You’re knee deep in the trenches of search engine optimization, figuring your way through Google’s algorithm changes for the 10th time. You get yourself to a great search engine ranking when you hire copywriters to help with your content and positioning. Then your marketing department comes around the corner, waving their tablets, asking “What about mobile?” It’s a valid question: as CNN reports, 55 percent of Internet usage came from mobile devices. With a market share like that, it’s time to start looking at the SEO needs of the mobile world.
Is Your Website Ready for Mobile?
Smartphones are in everyone’s pockets and tablets are aggressively taking away market share from laptops. Mobile Internet usage is commonplace and only going to get more prevelant, so your website has to be ready for mobile. Usability and speed are the most important factors to consider for your mobile optimized site. You don’t want users getting frustrated because it’s impossible to navigate around your site due to poor coding, broken elements, and other issues.
Your users also don’t want to wait more than a few seconds for the site to load on their 3G or 4G data connection. Don’t load your mobile site down with unnecessary and unoptimized graphical content. You might think your flash navigation bar is the bee’s knees, but it doesn’t even work on most mobile devices. Keep it simple so you provide a quality user experience for your customers. If you don’t want to create two separate versions of your website, consider responsive design.
Responsive design is a web design technique that adapts one design to the platform viewing it. For example, a responsive site displays videos, images, and multiple content categories on your main page on the desktop site. When you switch to a mobile device, the responsive design determines the resolution of the display and the type of device and makes adjustments. Commonly, this involves dropping incompatible elements, such as Flash-based videos from the page and pushing a more text-based experience.
Do You Know What Mobile Users are Looking For?
Once the on-site technical elements of mobile SEO are handled, it’s time to look at how mobile users search on their mobile devices. You aren’t competing with the entire world wide web with mobile SEO. Users are looking for hyperlocal searches relevant to what they’re doing at the time. They want to know the closest restaurants, professional services, stores, and other companies when they’re out and about. Optimize your mobile content with hyperlocal references. Focus on your region, town, and especially street and neighborhood. Mobile search queries are also generally shorter, so you want to focus on short-tail keywords associated with your general location.
Tiffany G has geared up as a wordsmith for the past 12 years, frequenting the technical and business copywriting battleground for most of it. When she’s not slaying the beasts of boring content and replacing them with thought-provoking pieces, she can be found tinkering with computer builds and creating jewelry.
