It's a Mobile World: How Does Search Adapt?

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Mobile SEO, still a nascent industry as it is, is getting even trickier. New developments in the mobile industry - such as growing mobile advertising opportunities and technologies, new location-based technologies and mobile social networking - are already rewriting business rules only established a short while ago.
To help navigate the changing environment, SEO experts advise the following:

1. Remember that search engines don't have a lot to work with, says dotMobi, the company behind the .mobi domain, which maintains a collection of Mobile SEO Best Practices on mobiThinking.

"According to Google's research, the average query on Mobile Search is 15 characters long, but takes roughly 30 key presses and approximately 40 seconds to enter. One way in which Google and others are compensating for this lack of keyword action is by providing what's known as predictive search - or predictive phrase/query suggestions - in order to help users complete their queries more easily and to help them deliver more relevant search results."

From a technical point of view, this new functionality presents a new SEO opportunity, dotMobi says. "Just as you might try to identify a set of keyword categories to align yourself with in the desktop web, it's now extremely important to place yourself in the most common 'predictive search phrases' that are related to your business and location."

2. Take apps into account as well. "If you are moving forward with a mobile marketing strategy, you need to think of what people will search for when looking for an app," according to Patricia Brusha, co-founder of A Couple of Chicks  - an internet marketing company focused on travel and tourism.

"There is a limit by Apple of only 7-8 keywords that you can use to tag your app. However, besides finding it through the app store, you can promote and highlight your app the same way you did your website, social media sites, on your cards, email signature and print collateral."

3. Build a mobile optimized site. At one time mobile-optimized sites had a small advantage in Google mobile search rankings, according to Practical E-Commerce. "However, as devices have improved in displaying regular, non-optimized pages on mobile interfaces, perhaps Google sees less reason to give any rank priority due to that factor."

Still, though, it is difficult to say with any certainty that mobile optimized sites are or are not favored in search rankings, according Stephan Spencer, vice president of SEO strategies for Covario."It's not likely that the existence of a mobile-optimized site affects the rankings on Google's main web search," he tells Practical E-Commerce. "But the signals that Google's web search utilizes are ever expanding. Perhaps Google engineers will find that site owners who make the effort to create a mobile site for their visitors are more trustworthy and important, and thus more relevant."