A few of today’s talks at SES London focused on mobile and local search, so I thought I would send another post from the conference for businesses and SEOs who couldn’t make it themselves but want the exclusive tips and insights from the industry to stay ahead of the curve.
Angie Schottmuller began the whole mobile discussion with a talk on mobile marketing strategy. In light of the facts she gave it’s hard to believe some businesses are unaware or suspicious of the potential of mobile when it is predicted to overtake desktop search within the next couple of years, at least in terms of volume. Angie also noted that less than 1% of businesses have a mobile-optimised site. This seems crazy, when so many conversions (or transactions) are happening online and on mobile how is this number so low?
At the moment I think users kind of expect mobile sites to look like normal sites, because they rarely experience the 1% which actually consider mobile usability. Many users silently suffer the hassle of pinching the screen to zoom in by several hundred percent while trying to tap a link which is the size of an pinhead. But as businesses begin to optimise for mobile devices, late adopters will surely fall behind.
Creating a Mobile-Friendly Experience
In one of the afternoon sessions Sri Sharma suggested the first step to improving and profiting from mobile search is understanding. That is, understanding your users, their search location and their intent.
A search on a mobile device could be made on the high street, at home or on the move. If you can understand why people are accessing your site from a certain location or at a certain time, you can change the site’s appearance to improve the accessibility.
To expand on one of Sri’s examples, if your mobile users are pub-crawlers who order pizza via their phones at 11pm, why not create mobile-specific content and offers and change the site appearance to ensure these customers can order at that time?
But once you understand your users, you still need to understand how to optimise mobile usability. Should you create a mobile specific site? What about an app? Whilst some mobile SEO is easy, any site creation or customisation is more technical and would require business collaboration between web designers and SEOs.
However, Angie noted that creating a mobile-specific site costs additional time and money beyond your original website and can split your authority and inbound links between both your sites – desktop and mobile. Instead of creating a mobile-specific site, she suggested hiding or reformatting certain content on your main website for mobile devices, either with CSS or with instructions to mobile user agents.
But ideally brands should create their sites with mobile in mind. This way you can change the style for each device and ensure your site isn’t difficult to navigate via small links or vast horizontal pages. This also reduces the need and cost to keep redesigning for different devices.
And as far as apps go, the expert advice – enthusiastically agreed with on Twitter – was to only invest in apps if they use the features of the mobile device. If you can’t make a creative web app which utilises the camera, geo-tagging or touchscreen then just use a mobile website or play around with the CSS of your normal site.
Last Notes from SES…
So for businesses considering their mobile strategy, it seems the industry advice is to look at the usability for each device, think about where your users are searching from and creatively utilise the features of these devices to connect with them in new and better ways.
SES London has been a great conference with a host of insightful information from some of the best in the industry. Linkdex met new people at the networking party last night and, personally, I have learned a great deal from the talks over the last three days. I hope to give you some of these tips in future blog posts, including more on the topic of mobile and local search.
Featured Image Source: laihiu – Flickr
