When Planning Your Mobile Strategy, Think Deep

By David Hillis (@davidhillis) May 5, 2011

Mobile strategy often starts with ambitious plans for native apps or new mobile web sites. This makes sense, but falls short of supporting the most important element of a mobile strategy — Deep Linking.

Deep Linking is a term describing links to content that live beneath the home and top level sections of a website. These links may come from search engines like Google, outbound email campaigns, social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr or Twitter, as well as in-bound links on blogs and other websites.

An effective mobile strategy accounts for deep links and optimizes mobile experience using a single domain or relevant redirects to a dedicated mobile site. The vast majority of mobile websites disregard deep links by blindly redirecting users to a different domain or by not optimizing content on the main website for mobile. Mobile experience should be seamless. It should preserve your links while delivering an engaging experience on phones and tablets.

Why Do Deep Links Matter?

Not All Content is Created Equal

Pages deep on your website are more valuable. Information Architecture on the web consists of cover and section pages that direct users to the actual content. The entire goal of a website is to move users from the top of the website deep into the site where the actual content lives. Deep content includes catalog pages on e-commerce sites, news or media sites with articles and ads, product and marketing sites with lead generation forms, and other important content types. The return on investment from most websites comes from the content that is deep in the site.

Mobile Traffic Skews Deep

Mobile traffic is overwhelmingly directed at pages deep on your website. I have customers who only see 10% of their web traffic from mobile websites, but up to 40% of traffic from outbound email campaigns come from mobile. It makes sense. People tend check email on their phones more than they browse the web.

Other customers I have met with have very active in-bound marking programs. These customers often see up to 20% of the traffic coming from mobile, but almost all of that traffic originates on landing pages and other campaign content deep in the site.

The Most Important Users

It is not only that the content deep in your website is more valuable, or the majority of mobile traffic does not hit the home page, but goes deep in the site; the people linking deep on your website are also the most valuable users. Why? Because they have been referred to your website by someone they trust or from a qualified source. A link shared by a friend on Facebook has more relevance than general web traffic. The same could be said about a search result that by definition has intent. In the case of traffic coming from marketing campaigns like Google Adwords or outbound email, these are the users you have paid to attract.

How Do You Support Deep Linking?

The key to supporting deep linking is making sure that every page on your website is optimized for mobile and will resolve properly.

One Web Site

According to research by Smashing Magazine 89% of mobile websites are hosted on a different domain from the PC website. Over half of mobile sites use the “m.” sub-domain. Other mobile sites may use a different sub-domain or a TLD like .mobi.

The problem with using a different domain for your mobile website is that you have separated mobile traffic from your main website and “un-tethered” all of the inbound links.