What You Need to Know About Micro-Moments (And How Your Site Can Take Advantage of Them!)

Have you wandered around a new neighborhood and used your phone to find a nearby coffee shop? That’s a micro-moment. Ever lost your umbrella and searched for a new one via smartphone? Again, micro-moment. What about when you just can’t think of the name of American Idol’s first season runner-up, so you surrender to Google and search for the answer? (It’s Justin Guarini—how dare you forget the costar of the 2003 cinematic masterpiece From Justin to Kelly.) All together, now: micro-moment.

 Even if you haven’t heard of the term “micro-moment” before, we’ve all had these experiences. According to Google, they “occur when people reflexively turn to a device—increasingly a smartphone—to act on a need to learn something, do something, watch something, or buy something.”

Check out this awesome Think With Google video that summarizes micro-moments perfectly.

The video ends with the vital question: “Are you there?” These micro-moments are happening constantly. You want your website to rank highly and have everything a person needs to make a decision while experiencing a micro-moment. Otherwise, you’ve missed a potential conversion and lost a new customer or client to a competitor whose site showed up on the first page of results and provided helpful information.

HOW SMARTPHONES HELPED CREATE MICRO-MOMENTS 

 The omnipresence of smartphones is central to the micro-moment experience. No longer do you have to wait until you get home and turn on a hulking desktop computer to find a reliable plumber in the area. Instead, phones have “fractured the consumer journey into hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro-moments.”

 Now you can peruse different plumbing companies while riding the train to work. Mobile phones are always in our pockets, ready to deliver a quick answer to whatever query crosses our mind that second. As a result, websites need to be just as prepared to supply fast, user-friendly information that helps the user make a purchasing choice.

 Need more convincing as to how important mobile phones are for consumer decisions? A Think With Google infographic provides statistics for you numbers-minded people. There’s been a two-fold increase in “near me” searches between March 2014 and March 2015. 82% of smartphone users use search engines when looking for a local business. Mobile conversion rates have increased 29% between April 2014 and April 2015.

HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY LEVERAGE MICRO-MOMENTS

 Now you know what micro-moments are and how important it is to take advantage of them. But how exactly should you make your site micro-moment compatible? Check out these tips:

 USE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

 To successfully gain a conversion as a result of a micro-moment, your site has to be on the first page of results. And to achieve this, you need to know search engine optimization. However, I won’t be able to do justice to SEO in this post. Check out Search Engine Land’s comprehensive guide to SEO to learn more about how to find out what keywords your site should be using, how to optimize title tags, and more.

 MAKE YOUR SITE MOBILE-FRIENDLY

 Remember how important mobile is to micro-moments? Obviously, having a mobile-friendly site should be one of your first orders of business. Check out our post on strategies for optimizing your site for mobile. Other general things to keep in mind:

• Use large, easy to read text and include large, clear images
• Have a simple layout
• Include large, mobile-friendly calls to action

THINK ABOUT WHAT “MOMENTS” YOU WANT TO BE THERE FOR

 It’s vital to think about what kind of micro-moments you want your business to win.

• For example, if you own a towing company, you want to win the “drat-my-car-broke-down-and-I-don’t-want-to-call-my-Mom-I-need-help-ASAP” moment. (Google might have a shorter name for this micro-moment, but whatever.)

Once you know what kind of micro-moments your business can provide solutions to, think about what a person would need to know after searching for something like “towing company near me.”

 UNDERSTAND WHAT YOUR CUSTOMER WOULD NEED FROM A WEBSITE WHEN THEY’RE IN A MICRO-MOMENT

• Display your company’s name, information, address, and phone number clearly
• Make call-to-actions clickable; having things like “Call now!” or “Order today!” large links makes it so much easier for a user to actually act in the way you want them to
• Include important details users need to know in order to make a purchase decision, like stock availability, store distance and directions, inventory, and pricing
• Make sure your site design makes this information easy to find! Check out this Think With Google article for more tips

Let’s go back to the towing company example. If someone’s car broke down and they search for a towing company, they want to know how to contact the company, how quickly they could get help, and how much it would cost. It only makes sense to include these details on your website so that people in this specific micro-moment will choose your company (and they won’t even have to call their mom)!

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 Do you have other tips for making sure your site takes advantage of micro-moments? What's the most recent micro-moment you've experienced? Comment in the section below, email us at [email protected], or tweet at us @perfect_search!