Mobile Phone SEO-How is it Evolving?

• What is the future of the Mobile Web
  
• New browsing habits & Information Sources
• Your Mobile SEO Strategy

Mobile Web Evolution

The mobile web is growing at a rapid pace, and the way in which people browse it is becoming very different from traditional desktop browsing.

People trying to build up a web presence on the mobile web must realize that the majority of your mobile audience are usually not looking for the same information that your desktop audience is looking for.For this reason it is becoming increasingly hard to create a mobile SEO strategy for your business.

Before the introduction of Smartphones, mobile advertisers were confined to the small screens of traditional mobile units. Web access was unappealing and expensive/ slow web pages on those phones often consisted of nothing more than a few hyperlinks and some text.

The introduction of the iPhone has changed the way we surf the web on our mobile handsets. Mobile web browsing has been brought to a new level of functionality thanks to the introduction of a full touch screen HTML browser. Now, the use of the web on mobile handsets devices has started to make more sense for both smart phone users and advertisers.

Click here for a broader explanation of the Mobile web

The Future of the Mobile Web:

Lately we have seen a huge increase in Location based and real time searching on mobile handsets. More and more applications are being used to browse the web in different ways as opposed to just using Google as the only means of search.

How/Where does this leave advertisers to access their web audience? Do they stick with Adwords and organic search techniques or do they find new & different ways to boost traffic to their websites via mobile handsets.

Following Google’s recent acquisition of AdMob, they have introduced “Click to Call” ads. Your business ad now shows up in the SEPRS on the mobile web but there is a clickable telephone number link that connects directly to the business via your Smartphone.

This proves that a lot of people who browse the web are looking for instant information or “on the go” information and may not even want to enter a website.

Most search applications on smartphones are now using your GPS location to give you more personalized and real time search results. Also, with new “check-in Apps” like Foursquare and Gowalla you can now advertise directly to an individual’s mobile when you know they are in a nearby location of your business. This is making Mobile SEO increasingly hard to track and analyze.

These applications are bringing mobile SEO to a new level, where businesses can track down potential customers based on location, instead of having to wait to be indexed in Google’s SERPS (search engine results pages), where they might not ever be found. These “check in” Apps, could be the way of the future for many advertisers. It brings about a whole new meaning to localized searching.

Foursquare and Gowalla are the two most popular “check-in apps” out there at the moment, with Google Buzz attempting (but failing) to capture some of this market too.

The thing about Foursquare and Gowalla, and these check-in apps, is that they create a connection between yourself and the merchant (business owner). It tells your friends where you are, and then in the aggregate, it tells the services like Foursquare and Gowalla what places have the most activity about them at any given time.

With potential customers sharing their locations means businesses can provide a real-time call-to-action to get them inside their establishment while they’re nearby. Search marketers can utilize location with APIs.

Foursquare is beginning to take off in some major cities and has over 1million users worldwide with ten “check- in’s” per second. Business owners are getting great visibility by interacting with potential customers who are in their locality and reeling them in by offering them discounts on certain products.

For more information and examples of these “check-in” apps click here

Does this pave the way for more methods of “on the go” or location based advertising techniques? Do people have similar browsing habits while on mobile phones when compared to desktop searching?

New Browsing Habits & Information Sources

Downloadable search applications for Smartphones have different input mechanisms that can make them more fun, more interactive or more useful, and in many cases, the results tend to be more specialized and provide more information than a regular mobile web search.

Mobile Search Applications are altering mobile SEO. Mobile searchers are actually turning to mobile search applications instead of web search. These include search applications like WikiTude,UrbanSpoon,RedLaser,Trip Advisor,Yelp and Shazam and many more.

For more info on these search apps click here

As the web quickly becomes more mobile and social than ever, we see these kind of Apps filling voids that were mostly left empty throughout the history of search and social media. We see more and more people not using web browsers on mobile phones, they just use different Apps associated with different websites due to their ease of use and quicker download time.

With Apple dominating the Smartphone market, other well known mobile phone brands are constantly playing catch-up. This is due to the popularity and functionality associated with the Apple brand and its hugely popular iPhone. The new 4G iPhone is due to be release next month, with Mashable announcing yesterday that the first batch of devices available for pre-order were already sold out.

Your Mobile SEO Strategy:

Mobile SEO greatly differs to traditional desktop SEO methods. A lot of questions are still being raised about how mobile sites are indexed. Mobile search engines do not index your website for search in the same way as your traditional desktop search engines would.

Whether you create a separate mobile site on a sub domain of your existing domain or you create different css style sheets for different mobile devices, it’s important that website owners understand that your mobile audience usually wants to see very different information than you desktop audience.

Most popular social media websites or any websites that have a significant user interaction on desktop devices still saw it fit to “trim” down their existing sites and introduce handy Apps. This allows mobile users to use the main functionalities of these sites while chopping out all the extra information that is not seen as hugely relevant to the mobile market or that could contribute to slower downloading time or rendering issues.
By making your website more appealing to mobile search and attacking rendering issues on different mobile devices you can greatly increase your chances of being found for different key word searches.

For more detailed information on how to tackle Mobile SEO you can check out our webpage devoted to exploring how to create a mobile SEO strategy for your business.

This webpage goes into more detail about rendering issues across multiple handsets, best practices for mobile SEO, as well as all the risks involved with mobile SEO including content duplication and different ways of getting around it.

Read more about your mobile SEO strategy here

Like what you read?

Get more tips by RSS

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.