Introduction to Mobile SEO
Mobile SEO is quite a confusing term. I’ve been around the SEO industry for years and am involved in mobile application development but still the term is confusing.
The reason it’s confusing it because nobody quite knows what mobile SEO actually involves. In a new series on Blogstorm I will take a look at what mobile SEO actually means.
The definition of SEO to me is helping a website to get as much traffic as possible from search engines so it makes sense to apply this to the mobile arena as well. On this basis the goal of mobile SEO should be to make sure websites get as much traffic from people searching on mobile phones as possible.
However this is where the issue gets complicated because not every mobile web user actually wants to visit a website – some of them just want a phone number. If you can optimise a listing on a directory such as Google Local so that a client receives more phone calls then this is probably going to give a much greater ROI than sending traffic to the website.
So really we can revise the definition to say that mobile SEO is about making sure that a business is as visible as possible on the mobile web. Whether that involves people seeing your phone number, finding your shop on a map or actually visiting the website is irrelevant.
There are of course a number of steps involved in promoting your business to mobile phone users so in a series of posts I will look at the options available and the best practice solutions.
If anybody has experience in this area then guest posts are welcome.
Post category: Mobile SEO Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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Hi Patrick,
Interesting post hear and look forward to the development in this series of posts.
In my opinion – this type of SEO won’t last long. My reasons;
3G availability covers something like 98% of the UK population with HSDPA rapidly catching up.
WiMAX is a maybe in the near future (but that may just be wishful thinking like 4G).
So with these in mind, mobile internet is improving at a very fast rate, most notable form will be through the 3G iPhone. Where as we all know is the actual internet, not this make shift mobile internet that we are used to.
It won’t be long before more mobile phone platforms will offer this “full” internet and browsing will imitate the same concept of searching on your home pc (or mac).
Take Android into account – there may be delays in launch but it’s more than likely to be by the end of 2008. Will android be the cause of an even newer type of mobile SEO? Sounds good – android SEO!
I think the key is that mobile users are looking for services and businesses – not websites. If we can help drive walk in traffic or phone calls then that is better than web traffic.
i realy need this type of information….
thanx for shareing with us…this time is good to focus on wireless device…which can connect with internet….through browser…
Regardless of the speed of download, the lack of viewing pleasure is the most important mobile web factor. Small viewing stages incur a situation where mobile web browsing will never be regarded in the same way as desktop browsing. I agree that immediate info, even if only from the search results is the moct important factor.
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December 7, 2008 at 12:23pm