Mobile Phone SEO

The Mobile Web

Mobile vs Desktop Search

Mobile Search

New Mobile Browsing Habits

Check-in Apps

SEO Mobile Search Strategy

1. The Mobile Web

The mobile space and the development of mobile technology is growing rapidly.For this reason more and more businesses are using the mobile web as an integral part of their internet marketing stretegy.

Search engines are frantically trying to keep up, and they are still doing a lot of testing. Mobile algorithms get updates just like traditional web algorithms, but the way in which Google ranks mobile pages can be much different when compared to traditional indexing methods on Desk top PC's that we are more framiliar with..

Google have revealed that over a third of the mobile Internet searches are of local intent. Suggesting that the mobile search engines are used to find a service, product or address in the proximity of its user.

Some analysts now project that location-based mobile spending will top $4 billion in 2015. That’s a mind-blowing increase from the relatively paltry $34 million spent just last year.

Because mobile SEO can be very focused on location, some of the search engines applications for mobile devices are beginning to include your current GPS location in your mobile web search. (Depending on your handset). This is taking local and real time search to a new level.

Being able to get information in real time for searches based on your location is just one of the many emerging benefits of browing the web on your mobile handset. This location specific real time searching is Something which greatly helps distinguish the difference between mobile & desktop search.

With the increased personalization of search results and the inclusion of this real-time content like tweets and wall-posts, mobile search provides the user with information that they want quickly and easily. In the past, computers were shared, but mobile phones rarely were, so the level of personalization in mobile search should continue to grow due to the new functionalities for browsing the web on your mobile handset.

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 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.

With the increased amount of location based searching, combined with the personalization of search results, mobile search results could get even harder to anticipate and track. This could mean that Mobile SEO will focus heavily on traffic as a measure of success for exactly this reason.

2. Mobile vs. Desktop Search

Mobile search engines have different bots and algorithms than those used for traditional web search. They evaluate your website as if it was being rendered on a mobile phone, and they rank results partially based on how well the page will render on the type of phone that submitted the query. (As well as many other issues)

Users accessing the Internet via desk top PC’S or laptops are in a totally different mindset from their mobile counterparts. Generally, PC users will spend large chunks of time in a fixed location and may spend hours searching and researching.

The PC experience is much more tolerable, searching from the comforts of your home or office is much more enjoyable than trying to navigate a 2-4 inch touch screen while walking down a busy street or riding on a bus.

PC users have more time on their hands. When you are on the go you probably have a task to accomplish and you are usually in transit. Mobile users “snack” on the internet in small browsing sessions, and generally access the web when they need a quick answer. Now you can start to imagine why ads that you have strategically set up with PC users in mind may not be as effective in an AdWords’ mobile campaign.

Google is going mobile in a big way. Following the announcement of the Nexus One, the official Google phone, and the acquisition of “AdMob”, Google is ready to make some serious moves on the small screen.

Soon after the iPhone launch in 2007, Google introduced a new feature in the AdWords “Settings” tab. This feature enabled online advertisers to syndicate AdWords ads to mobile phones. With the flip of a switch, online ads could be displayed on browser-based handsets around the world. This was just the first of many steps that have been taken by Google to facilitate effective adverting on mobile handsets.

3. Mobile Search

As smart phones have proliferated, we’ve seen dramatic increases in mobile search volume. Over the past two years, Google's mobile search volumes have significantly grown.

In the first three months of 2010, smart phone users with “full” WebKit browsers (such as the iPhones, Android devices) searched 62 % more than they did in the previous three months.

Increasingly, people aren’t just typing search queries into their mobile devices. They speak them, they take photos of them and they even translate them from different languages.

In addition to traditional search ads on mobile devices, Google have now introduced: “Click-to-call” search ads.
click to call ads

They enable advertisers to include a local business or national phone number directly in their ad text that you can click to reach the business directly via your smartphone.

This is a really great way for you to easily get information from a relevant business (say, a local restaurant), and a highly effective way for advertisers to connect with interested customers.

This also proves that people who are looking for businesses while on their mobiles will be interested in real time or contact information concerning a particular business.

That same business might be a huge seller of products on their online store, but that could perhaps be more targeted at desktop search users.

This means that a separate sub domain for a mobile version of your website should be implemented to allow for more useful information to be accessible from people “on the go” using their mobile handsets.

Mobile display and text ads make it easy for publishers and developers to make money from their mobile websites and apps, and enable advertisers to extend the reach of their campaigns to relevant mobile content.

In this area, AdMob (recently acquired by Google) has been a real pioneer and has innovated at a tremendous pace, building a successful business and working with thousands of advertisers, publishers and developers. Advertisers are now starting to see mobile as an essential part of their overall campaigns, not just a strategy on the side of their main campaign.

4. New mobile Browsing habits

As the web quickly becomes more mobile and social than ever, we see apps filling voids that were mostly left empty throughout the history of search and social media.

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

If I go to "Trip Advisor" on my iPhone, and search for nearby restaurants. it will do a search using my location via GPS and bring back to me any restaurants that are in my locality.

Most popular social media websites or any websites that has a significant flow of traffic have introduced handy Apps that allow 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 mobile users.

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. The way in which we browse the web on our mobiles handstes becomes much easier and straight forward due to the simple interface many of these mobile search applications possess.

Downloadable search applications 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.

However with the simplicity and usability of these apps, there also comes a question. How effective will traditional desktop advertising be on mobile handsets? Especially PPC advertising. Does this pave the way for more methods of “on the go” or location based advertising techniques?

5. Check-in apps

Foursquare and Gowalla are the two most popular “check-in apps” out there at the moment, with Google Buzz attempting 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.

Example of a Bar called "Blue Chalk"using Foursquare for Advertising:

What this means is that Businesses can use this as a local ad network overlaid on top of these check in apps allowing them to advertise to people in their locality via their handsets. They can send people promotional ads if they know that they are just a few doors down from their store. They can reward people for “checking in” on their premises, allowing them more visibility for local search.

This is what’s known as real-time local search marketing, and in fact can be a far more effective strategy of utilizing real-time search than simply getting into Google's ever-moving regular real-time web search results for a brief second.

Now is the time marketers are perking up to opportunities to reach target customers by promoting their phone numbers through mobile, internet and VoIP channels.

Instead of just buying a listing in a phone book, marketers can make a much bigger impact and reach a much bigger audience by leveraging internet search sites, mobile applications and VoIP channels to promote their phone numbers. Effectively capitalizing on all three of these channels is an easy way to open the door to new revenue streams and customers for any marketer.

VoIP users worldwide number in the hundreds of millions. And mobile VoIP users could rise to as many as 100 million by 2011, according to consulting firm ON World. Skype, for example, already has 20 million concurrent users at peak times.

6. SEO Mobile Search Strategy

The Googlebot-Mobile has different user agents that can rank pages differently. In some cases, different handsets will have different search results based on the evaluations that Google makes with those different user agents.

The best thing you can do to improve your mobile SEO is to ensure that the mobile crawlers and user agents determine that your content will render well and load quickly on any mobile phone.

Since the mobile search engines are not as finely tuned as the traditional engines, they are still placing a heavy weight on a website’s mobile bounce rate, using the mobile visitors as barometers for how the website renders on their phone. This, again should reinforce the need for good mobile rendering.

To read more about how to construct a Mobile SEO stratey just visit our Mobile SEO strategy page Share

For more information on how to implement an effective SEO Strategy for your business:

6 months subscribtion to the SEO Workbench (value €90) - each month your website and your competitors will be benchmarked giving you a fresh SEO site review.