What is Mobile SEO?
What is Mobile SEO? - Render Your Site Correctly for All Devices
Mobile SEO should be a matter of increasing visibility of your website, not only in mobile search engines but on the actual mobile and often touch-enabled devices themselves. There are different mobile search engine results depending on the type of smartphone or tablet you use. Google confirmed that mobile-specific page types do get tracked separately and are included within the results if searched on a non smartphone device versus what you see on for example an iPhone or an Android phone. These are the pages you need to set up correctly for Google-bot to both find and include in these feature phone search results.
Smartphone Search Results mirror those from a Desktop Search
Smartphone search results themselves are pulled from the main index directly, which mirror what you would get from a desktop search but with implied location intent, as an emphasis is placed on local results. This is where local SEO becomes important.
Render Site correctly for Mobile Devices
It's also a matter of rendering correctly for all devices, which Google has affirmed is a factor for being included or dismissed from the mobile index used for feature phones. A real responsive website should be simple, to the point and touch-friendly. We recommend you add SEO to each page of your mobile site.
Adding Specific Keywords to each Active Feature
Improve the ranking of your mobile site in search engines by adding specific keywords to each active feature. You can add up to 6 keywords via the Advanced Options area of each features. There is little doubt that mobile search is the hot topic in the SEO world at the moment. Some brands are now finding that more than 30 percent of all searches come from devices such as smartphones and tablets, according to Captain Marketer. It's fair to say that mobile search is quickly moving out of the Stone Age and into the Digital Age. That's the premise of a new insight article, SEO Best Practices, published recently by lesser known company, WhizBiz. In addition to a list of our tips for effective responsive SEO, the paper offers marketers a step-by-step guide to delivering effective mobile search campaigns. The tips range from the simple (i.e., understanding the differences in how people search on mobile devices compared to their searches on desktops) to the complex, such as best practices to ensure a site's mobile content can be correctly viewed and crawled by the most common search engines.
A mobile site gets you ahead of the game
It's no secret: brands and businesses that have mobile websites and apps are a step or two (or more) ahead of the game. Why? Because 31 percent of Americans own a smartphone and one in three would rather give up TV than be deprived of their smartphones. But it goes beyond just having a responsive site. Your website need to be optimized properly to perform to their full potential. The concept is simple: offer a mobile site that has the same or similar content as the desktop site to satisfy those who use these devices for some, most, or all of their web searches. Sure, there are a lot of overlapping aspects with traditional SEO, but the idea and practice go far beyond that, focusing on true mobile SEO.
Important Aspects to Mobile Web Presence
There are some very important aspects that will help you take charge of your brand's mobile web presence:
- Know your brand's audience: Start with your analytics package. Create a custom dashboard for organic mobile traffic to easily identify volume, trends, the devices being used, and, obviously, keywords being searched. This will tell you how many visitors are coming to you from all kinds of different devices. Also, what kind of content are they looking for on mobile devices? Should the content be the same? Slightly different? Find out and prioritize accordingly.
- Know your site's behavior in mobile search results: Use Google Webmaster Tools to figure out if your site is showing up in the search results and what it looks like when it does. Know what the top search queries are and which pages (if any) are returning in Google's mobile search results and prioritize accordingly.
- Know your audience's mobile behavior: Google's Keyword Tool offers a special mobile-only filter to identify your audience's keyword choices and frequency. Use it to build a model for your audience's behavior when they are on a mobile device – it will likely differ in many ways from desktop.
- Know your site's mobile behavior: Try searching for your site on different devices and see how it shows up and performs. Then, use Google Webmaster Tools, GetMoMeter, and PageSpeed Insights to test how visitors (and bots) find and view your site.
- Know your content and product offering for all users: Figure out if your product offering should be the same for the mobile site as it is for the desktop site, and take into consideration that devices such as tablets and smartphones offer a user's location information more easily than that of a desktop site, and those mobile users are often looking for something close to their location.
- Know your technical capacity to develop a responsive site: Your site isn't working correctly on cell phone and tablet devices? You'll need to fix that. Can you build a mobile friendly site correctly? Can you reformat the desktop version to work on all devices? Can you use a rendering engine? There are pros and cons to the different courses of action that can be taken. Choose what works best for your brand. Google offers some solid recommendations for mobile-optimized sites, too. The advantage of properly implementing and aiming your brand's mobile site will certainly become evident when reporting on traffic and conversions after the fact. The statistics speak for themselves: mobile search directly drove 25 percent of all online U.S. device purchases, according to a study by Google published in March 2010. The numbers have only increased since.