The power of the smartphone is much greater this year than it has been in years past, with over 70% of mobile devices in the market that are capable of accessing the web. With this, there’s a massive possible audience out there that you could be missing out on. It’s important to have a handle on the mobile market as well as your normal SEO services strategies. Here are a few mobile trends to stay ahead of when creating your mobile SEO services.
1. The Importance of Local Organic Search
When Google massively redesigned their AdWords earlier this year, there was a method to their madness. One of the main reasons was because measuring the return of investment (ROI) for mobile search was tough. A mobile user could view an ad on their smartphone or tablet and then walk into a store and make a purchase. There’s also the possibility of users calling businesses straight from the search results page (SERP) without getting a convert to a website.
This is the problem with mobile SEO services; you can’t always track every benefit that you get from your mobile SEO campaign. Google addresses some of these problems with new tools in AdWords such as:
- Offer Ad Extensions: Help connect your search marketing efforts with in-store purchases
- Detailed Call Reporting: Allows advertisers to find out who called and from what devices
- Brand new phone call conversion format
You can’t always see what your organic search strategy is contributing to your mobile SEO services campaign, but you can hold on to the fact that the low mobile stats in your Google Analytics account are much lower than they actually are.
2. The Importance of Mobile Search
When it comes to mobile search conversions, it’s important to realize that the time between someone searching for something and then taking an action is much smaller on a mobile device vs. a desktop. This creates a new kind of metric to keep track of for your SEO services team: monthly mobile search volume, which is accessible via Google’s Keyword Tool. This is because mobile searches might end up being more valuable to you than desktop searches.
Another thing to watch out for is that mobile-optimized ads do much better than normal ads. Mobile ads employ a click-to-call extension or a location extension has seen a boost of 6-8% click through rate in the past year. This emphasizes how important it is that your website shows up in organic search listings with one-click call and location links.
3. Mobile Sites Aren’t the Answer
The answer to the mobile area for years has been to build a separate site optimized for mobile devices. You can tell these sites by the m. that shows up before the rest of the URL.
This has all changed though in the realm of SEO due to the fact that Google now prefers sites that are built with a responsive design than those sites that separate the desktop version from the mobile version. Mobile devices are getting better on a weekly basis, so webmasters need to create a single website that works on all devices using CSS that can read what kind of device that is calling up the site. With the use of one site, your SEO services team will be thankful that they only have to maintain content for a single site over multiple sites.
4. Keep your Mobile Site Simple, Not Dumb
The problem with some company’s mobile sites is that they oversimplify their mobile websites in an attempt to make it more mobile friendly. When creating a mobile website, you have to keep in mind that just because it’s being used on a mobile device, that doesn’t mean you need to strip it to make it work. It’s important that the website becomes touch-friendly and that it focuses more on the layout of the important information. Figure out what information is more prevalent to a mobile user and present that first, but make it easy to reach other information as well.
It’s all about positioning your content differently to present a more organized mobile interface.
With these mobile SEO tips in mind, you can improve your SEO services to stay ahead of current mobile trends and get a handle of that ever growing mobile market.
SearchPro Systems
2023