Friday, June 03, 2011

The Rise of Mobile SEO


As the dichotomy of mobile and desktop search becomes increasingly apparent, so has the crucial need to use distinct SEO strategies for each search type. Mobile is increasingly viewed as a key driver of revenue and traffic to businesses, and Google’s Eric Schmidt has noted that mobile search has been growing much faster than industry predictions, at a rate significantly higher than desktop search.
[Credit: Image on Left, Mashable.com]

Schmidt noted that “more than 60% of consumers search for brands from mobile devices before purchasing, and another 49% of mobile searchers made a mobile purchase in the past six months.” SEO strategies niche to the mobile world range from ‘device agnostic approaches’ to simply applying traditional SEO practices on mobile platforms. The former approach advocates for full content transfer or transcoding from traditional to mobile sites. The idea here is that ‘more is more,’ where stripping key content from a website to achieve an ‘optimized’ site would result in lower page rankings and user browsing experiences.

Customizing status quo SEO practices on a new platform is also important. Mobile, as a whole, is used by consumers for more narrow and focused “task-oriented” searches. Understanding consumer behavior remains an important endeavor for businesses that seek to anticipate search keywords, queries and optimize visibility and detection from search engines.

Ultimately, the linked economy gets assigned even more weight in a mobile world. Integrated content and tight-knit information networks are even more relevant in a world where 20% of email marketing is read from mobile phones. With the advent of HTML 5 and other next-generation technologies, companies that wish to effectively employ the mobile space for their digital marketing needs need to become highly proficient in the world of mobile SEO.

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