What's the Future of Mobile Search and SEO?
Technology gurus’ have been declaring every year since 2005 that it is “The Year of Mobile.” Mobile phones have become a device for more than just calling people, checking email, texting and playing games, using and downloading apps and browsing the web. They have powerfully accelerated their influence on our technological connectedness. The Smartphone has become immensely popular, even more so than the feature phone and people are relying on this technology more than ever before.
The searching process, the intent and the results attained from Mobile devices is practically equivalent to what can be accomplished via desktop computers and laptops. Many people currently use Blackberries, Androids or iPhones on a daily basis and especially when away from home and office settings.
Mobile searches as well as a substantial laptop/desktop searches often use local intent, and currently, mobile searches are more likely to perform local searches than other varieties. Interestingly though, the top mobile searches of 2010 are similar and surprisingly non-local to the top general searches of the year. The closer the mobile usage mimics that of the laptop/desktop, the probability of how we will be searching on our mobiles may be in a similar style to how we search elsewhere. The newest mobile devices are competing with increases in speed, resolution, battery life, screen size, multimedia capacity and overall functionality in order to make the mobile experience as effective as possible.
There has been much data collected and research done by Doubleclick in order to compare search done on computers vs. on mobile devices with full browsers. It shows that we are moving toward search parity, with similar clicks, similar queries, a similar click-through rate and even the conversation rate is getting close. Although, mobile is currently a much more research based experience, with a hard to measure influence of offline conversations.
This means you do not need to be building separate mobile experiences or separate mobile sites. It also does not mean you should necessarily ignore local/mobile as a powerful marketing channel either. Unless your site content is challenging for mobile users, including those with fast and impressive devices, there are other marketing avenues to consider.
Mobile search is growing faster than traditional search. There are many more queries and this bodes well for search marketers. Yelp does an impressive job to help make your mobile-focus known by their overlay on mobile devices which encourages searchers to download their app. Some people have complained that it can get annoying to have to deny this option every time you don’t want it.
Mobile copies of websites may be more likely to cause technical challenges duplicate content issues therefore; there is little need for a separate mobile site. Currently, waste engineering resources draw attention away from real mobile opportunities instead of earning higher rankings in mobile searches. Unless your regular site is completely unusable on a mobile device, this practice is not highly recommended until dramatic changes occur.
There is a definite need for a separate mobile ad strategy, since the paid search results differ dramatically on mobile devices, unlike SEO. Generally the conversion rates and CPC is lower at this time, although the conversion rates may be on an upward trend eventually if device convergence occurs.
Currently, apps are being highly utilized. It is a fantastic way to keep users in a brand and ensure a more customized experience for customer. The long term future of apps remains to be seen but it is a huge part of what differentiates the device.
Geography plays a part as both traditional and mobile search are becoming more biased by geography. If you are able to tailor your marketing and your content to effectively be seen as local, and serve locally, you can hugely benefit.
