a 3G connection, and I need to search for something – rather than search for a website and then look around within that site for my destination, I’ll just try and use Google to get me directly to the right page.

And all too often I find the perfect listing in Google – but when I click on it I’m taken to the site’s “mobile friendly” home page, miles away from where I wanted to be and would have been if I’d been on the normal/desktop site.

Typically, now I’m here to write this blog post I can’t find many good examples of this – I think a lot of the sites I’ve found it on in the past have corrected this issue which is great. But the one that stumped me at the weekend was Morrisons.

We were in the centre of Bristol, needing to get to Morrions’ in Weston-Super-Mare. I just needed the post code to tap into the satnav. I had very little connection and everything was painful to load. So I googled “Morrisons Weston-Super-Mare” and clicked on the top result for the Morrisons site (yes, yes, why didn’t I just use the Google map result – well in the end I did! But initially my first instinct was just to click on the top result to go to the Morrions site itself):

But when the page loaded, it had taken me to the mobile site and was just on the normal store locater page, not the Weston page  Which, to be fair to Morrisons, was very clearly laid out and is still better than a lot of mobile sites as it was at least the right section, not just the mobile home page. But still, it was quicker to hit “back” and look at Google’s map than to use their search considering I had such low reception.

Meanwhile, if I do the same search on my laptop…

…clicking on the top result takes me to Morrison’s very attractive and clearly laid out page for Weston-super-Mare:

(Loving the 1 hour photo processing by the way, Morrisons! That’s why I was heading there and it was actually done in 15 minutes!)

So Morrisons are better than most, and I don’t mean to give them a bad review because their site is neat and could be quick to use if I hadn’t been sat in a carpark on a time limit with bad reception, really wanting to hit the road! But it’s still an example of how if you’re going to go mobile, please make sure you consider how your mobile offering works with search engine results.