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Halfords and Lakestar Media team up for mobile SEO

Halfords Group plc is the UK’s leading retailer of automotive and leisure products. Its website not only provides a convenient way of shopping for customers, but also includes an in-depth advice centre and informative user generated content that provides information and advice. As its digital e-commerce channel continues to expand it is important that it achieves maximum visibility on all platforms and devices.
Part of the SEO strategy and implementation included creating a technical brief for the mobile website in line with search engine optimisation best practices.

Brief
The key elements of the brief were to;

• Analyse and recommend fixes for historical SEO issues that were affecting the mobile website
• Ensure that the mobile site works on as many handsets and devices as possible
• Prevent mobile webpages from outranking desktop content in the main results pages for searches conducted on desktop PC’s or laptops by making sure that search engines can easily distinguish between mobile and desktop content
• Increase the number of handset and tablet users hitting the Halfords mobile website via the search engines

Strategy
Having identified all existing issues Lakestar Media recommended redeveloping the mobile website adhering to development best practices to ensure that search engines can clearly distinguish between mobile and desktop content. This was achieved by using mobile-specific coding and creating a mobile XML sitemap to ensure full separation of mobile and desktop content.

Halfords mobile campaign results

• 400% increase in natural search engine traffic and sales via the Halfords.com mobile website
• 15% of the total traffic to the Halfords.com website is now from mobile devices