Hi,
Here we are almost six years later, and while mobile search is still growing at a rate faster than PC search (four times last year’s figure in 2010 according to Google, and 5x in the past two years), accounting for 10% of Google search volume or more, it seems no one really knows what to do differently to take advantage of the growth.
Nonetheless, bearish or bullish about the prospects of mobile search and SEO in the near or distant future, here are two tips that can help you get more qualified mobile traffic to your digital content today.
Seo With Mobile Keywords
If you’re not yet using the Google Mobile Keyword tool to incorporate mobile search volume into the keyword research for your digital content, be it your desktop site or mobile site, you are ignoring 10% of Google’s total query volume.
Present Mobile Users With Mobile Formatted Content
Perhaps he was just making a bold prediction for the sake of generating controversy and links, but I for one found Rand Fishkin’s recent prediction that “the mobile and normal web browsing experiences will continue to merge toward a single experience, thus negating much of the need for mobile-specific sites and SEO” to be sort of baffling, especially when he says in the same article that he believes clickthrough data in search results is used by the engines, and said a week before that mobile visits could be an indication of quality content that could be used to filter spam from the results.
Whether you believe mobile SEO is the second coming or the never came, you can reduce bounce rate now by providing mobile formatted content to mobile users, and ensure relevance of your content to mobile users by incorporating mobile queries and opportunity into your current keyword research routine.
Finally, this isn’t a mobile-specific rule, but if you’ve been doing this long enough to remember when SEO was new, you should know by now to test everything. Best practices are fine, and certain experts are fairly reliable, but when you remember that many mobile SEO best practices are based on a pre-iPhone mobile search world, you find that some of them are not currently relevant.
Case in point, it seems every mobile SEO expert out there talks about validation as being more important in mobile search, but all of the 55 listings for the top mobile search queries failed validation. If you do nothing else for mobile in 2011, incorporate mobile queries and provide a mobile site, and you’ll be more competitive for mobile searchers than those who choose to hope they go away.
How To Get Started With Mobile Marketing
Marketing to mobile devices is widely believed to have started in the year 2000 with text message/SMS news services that were free but sponsored by advertising. This evolved into mass promotion of events and alerts with even recent claims of “more than 100% response rate” by Marc Hyatt of Txtlocal, thanks to the viral effects of users forwarding messages to others.
