Sumo and Google: Mobile User Experience

How will Google's change to mobile SEO affect Sumo?

On August 23, 2016 Google published a blog post announcing that they will be increasing efforts to make mobile web browsing more friendly. As a Sumo user, you may have questions about this particular quote:

"To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly."

We're carefully reviewing their guidelines and monitoring the situation for updates.  Check out this article our content team published on the subject.

Sumo is a whole suite of tools to help your website grow. You have numerous options to determine how aggressive or non-aggressive you want to be with your email capture methods.

We care deeply about end user experience. This has been important to us since day one. It's why, from the beginning, we provided features like Yield Tech which prevents site owners from accidentally overwhelming their visitors with multiple calls to action per page. We're currently testing new mobile friendly email forms and is something we've been working on before Google's announcement. We know how painful it is to enter email addresses into form fields on tiny mobile devices.

We strongly believe in growing your email list. Our goal is to provide you with the best tools available to do so. We know that the market doesn't sit still. It's constantly evolving. This is why we continue to pioneer new formats like we did with Welcome Mats.

Sumo isn't just popups. You get a whole suite of tools: Email Collection, Share/Social Growth, User Consumption Analytics, Ecommerce, just to name a few. We give you access to both current and experimental formats. We also give you an incredibly dedicated team focused on even the tiniest of optimizations. We are constantly working to improve conversion rates for your email collect forms.

Email is one of the few and only marketing channels where you OWN your customers. Google is in the business of selling paid ads and wants you to continue to depend on them for customer acquisition. You need to carefully decide what is more important and find the right balance that works for your marketing and SEO strategies.

We will keep you posted with updates but we don't recommend waiting to grow your email list, the sooner you do the more independence and control over your own business you will have.

Using Display Rules to improve mobile user experience

If you haven't seen our article covering Display Rules we highly recommend checking that out first so you're familiar with the feature.

There are several Display Rules which you can use to target your mobile users in different ways.

1. Control what your mobile users see.
   • If you simply don't want to show your Sumo email apps to mobile traffic at all, you can use a "Dont Show to mobile users" rule.
2. Control how many pages a user see's before seeing Sumo.
   • Using our Pageviews rule will allow you to define how many pages your visitors must see before your Sumo email apps will trigger. You can ensure their first page view doesnt trigger Sumo but subsequent page views will.
3. Control who you show Sumo to with our "Show" and "Don't Show" rules by targeting your traffic sources (e.g. social platforms or paid ads).

Improving mobile user experience with Welcome Mat

We have a great new feature called "Display Mode" found in the "Behavior" tab of all your Mats. Our brand new "Embedded" mode embeds your Mat below the fold. This complies with Google's guidelines.

Improving mobile user experience with List Builder

Sumo offers two great features which both comply with Google's guidelines for mobile user experience: Smart Mode popups and Click Triggers.

Smart Mode (found in the Behavior tab) is the default trigger behavior and only appears when your visitors are attempting to leave the page.

Click Triggers are a feature (also our highest converting email collection method!) which allow you to place a clickable element on your page that visitors can use to opt-in on their own terms.

List Builder also supports autocomplete and spell checking to email fields.

Improving mobile user experience with Scroll Box

Scroll Box allows you to set the exact percentage down the page your visitors must scroll down before it triggers. This allows you to set it to appear below the fold, which is in compliance with Google's guidelines.

Improving mobile user experience with Smart Bar

As a banner that uses a reasonable amount of screen space and is easily dismissible, Smart bar is in full compliance with Google's guidelines.