It’s long passed the time we discuss whether to optimize for mobile search or not. It’s about how much time and effort to invest in mobile SEO, also how to do it right. Our mobile planet reported that the percentage of mobile penetration in Australia has doubled from 2011 to 2013. We saw percentage of mobile visits to our clients’ websites has been doubling each year since 2010, roughly.
We all know consumers are spending more time on smartphones and tablets. Brands want to communicate with audience through mobile. The fact is mobile search results varied significantly across different devices and location. Personal data contribute a lot more in mobile search results than on desktops. No wonder marketers get lost in what to optimize for mobile search.
Many clients ask the same question: so how to optimize for mobile search?
From the work we’ve done for our clients, I find the following tips and tricks are quite relevant.
Getting the basics right
Keyword research for mobile
No matter you have a mobile site or responsive site, keywords and content still contribute to your search engine ranking, to a large degree. So understanding how your target audiences are searching with their mobile devices. Google keyword tool can still provide some insights, even though it’s strongly skewed towards paid search. Your website analytics data could give you a very good indication on what keywords did your mobile visitors come through. To avoid the “not provided” secured search data, try going to Google Webmaster Tool. It starts to provide detailed search keyword data this month, which include mobile search segment.
Responsive
For responsive websites, using different keywords for mobile search is not an option. This means we need to consider both desktop and mobile/tablet user when doing keyword research. Working with UX designers on what pages or functionalities should be on the mobile view, making sure the keywords which represent the priority of clients’ business objectives are on the minimized version of the site.
A few things to be mindful of
Local search
24% of Australian does a local search daily with their smartphones in 2013 (data source: our mobile planet). Search engines heavily personalized search results with local information. Optimising towards local results is almost a must. Location based keywords are a good start, time-based content update and structure data markup can do wonders to your local search ranking.
Android users are logged in
It is important to remember that almost all Android users are logged-in to Google accounts. This means their organic search keywords data is “not provided”. This also means advertisers can target a huge amount of Android users by their location, local weather and events, precisely. For example, pulling down AdWords spend for car wash client on a rainy day; or dedicated mobile campaign for real estate sales targeting local buyers.
In app content is being indexed
If you manage an app, you might already know that Google started indexing in-app content last October. We saw some mobile search results in US with based on in-app content. It won’t be long until we see them in Australia. This means marketers need to optimise in-app content, not only the titles anymore. Please refer to my presentation for App store SEO if you are interested to know more.
As you know, the world of search changes every day. The world of smartphones and tablets is also evolving. Where these two worlds combine, we might need to look at a different set of technics and tools in a few months’ time.