5 reasons to keep doing mobile SEO even though ads are everywhere

Sure, paid search on mobile has grown. But if you're thinking of cutting your organic search budget for mobile, columnist Bryson Meunier urges you to reconsider and focus on increasing your overall traffic.

Chat with SearchBot

ss-mobile-seo“Look,” says your boss, directing your attention to the Google search results on her iPhone. She just searched on “life insurance quotes,” and the organic listings are nowhere to be seen. She actually has to scroll down past the third ad before she gets to the first organic listing.

Screenshot_20160428-145815

“Why would we continue to pay any attention to organic search on mobile when Google is only showing ads?” she says. “I just read a report from a prominent agency that said organic search visits were down seven percent year over year in Q1, as increased monetization of mobile results is pushing more traffic to paid listings, and that mobile traffic share has been flat for organic search in the past year, but it is up 10 points for paid search. Let’s just shift the budget into paid and be done with it.”

If you’re interested in growing your traffic overall, you should resist that suggestion.

While it’s true that organic search visits are down overall, according to recent reports, there are many reasons you should continue doing mobile SEO in 2016. Here are five of them.

1. The first organic listing in mobile still gets 73% more clicks than the first and second sponsored listings combined.

The first three points I’m going to mention come from research done last month by Mediative, a Montreal-based digital marketing agency and originator of the Golden Triangle study. Their white paper called “How do consumers conduct searches on Google using a mobile device?” is definitely worth downloading (registration required) if you’re interested in solid research on mobile search behavior.

[See the full story on Marketing Land]


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Bryson Meunier
Contributor
Bryson Meunier is the SEO Director at Vivid Seats, is an SEO veteran with more than 14 years experience both agency and in-house, and is a thought leader in permission marketing as a columnist and a frequent speaker on SEO and mobile marketing.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.