In reality, with Google’s Old Possum/Skip Redirect update in December, user agent redirection is all that’s necessary for mobile sites to rank ahead of desktop sites in smartphone search, even if it’s the same content formatted differently.

With canonical tags back to the desktop site for duplicate mobile pages, both mobile and desktop pages will be able to rank for competitive terms. As I’ve said often in this column, and as Google has said elsewhere, it’s a different paradigm in mobile search, and mobile sites are not, by definition, duplicate content.

However, there are duplicate content issues in mobile SEO that don’t exist in traditional or desktop SEO. These issues will split link equity within a mobile site.

Though this will likely not be a problem for mobile duplicates that are properly redirected, these issues could make it more difficult for your unique mobile URLs to rank, and could result in less link equity being passed to your desktop pages from your duplicate mobile URLs.

If your mobile site exhibits any of these seven common characteristics, you could have canonicalization issues that make your desktop and unique mobile content less competitive in search.

1.  App Interstitials

Many sites promote their mobile app when searchers try to access mobile Web content, taking them to a page created for users of their platform before taking them to the home page.

For example, Open Table takes Android users to an Android page and iPhone users to an iPhone page, and both of these pages are indexed in Google.

Does your mobile site have one of these? You could be splitting link equity.

Like Flash intro splash pages in the early days of this century, there’s a possibility( however remote) that users will link to and share the platform-specific URLs rather than the home page. This can split link equity of one of your strongest pages, making it less competitive in search.

Some companies get around this issue by promoting the app within the page rather than taking the searcher to a separate URL. Others get around it by making a mobile Web user experience that’s good enough to stand on its own. If you must promote your mobile app on your mobile website, it’s best not to have separate URLs per platform.

2.  Carrier Pages

Years ago on Google’s mobile webmaster guidelines, they warned about creating duplicate pages for each carrier. And though that warning is no longer on their mobile guidelines, many companies are still creating deck-specific content that could dilute link equity.

For example, NBC’s mobile site lists a show recap here that’s exactly the same as this show recap here, with the exception of the return to t-zones text at the bottom of the second page.

NBC.com page for T-mobile's t-zones is a duplicate of another recap page except for two words: t-zones Home

Both of these pages are indexed in Google with their own link equity.

If you must create carrier pages, use the canonical tag; or if the page is parameter-based, use Google parameter handling to let Google know they’re duplicates.

3.  Indexed Legacy Transcoder Duplicates

In the initial rush to go mobile, many companies used solutions like Usablenet as a stopgap solution to allow them to provide some sort of mobile content to their users. For various reasons, including SEO, some of these companies then elected to stop using a transcoder like Usablenet and build a mobile site in-house.

Sears.com is one such case. Usablenet currently has 180,000 pages indexed in Google with Sears.com in the URL, but Sears no longer uses Usablenet to power their mobile site.

In fact, they’ve created a jQuery mobile showcase on m.sears.com, which has 381,000 pages indexed in Google. Many of these Usablenet pages are duplicates with older, potentially more trusted links, and they’re splitting the link equity of the Sears mobile site.

One of 180,000 indexed pages of the legacy Sears Usablenet site

Canonical tags on the Usablenet legacy content could fix this problem, but contacting an old vendor to have them implement changes on a site they no longer generate revenue from is never very easy to do.

4.  Other Cross Domain Duplicates

Though transcoded mobile content seems to be the most common instance of cross domain duplicates, there are other instances where the same content will be hosted on two different domains with no canonical tags to indicate which one the search engines should promote.

For example, if you access CBS Sports mobile site directly you could do it through m.cbssports.com. But if you were to access the same page from T-mobile’s deck, you would see the same content at this URL: http://cbstmobile.mo2do.net/?src=tmobile.

If you were to attempt to access it through search by putting in the keywords [cbs sports mobile], you would find the same content at this URL: http://wap.sportsline.com/

Is this a screenshot of A) m.cbssports.com B) wap.sportsline.com C) cbstmobile.mo2do.net D) all of the above?

Again, the same content on different domains could indicate reduced ability to rank for competitive terms. Best to indicate a canonical site through rel canonical or parameter handling in Google Webmaster Tools.

5.  Mobile Site Showcase On Desktop Site

Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NFL all have pages on their desktop sites promoting their mobile websites.

NBA's desktop page promoting their mobile app may appear when mobile searchers are looking for the mobile site.

In spite of Google’s focus on relevance in search results, sometimes these pages intended for a desktop user show up in search results for brand + “mobile site” queries ahead of actual mobile sites.

While these types of pages rarely result in any significant link equity, they can take link equity away from the actual mobile site and make it difficult for it to rank (assuming it’s not a duplicate, which will rank with redirects).

We would love to hear from Google whether pages like this can safely include canonical tags back to the mobile home page, as the content is similar and isn’t something desktop searchers are going to want to find in search. But if the canonical tag is questionable, the pages should at least be excluded or redirected back to the mobile site for mobile users so that they don’t compete with the mobile site in search results.

6.  Duplicate WAP Sites

It’s springtime in America, and many sports fans are rooting for the home team again until the big finish in October.

Do you think any of them can tell the difference between this:

Screenshot of wap.mlb.com

And this?

Screenshot of m.mlb.com. Don't look too hard for differences.

That’s because it’s the same content. The difference is that the former was built for feature phones and the latter was built for smartphones.

These days many companies are building accessible mobile sites at m.domain.com with progressive enhancement in mind, eliminating the need for a duplicate site on a wap.com subdomain.

If you do have a wap site on a separate subdomain (and there are almost 8 million pages indexed on wap.*.com subdomains in Google) the best practice is to use canonical tags to transfer the link equity to one mobile site.

7.  Promoting Mobile Apps Ahead Of Mobile Web Content

Some companies don’t have a mobile website at all, but promote their mobile app instead. There are numerous problems with this strategy that I’ve covered in a past column, but from an SEO standpoint, it often results in creating native app content that can’t be linked to or shared.

So while companies are often duplicating their content and splitting link equity, this particular duplication doesn’t result in any additional links or shares which could ultimately help them rank for competitive terms in search.

If you are creating software or mobile Web functionality that truly can’t be replicated on the mobile Web, by all means build an app. But if you’re just building a stripped down version of your desktop website with mobile searchers in mind, make your mobile content accessible on the Web first.

If my colleagues who are also competing with me in search results want to pick a strategy that ultimately will bring them less qualified traffic in search results, honestly, that’s more traffic for me and my clients.

Because when it comes down to it, SEO is not about efficiency, or what the search engines say is easiest, but about what is going to provide the most value to search engine users, which will ultimately result in quality search engine traffic to a site.

Different Context, Different Goals

If you recall last month’s column, I showed another clear example from Walgreens in which desktop search behavior and mobile search behavior are vastly different.

Instead of giving the mobile searcher a reformatted version of their desktop site, with a lot of extraneous code hidden, ultimately slowing the time-starved mobile searcher down, Walgreens elected to present a simplified mobile home page with mobile architecture, mobile features, and mobile keywords.

Likewise, State Farm and eSurance both recognize that their mobile searchers have vastly different goals than their desktop searchers, and elect to provide them different content to improve their user experience.

Sure, they could put all of the content on one URL, but as the founder of responsive Web design, Ethan Marcotte, explained in his book, this approach is “irresponsible”:

We real­ized it would have been irresponsible of us to ask our visitors to download all that extraneous HTML, marking up content that they’d never see, much less benefit from. And I don’t say that just out of concern for mobile visitors: regardless of whether our visitors were on a phone-or a desktop-based browser, we would have been penalizing them with extra markup.

As I describe in more detail in a recent column on Marketing Land called Responsive Web Design Isn’t Meant to Replace Mobile Web Sites, responsive Web design, while great for duplicate pages, is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and was never meant to be.

Sometimes mobile searchers need dedicated mobile content, including a mobile home page and mobile-specific pages that don’t exist on their desktop site.

Responsive Web Design Or Search-Optimized Information Architecture?

Think about how SEO works, and in particular siloing or search-optimized information architecture. At this point, you’re really only eligible for keywords and concepts that you have on your site.

If you’re an insurance company, and your mobile searchers’ primary goal is to get help with towing their car, and you don’t have towing content on your desktop site because your desktop computer users are generally not stuck on the side of the road with an immediate need you can fill, you’re probably not going to get any traffic from search engines when your customers enter the term [towing service] on their smartphones.

This concept is not likely to be included on your desktop site because 73.64% of the searches are coming from mobile devices. For the mobile site, however, it’s probably important enough to be put on the home page, and to have dedicated mobile content addressing it.

If your customers are not putting in different terms and concepts in different frequencies on their mobile devices than they are on their laptops and desktop computers, responsive Web design may be the way to go for you.

The problem is, many of my colleagues in SEO and Web design are recommending responsive Web design in all cases without doing the necessary research to discover whether mobile searchers’ goals are vastly different from desktop searchers’ goals. Because of this, many businesses are losing out on searches from mobile devices that they should be getting. And, people, losing out on qualified search traffic is not SEO.

Mobile Sites ≠ Duplicate Content

Still worried about split link equity making it difficult for your mobile site to rank? Don’t be, as it’s a non-issue in Google. With December’s skip redirect/Old Possum update, mobile URLs that are properly redirected will be ranked in the mobile (feature phone or smartphone) search results regardless of link equity.

I know it’s difficult for people like us who spend so much time consolidating link equity to grasp, but mobile URLs really are different. This is the one thing Google has been consistent on when it comes to mobile SEO. Not sure how many times I have to point this out before SEOs stop revealing to us that mobile URLs split link equity.

Fortunately the entire industry isn’t losing their minds over responsive Web design. There are a number of us who are making the responsible and optimal choice to serve mobile sites on mobile URLs when the users’ goals call for it.

Adam Audette was brave enough to say in Clickz this month, “The best approach to mobile is a hybrid model that caters content delivery to the specific needs of the user. In some cases, having dedicated, mobile-specific sites and content is the right thing to do.”

Meanwhile, Duane Forrester of Bing, though he wrote a strong recommendation for responsive Web design rather than duplicating URLs, stopped short of recommending it in all cases: “Occasionally, it may make sense to keep some URLs targeted at specific clients (e.g. mobile devices)”.

Possible Algorithmic Advantage To Having Dedicated Mobile Site

Apart from all of this, there may even be an algorithmic advantage to having a dedicated mobile site. In an upcoming white paper examining the top three search results for competitive non-brand queries in Google smartphone search, Resolution Media found that 64% of the ranking sample had dedicated mobile sites.

When you consider that just 21% of Google’s top advertisers have mobile sites, there are a disproportionately high number of top ranking smartphone sites that offer mobile content.

Correlation does not equal causation, of course, but Bing’s Rangan Majumder revealed at SMX West this year that mobile sites do rank above desktop sites in Bing mobile search, all else being equal; and Google has a blended mobile ranking algorithm and admits differences in search results for different platforms, though they’ve been reluctant to speak with one voice on whether they favor mobile sites in search results.

Relevance is still the goal, and as long as there are so many unusable sites that have relevant answers, no search engine is going to prevent that content from ranking. But as more webmasters see the opportunity in mobile, and develop mobile content to meet that opportunity, more sites will be both relevant to mobile searchers and usable.

When this day comes, why would the engines continue to serve content that requires additional pinching and zooming, or slows down the page load time because of additional markup, when they have a number of URLs that are both relevant and usable to choose from?

If you want to jump on the bandwagon and favor responsive design in all cases, in spite of all of this, that’s really your decision to make. If you want less qualified traffic, that’s up to you. But as an SEO consultant who is primarily concerned with bringing my clients the most qualified traffic possible, that’s not a recommendation that I can make to them, and that’s not a recommendation that I can in good conscience make to all of you.

If you want the most search traffic from mobile search, don’t think “one URL to rule them all;” think “what do mobile searchers need?” In many cases, your answer will be not responsive Web design, but an approach that includes mobile URLs.

If you’re a regular reader of this column and you don’t have a mobile experience, you are in the majority of site owners; but you’re also way behind and may not be able to catch up if you wait much longer.

So are you ready? Let’s talk about the ideal set up for your mobile site for SEO purposes.

There are cheaper, easier solutions, but this is the one that I would recommend to webmasters looking not just for a mobile friendly solution, but something that’s truly optimized to bring in traffic from mobile searchers.

If you want to build a mobile site in a way that will increase your organic search engine traffic, this is how to do it.

1. Make It Truly Mobile

Before you even think about subdomain options, you better know your mobile user: the person who you’re building this for who will ultimately make it a success or failure.

What are they looking for and why? Use the AdWords keyword tool to get mobile volumes and desktop volumes for keywords related to your brand, and to your products and services, and then find the mobile percent of total volume, or the mobile ratio, as Sherwood Stranieri put it. This gives you a sense of what concepts and keywords overindex with smartphone and mobile searchers, and it will help you build more than a desktop experience.

For example, for Walgreens, it’s clear from their brand keywords that index high among mobile searchers that the majority of searchers are looking for a Walgreens near them. It’s clear from the volume of queries where more than 30% of the total volume is mobile (smartphone and feature phone):

And it’s clear from a long tail analysis of the same list:

These are highly qualified searchers, as they’re very likely to convert offline, so why not make it as easy for them as possible?

Now that we know what our mobile users want, we can design the mobile site so that it provides those things with ease. And this will differ for all businesses, but it’s likely to be different from how your desktop website is structured.

Walgreens seems to know this, as they designed their mobile website differently than their desktop website, specifically taking advantage of the unique capabilities of a mobile device.

Instead of having their mobile searcher find a site with a lot of irrelevant content crammed on to one page that’s intended for desktop users, they’ve highlighted those areas that are most relevant to the mobile user experience.

For example, instead of doing nothing with their site and hoping that a mobile searcher finds the sections they’re looking for (which I’ve highlighted in red in the second image):

Walgreens has presented a simplified version of the home page that highlights those areas of the site that are most relevant to the mobile user experience:

When you hit the “find near me” button, it uses the phone’s GPS to find the locations closest to you, taking advantage of the specific functionality of mobile browsers rather than completely transcoding the desktop site with desktop functionality to look good on mobile browsers (i.e. responsive design).

Walgreens.com isn’t the paragon of mobile SEO, unfortunately, as they’ve done a lot of things wrong when it comes to the findability of their mobile site. With the design they really should have included a small keyword-rich text box that conveys the relevance of the page to users and search engines, as there’s not a lot of text or keywords on the page to help search engines understand that it’s relevant for what search engine users are looking for.

For some brands, there may also be concepts and keywords that aren’t included in the desktop site that need to be linked to from the homepage.

I’m guessing this is because the page was designed with users rather than SEO in mind, as someone hired the non-search-friendly mobile platform Usablenet to design the site and disallowed it in the robots.txt file so that it only appears in search engines when you put in the navigational keyword [m walgreens com].

They also promote the app over the mobile site by sending the searcher to a splash page first, which isn’t good for users or search engines.

Nonetheless, like State Farm and too few other companies, they did build a separate mobile user experience rather than used stylesheets to serve a formatted desktop experience, which is the first big step to getting a search-optimized mobile site.

2. Create A Hybrid Of Mobile-Optimized & Mobile-Friendly Content

Once you’ve settled on the design and site architecture, you need to determine the best way to host your mobile site. Though there are many opinions on the matter, the best solution is to host your mobile homepage and mobile-only pages at m.domain.com subdomain or /m subfolder.

For all other pages with content that won’t change from desktop to mobile, it’s perfectly acceptable to keep them at the same URL as your desktop and simply reformat them for mobile user agents. Redirects work fine too, but the best practice for transcoded desktop URLs is currently to add canonical tags to pass the link equity back to desktop pages.

For mobile only pages that are not strict duplicates, canonical tags are unnecessary, and could make your most valuable pages invisible to searchers.

3. Redirect Appropriately

For mobile-only content, you’ll need to set up the proper redirects. My colleague Cindy Krum has a handy tool for PHP and .NET redirects that makes it easy for novices to set up mobile redirects.

When Googlebot comes by, serve it your desktop content; but when her sisters Googlebot mobile and smartphone Googlebot arrive, give them your feature phone site (if you have one) and your smartphone site, respectively.

If you have a tablet site, by all means serve it to tablet searchers instead of your desktop or smartphone site, but there currently is no tablet Googlebot to receive your tablet site.

If you don’t have a tablet site, serve your tablet searchers desktop content, as research shows that’s what they respond to best. Just make sure you’ve removed all traces of Flash before serving it up to the iPad or other tablets that don’t support Flash.

4. Don’t Forget the Images!

It has been a long time since mobile SEO was about optimizing WAP sites, and in the near future we may be optimizing for a literal pair of Google Goggles, with a Terminator-like overlay that searches for more information on the things around us, just by analyzing images and comparing them to Google’s image and Google Goggles image database.

SEOs can prepare for this brave new world today by ensuring images are optimized for mobile searchers.

5. Analyze & Optimize

Sure, there are mobile SEO best practices beyond this, but best practices only go so far. If you want to retain the edge that optimizing your site in this way gives you, you can’t just set it and forget it.

Given how rapidly this practice is changing, and how much it has changed in the last five or six years, mobile SEO requires regularly looking to your web analytics and to columns like those in the Mobile Search section in Search Engine Land in order to stay optimized.

There are many ways to go mobile, and many of them will actually hurt your visibility among mobile searchers. If you create mobile content when appropriate, redirect appropriately, optimize your images for mobile searchers, and analyze your site for new opportunities, there won’t be many mobile webmasters who will be able to compete with you in natural search.

According to Goldman, 7% of all online sales Kenshoo saw over the holidays came from a tablet, and “Of the sales transactions completed via mobile, over 83% of the revenue was driven through tablets, and overall tablet conversion rate was 2.72%, more than 3x higher the conversion rate for mobile phones.

Additionally, the average order value from tablets ($149.84) actually exceeded that of desktop computers ($146.07).”

On top of that, tablet ownership nearly doubled over the holidays, according to Pew Internet.

With numbers like these, it’s clear that there’s an opportunity for marketers in tablets in 2012. What’s not clear is what marketers need to do to target tablet searchers effectively.

Do tablet owners search? If so, how do they search, what do they search for, and is it different from desktop and/or mobile search? How can content owners and advertisers build content today to effectively engage this highly lucrative tablet segment?

Fortunately, there are some things that we know about tablet owners that can help us get a better sense of what they’re looking for and how to give it to them:

Tablet Owners Are Searchers

Not only do tablet users buy a lot on their tablets, but they search a lot too. According to Google research, tablet owners reported that searching was the second most frequent activity (with 78% of users responding that they search for information on their tablets) behind playing games.

Tablet searchers account for a significant portion of mobile searches, according to Performics, who reported tablet accounts for 34% of mobile impressions on average, and as much as 50% for some advertisers. Marin Software reports that tablet search accounted for 3% of total impressions and 4% of total clicks in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Tablet Search Behavior Is Different

Last week, Resolution Media spent two days with the search engines planning strategy for 2012. And while I can’t talk about most of what was discussed, both Google and Yahoo! made a point of saying that tablet search behavior is different than mobile or desktop search behavior, and that campaigns and ad groups should be separated by platform for the best performance.

Last year at SMX West, Jacquelyn Krones of Bing and Taylor Schreiner of Yahoo! presented research to this end on tablet searchers’ user experience and goals. Krones gave marketers a model for understanding tablet users’ needs based on Mission, Excavation, and Exploration:

Unlike mobile (i.e. smartphone and featurephone) searchers, tablet searchers are not focused on completing a task (Mission), but are instead using the search engines on their devices to find new and interesting content, without really knowing what they are looking to find (Exploration). And neither tablet nor mobile searchers are using their devices for multi-step problem solving (Excavation).

Indeed, a Yahoo! Research/Reprise Media study at that time on mobile and tablet search behavior called “Searching on Glass” indicates that tablet searchers are more likely to search different categories (e.g. Real Estate, Investing, TV/Cable) and less likely to search others (e.g. Insurance, Deposits, Brand) than mobile and PC users.

Tablet users are also searching at different times than mobile and PC users. According to Google research, desktop searchers search during the day, and tablet and mobile searchers search at night. Google later draws the conclusion that desktop and laptop computers are for work, and tablets are more for entertainment at home.

Tablet Searchers Are Not Quite Mobile

A lot of people consider a tablet a mobile device, but research shows that most people aren’t mobile when they’re using it. Most of them are, in fact, on the couch, watching TV, in the kitchen or in bed.

If you’re lumping tablets and smartphones in the same ad group, or serving content created for mobile users to tablet users, you could be serving your customers content they don’t want.

Google (or at least Maile Ohye) recommends serving desktop content to tablet users, as they more closely resemble desktop users than mobile users in terms of behavior; but Adobe says the best option is to build tablet optimized experiences, separate from mobile or desktop sites.

Tablet Searchers Are Not Quite PC Searchers

One reason to build separate experiences rather than providing desktop content to tablet searchers is that tablet searchers aren’t able to access certain technologies that PC users are. The iPad, for example, is the market leader with 58% market share, and none of them run Adobe Flash.

If you’re using Flash to run videos on your site, or if you have a restaurant or other local business that tablet or smartphone users are likely to visit and you have a user experience that relies on Flash, you have two choices in this era of smartphones and tablets:

1. get rid of it and build an experience in HTML5 that can be dynamic and accessible to multiple devices, or
2. be invisible to the majority of tablet and smartphone users and risk frustrating this large and growing audience and/or losing them as customers.

Tablet Searchers are Looking for…?

It’s strange that all three major search engines tell us that tablet search behavior is different, but give us only desktop keywords in keyword tools to help us develop relevant content.

You can find tablet keywords in analytics, of course.

In Google Analytics, it’s as simple as going to the mobile devices report and then filtering with the following regular expression to isolate popular tablets:

tablet|tab|pad|slate|thinkpad|viewpad|ipad|lifebook|nook|windpad|xoom|xtablet|flybook|g-slate|ideapad|kindle|modbook|multipad|olivepad|paddle|playbook|quadpad|slimbook|t-touch|tuftab

Select the secondary dimension “Keyword” to see what tablet owners are searching for.

The problem with this method, of course, is that you can only see keywords that your site is optimized for, and not keywords that you should be optimized for.

To see that, we want to use a keyword tool, but at the moment the only keyword tool that I know of that includes tablets is the Google Keyword Tool. It’s currently impossible to find popular tablet keywords with it, however, as they’re lumped in with smartphone keywords.

Given that tablet searchers have different needs and search behavior than desktop or mobile searchers, it’s likely that they also use different keywords with different frequencies. The Reprise Media/Yahoo! study hints at that with the different categories that they uncover, but marketers currently can’t do much keyword research on their own without a specific tablet breakout.

My hope is that Google and the other search engines break out tablet queries separately in the Google Keyword Tool and similar tools so that marketers can optimize the user experience based on what tablet searchers are looking for.

Google has optimized their user experience for each platform, so they must understand content owners’ desire to do the same for their users. If you want to join me in this request, please show your support in the Google Adwords Support Forum, where I’ve formally posted this feature request.

Until then, hopefully this information on tablet searchers and their intent gives you a better sense of of what’s necessary to target tablet searchers in this oft-described “year of the tablet”.

It seems every year about this time consultants and pundits like me become clairvoyant and share their wisdom with those of you who lack the capacity to see beyond the daily planner.

While I usually avoid such lofty predictions in an industry like ours that is so maddeningly unpredictable, here are a few things I think mobile and search marketers need to be aware of when preparing for the inevitable rise in mobile search in the New Year.

SoLoMo

Social Local Mobile Marketing (SoLoMo) may seem so 2011 to you at this point, but it really is just beginning to take off.

As I mentioned at SMX Social Media Marketing last month, 42% of Facebook’s users regularly access the service through a mobile device. As social continues to influence search results through Google+ and Facebook shares, it will undoubtedly affect mobile search as well.

Currently, mobile results do not display plus one data or verified author stats, but I would think it would be difficult for Google to ignore the synergies between social and mobile for long. And with their push for ubiquity in search results and their use of GPS to provide more relevant search results to mobile users, it’s probably just a matter of time before Google finds some way to incorporate social data into mobile search results as well.

Savvy marketers should be thinking now about the effect of social on search results, both desktop and mobile in 2012.

Mobile Visual Search Optimization

This is something that I’ve been expecting for a while now but that’s never really come to fruition on a large scale. However, as marketers continue to develop mobile websites as a result of Google’s massive 2011 push in ZMOT and GOMO, it’s likely that SEOs whose mobile websites are well optimized will have to find another channel for search traffic. I expect this channel to be Google Goggles and other augmented reality search apps like Layar, who are developing a new image-based model for search on mobile devices.

Mobile visual search optimization is currently largely Google Image Search optimization with a focus on returning mobile formatted content with the image, but there could be additional signals and techniques in 2012 as more consumers adopt Google Goggles and other visual search apps as part of their standard routine.

Mobile Search Results Continue To Diverge

I’m not sure what search engines Rand Fishkin is talking about when he says “2011 has helped prove that the search world is pretty device agnostic”, but it’s not Google.

In 2011, I demonstrated that there are at least 14 differences between Google desktop and smartphone search results, which would account for the variations in ranking observed by Resolution Media and Covario in separate studies.

Further, with the introduction of a smartphone Googlebot in December 2011 Google is proving just the opposite of what Fishkin says– that they actually prefer if you give users content that’s fast, simple and relevant, and that the device they access the content from can change the user experience for the worse.

Google already has separate user interfaces for tablet, feature phone and smartphone, and this past year they made mobile landing pages a factor in quality score for AdWords and changed the search results completely for certain queries from the desktop results.

As more searches are done via smartphones and tablets and more Webmasters create content that’s optimized for these users, I would expect Google to continue to try to unearth the best user experience, which will almost always be the one that doesn’t require additional pinching and zooming in order to view.

Separate Content for Smartphone, Tablet, Feature Phones

In December of 2010, Google added smartphone volume to the AdWords keyword tool. So for a year now, marketers have had the ability to do keyword research and write content specifically for mobile or smartphone users.

I would imagine that as more marketers create more mobile sites we will need a way to differentiate our sites from our competitors. One of the reasons SEO works is because it allows marketers to see what their audience needs through keyword research and to give them what they need through content development.

Marketers who are only using desktop keywords to develop content and then reformatting the sites for mobile devices and tablets are at a disadvantage to those who develop content based on what the user needs in context because they could be missing keywords and concepts that mobile users are searching for.

Whether it’s incorporating these mobile keywords into the information architecture and content of your core site and formatting that for mobile, desktop and tablet users, or creating separate sites at different URLs with these keywords and concepts included, I think marketers who will get the most traffic from mobile search in 2012 will be the ones who understand what their audience is looking for and giving it to them.

Mobile Searchers Continue To Influence Core Search

In June of 2011 Google took two features that were previously only available on mobile and made them accessible to desktop searchers: search by voice and search by image.

Ubiquity is important to Google, as they mentioned at this event. Because of this we can expect more aspects of mobile search to influence not just mobile search results, but search results in general.

In the study I mentioned last month, I discovered that having a mobile site is strongly correlated with top three rankings in Google smartphone search. As Google continues to ensure that their results are usable regardless of device I would expect this trend to continue for core search as well.

Marketers Continue To Optimize Both Sites & Apps

Readers of this column know that in the debate over whether mobile apps or mobile Web will win the hearts and minds of consumers, I am pulling for the mobile Web. However, with comScore’s recent announcement that mobile app usage has overtaken the mobile Web for the first time, mobile app proponents are louder than ever.

However, the fact remains that consumers use both mobile websites and mobile apps, and marketers who only optimize for one platform miss out on the other. And since we’re talking about mobile search, the primary way to reach mobile searchers who aren’t putting in app queries is still by optimizing mobile sites.

Unfortunately there still will be no winner to the mobile Web vs apps debate in 2012. Marketers who want maximum reach in search and mobile will need to continue optimizing for both mobile Web and apps.

Not too long ago, the article Mobile SEO is a Myth got a lot of people fired up about the foolish notion that mobile SEO is a construct developed by salesmen to sell more SEO services.

I responded in the comments to the author’s points, and have addressed this point in multiple articles over the years, so I’m not going to argue it here again.

While I don’t agree at all that mobile SEO itself is a myth, there are many myths around mobile SEO that practitioners need to be aware of.

Here are a few of the most prevalent…

Myth #1: A Dotmobi TLD Is Necessary For Indexing & Ranking

According to the first result in Google for the query [mobile seo best practices], “the best way to build your mobile web site for SEO is by using the dotMobi domain”.

One of the reasons dotMobi gives for this is the following:

“Building a dotMobi site means that your URL will automatically feature on the ‘zone files’ that we maintain for ICANN (the meta-Internet registry organization), and which are regularly requested by mobile search engines, directories and other sites and services as ‘seed lists’ for the indexing of mobile-centric web sites (in much the same way as they use DMOZ).”

DotMobi should be commended for their dedication to mobile content, and building your brand new mobile site with a DotMobi TLD is no better nor worse than building it at m.domain.com or other popular alternatives, but the fact is Google has more m.domain.com sites indexed than any other.

Futhermore, no DotMobis appeared in the results of an upcoming Resolution Media study that deconstructs the smartphone search results for some top mobile queries in Google. The percentage of .com sites in our upcoming smartphone search results study at 73.97% was actually larger than the Internet as a whole at 55.1%.

There may be good reasons for using a dotMobi TLD, but SEO clearly isn’t one of them.

Myth #2: Metatxt Is Necessary For Mobile SEO

Though I haven’t heard much about it recently, for a while, Bena Roberts and Visibility Mobile were pushing the metatxt standard for better indexing of mobile content. A metatxt file is similar to a robots.txt file and an XML sitemap in that it is a text file at the root location of a server that helps mobile search engines discover mobile content.

The problem with metatxt?

It’s not supported by Google or Bing, which get over 99% of mobile market share, so it won’t get you a lot more visibility in the engines that people use. It’s also just a solution for indexing, so if your content is already indexed well, the metatxt file won’t help you at all. It’s just a txt file, so it doesn’t hurt you to put it up, but it’s certainly not necessary for visibility in mobile search.

In Resolution Media’s upcoming study of the top mobile queries and the ranked sites in Google, zero ranking sites used the metatxt standard, further busting the myth of metatxt for mobile SEO.

Myth #3: Code Validation Is Necessary For Mobile SEO

This one appeared first on this parked domain from 2005, and people keep repeating it because Google keeps ranking the site for mobile SEO queries (#4 currently for [mobile seo].)

It makes sense in theory. Mobile (feature phone) browsers are more primitive, and search engine spiders try to display content that is accessible to the devices that display them. If content isn’t accessible to mobile users, mobile search engine spiders won’t be able to index it.

However, this only applies to the feature phone index, whose importance is receding for mobile SEO with the growing popularity of smartphones.

When it comes to smartphones, validation does not matter, as all ranking results in the sample set failed validation, and  66% of them were so unusable that they scored a zero out of 100% on the W3’s mobileOK test, which is used to determine probable usability of sites on mobile devices, and more than 78% of the listings received a score of “Bad” from Ready.mobi’s mobile validator.

Myth #4: Mobile Sitemaps Are Necessary For Mobile SEO

These can help with indexing feature phone content, and for letting Google know that you want your content to appear in their index of accessible mobile content. But if you’re indexing smartphone content, you don’t need it, says Google’s John Mueller. To back him up on this, none of the ranking sites in the upcoming Resolution Media study on smartphone search results used mobile sitemaps.

Mobile sitemaps probably can’t hurt, and like Web sitemaps, they could help sites get more unique content indexed, but they’re not necessary for mobile SEO unless you’re concerned about indexing feature phone content.

Myth #5: Mobile Formatting (Handheld CSS) Is Enough For Mobile SEO

The mobile SEO is a myth article claims the best strategy is to allow your site to be viewed on all types of devices with CSS. This is a common argument, as I explained before here.

Also, as I explained before, the problem with this argument is that a site that uses a mobile-centric information architecture and keywords to develop content for a mobile user, rather than reformatting desktop content for mobile devices, will always be better-optimized for mobile searchers, because it gives users content that’s based on their specific user experience.

Case in point, if State Farm had not only considered the mobile user experience for their mobile site, but made it competitive for towing and roadside assistance queries that are more heavily trafficked in mobile than desktop, they would have had an opportunity to get even more traffic from search engines.

Responsive design is the easier option, so it’s very popular among designers going mobile because of what is perceived as efficiencies. However, in my experience talking with companies who design this way, many of them end up building a mobile site architecture down the line, making responsive design ultimately less efficient for them, as they have to redo it later on.

Myth #6: Mobile Queries Are Shorter

This one was just repeated in an article in Forbes, but that doesn’t make it true. The theory is, it’s harder to type on mobile devices, and because of this mobile searchers will use fewer words in their query to find what they’re looking for.

However, research from Google in 2009 showed that feature phone searches are only slightly shorter than computer-based searches (2.44 words for feature phones compared to 2.93 words for computers), and that iPhone searchers used the same number of words that computer based searchers used on average (2.93 words).

When some of the same researchers studied spoken queries in early 2011, they found that longer queries have a higher probability of being typed than shorter queries. Never mind your instincts. Mobile queries are no shorter than Web queries.

Myth #7: People Aren’t Searching On Mobile Devices

All due respect to the late innovative marketing genius and eccentric billionaire Steve Jobs, who famously said in 2010, “search hasn’t happened on mobile devices,” but search is happening on mobile devices. Quite a bit of it, actually.

Google reported early this year that 1 in 7 queries come from mobile devices on average, with certain industries (like restaurants) getting as high as 30% of their queries from mobile devices. And Yahoo! has reported that mobile search on average makes up 20% of their total search queries. Jobs was trying to demonstrate that people use apps instead of browser-based search, but Google research on smartphones from April shows that more smartphone owners search (77%) than use apps (68%).

Want to do your part in helping to eradicate these persistent mobile SEO myths?

If you’re calling yourself a mobile SEO expert, as many people do these days, stop repeating them. If you’re not a mobile SEO expert, but want to promote the spread of good, accurate information, share or link to this post and/or check out this list of credible mobile SEO resources until Google gets its act together and stops propagating these myths on what matters for mobile SEO.

But what is the official Google stance on mobile sites, search and SEO? Will having mobile content help in search results?

Many people will claim that Google has offered an official position on mobile search and SEO, but they don’t realize that someone else in Google has offered a different, sometimes even contradictory, position on the subject.

How many stances have people from Google offered on webmaster issues related to mobile search? Eight, by my count.

1.  Matt Cutts On Mobile Duplicate Content & Mobile URLs

In January of this year, Matt Cutts answered a question about mobile SEO and recommended using a mobile URL for testing purposes with URL redirects for Googlebot mobile for the mobile site and Googlebot for the desktop site.

He didn’t address smartphone users, who are the most active mobile users. He did, however, say one thing that Google has been consistent about: mobile content is not duplicate content, and if you redirect it to the appropriate bot you won’t be seen as cloaking. He reiterated this stance in his most recent video on cloaking.

2.  Google SEO Guide, Google Japan On Redirecting Mobile Content

The advice that Matt Cutts offered about redirects was taken from the Google Japan team, who in late 2009 recommended redirecting feature phone users to mobile sites through redirects.

This advice was reiterated in the section on mobile SEO in the Google SEO Starter Guide, published almost a year later, and illustrated above.

3.  Redirecting Traditional Mobile Content But Not Smartphone Traffic

When it comes to redirects, in February of this year Pierre Far of the webmaster team made a distinction between smartphone traffic and traditional mobile traffic that wasn’t made before.

He said that webmasters don’t need to do anything special for smartphone users, but it may make sense for some websites. He also said mobile sitemaps are not for smartphone URLs, but for traditional mobile URLs.

4. Redirecting Smartphone Traffic To Mobile Sites & Tablet Users To Desktop Experience

A little more than a month later, Maile Ohye of the Google Webmaster Team said that it’s reasonable to drive Android users to your mobile site, but that you should direct Android tablet users to your desktop content, and smartphone users to your mobile content.

But didn’t Pierre Far just say no redirects were necessary for smartphone searchers?

5. Google’s John Mueller On Single URL Mobile Strategy

John Mueller of the Google Webmaster Team took questions on his Buzz page (now on Google+) in which he recommended a single URL mobile strategy for smartphone content in order to reduce redirects and make the experience faster for mobile users.

He then clarified his position on Search Engine Roundtable, saying “If the touch.example.com site is significantly different that it covers a special niche, then maybe that’s ok [to index separately and not add rel=canonical to].”

• Update – John Mueller later said on his Google+ page that either mobile URLs or desktop URLs formatted for mobile are fine with Google.

6.  Providing A Fast, Relevant & Simple Mobile User Experience

In late June of this year, Google’s search quality head, Amit Singhal, said that Google is hyper-focused on getting the mobile user experience right in mobile search, and didn’t make a distinction between mobile search being feature phone as opposed to smartphone traffic.

He said that Google focuses on making a fast, relevant and simple mobile user experience, and that’s why they’re poised to excel at mobile search.

In March of this year, the Page Speed team also said speed is more important for mobile users.

7.  Google’s Scott Huffman On Blended Mobile Ranking Algorithms

Google engineer Scott Huffman revealed in Searchology 2009 that Google has ways of presenting content that they think is more relevant to mobile users for certain queries than desktop users, and confirmed this in a New York Times article this year.

Separate tests by Resolution Media and Covario both confirmed that mobile smartphone ranking differs from desktop rankings. Yet it’s unclear whether having mobile optimized content is actually a ranking factor in mobile search, since Pierre Far and others claim that desktop sites are adequate for smartphone browsers.

8.  Building Mobile Specific Content Rather Than Transcoding Desktop Experience

The most recent Google employee talking about mobile is probably Avinash Kaushik, who gave a fantastic webinar recently called Re-think Mobile Marketing & Analytics.

The webinar focused on creating extraordinary mobile experiences that add to the brand value rather than detract from it. His basic premise was to create desktop content for desktop users, mobile content for mobile and smartphone users, and tablet-optimized content for tablet users, and to do it in a way that takes advantage of what that specific device can do.

This is a lot of the same message that we also get from the best practices on the Go Mo site, but it begs the question: if mobile content is so important for mobile users, why does Google show so many unusable desktop results to mobile users in mobile and smartphone search?

Final Thoughts

So there are eight perspectives from Google employees on mobile sites and mobile search. There could be more, but these are the ones I know of. This is why it’s baffling when some writers claim that mobile SEO is a myth because one Google employee gave one opinion. If you really want to understand what Google the organization thinks about mobile sites and search, take the sum total of what they’ve said and try to make sense of it.

Granted, not all of these stances are mutually exclusive.

For example, you could build a fast site with a simple interface that’s extremely relevant to mobile user queries, as Amit Singhal suggests is necessary for mobile searchers, and you could build that on a mobile URL like m.domain.com as Matt Cutts suggests.

However, some of them are mutually exclusive.

For example, Maile Ohye and the Android Dev team say redirect smartphone traffic like the Nexus One to mobile content, but Pierre Far says no redirects are necessary for smartphone content.

Also, if you build a fast site with a simple user interface that’s extremely relevant to user queries, why would you give smartphone users desktop content, which is likely to be slow-going pinching and zooming through tiny text to find a result?

Some clarification is needed here to help webmasters serve the right mobile content to the right searchers, as the answers that have been given so far often cause more questions than answers.

Finally, I’m not suggesting that marketers need to wait until Google validates our mobile SEO strategies in order to keep optimizing.

On the contrary, things like doing mobile keyword research to understand how the mobile user experience differs from the desktop user experience and catering your content to that user experience is just good SEO, even though the user is mobile.

But Google, if you’d like to clarify your position on mobile sites, search and SEO, as Bing did last month, the webmaster community might find it easier to digest the sometimes contradictory positions above.

As someone who uses mobile search often, I am more often than not frustrated at the number of sites in the results that make me do extra work pinching and zooming to get the information I need.

I’m hoping a mobile search engine can come along that will provide a better user experience than Google. And I’m sorry Google, but with the amount of slow-loading, tiny-text, irrelevant-to-my-context desktop sites you present in mobile results, I can’t imagine that such an undertaking would be impossible to do.

Enter Bing. Honestly, I don’t know if Bing has the stuff to take on Google in the mobile search arena, but I applaud them for trying.

I wanted to know more about Bing Mobile and its approach to mobile search, so I asked Bing Mobile and Local Director of Product Management Andy Chu. What follows is his response.

Q. Google is the current mobile search market leader, with what some would say approaches 99% of the mobile search market share. Is that accurate? If it is, why should marketers optimize for and buy media on Bing?

Chu: At Bing, we are focusing on how to help people to make faster, more informed local decisions in order to help them complete tasks, save money and make search more social with their Facebook friends. From a distribution standpoint, Bing is one of the search options on the iPhone and was one of the top 10 free apps in the Appstore in 2010.

Bing is the default search engine for a number of Android, RIM and Brew devices on Verizon, as well as the default search engine on a number of RIM devices from other carriers. With the launch of Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 7.5, Bing is the default search option everywhere Windows Phone ships in the U.S.

Our unique user growth on m.bing.com on Android has grown more than 270 percent — and more than 100 percent on iPhone — over a six-month period ended April 2011. To date, our app activations in the U.S. have exceed more than 22 million.

Furthermore, we know search has evolved beyond simply typing text and navigating to third-party sites via blue links. Input options have expanded to include voice and OCR, and “signals” have expanded to include coordinates, importance, social signals and other factors that help deliver answers and decisions.

These expanded input options help Bing for Mobile better understand user intent, context, location, etc., which in turn allows Bing to provide improved answers, help with decisions and even recommend additional things to do after you’ve completed the immediate task at hand.

We are driving towards a mobile service where Bing will be the must-have mobile companion service that delivers exactly what you need — whether that is a quick answer to a simple fact, or the right tool and guidance to accomplish even a series of complex tasks.

In terms of where marketers should buy media, recent adCenter investments are making more use of mobile signals to drive greater performance for mobile advertising campaigns on Bing. Over the coming months, marketers can expect to see more focus on mobile in adCenter.

Taking each of these investments — the improvements in the Bing mobile experience, distribution across Apple, Android, Windows Phone, mobile investments in adCenter and the greater scale of the Search Alliance — Bing represents a unique, growing audience that mobile marketers can’t reach anywhere else.

Q.  How does Bing plan to distinguish itself in order to gain market share from Google in mobile search?

Chu: Mobile is an important space for Bing, and mobile Internet is ramping faster than the desktop Internet did. The mobile search category has grown 90% year-over-year according to a June 2010 Comscore report. Additionally, global mobile Internet users are expected to exceed the desktop in four years, reaching 1.6 billion users.

To meet the needs of the market, we’re constantly testing and updating our applications and mobile browse experience.

As previously mentioned, Bing is currently one of the search options on the iPhone and the default search engine for a number of Android, RIM and Brew devices, and the default search option for all Windows Phone devices in the U.S.

Q.  Do you recommend creating mobile websites in order to get more qualified traffic from Bing mobile search?

Chu: Yes, we encourage companies to create a mobile-specific site to optimize the small form factor mobile device experience for consumers.

Q.  Why isn’t mobility more of a quality signal in Bing mobile search results? If you’re trying to provide a positive user experience, why not provide results that are device-specific and contextually relevant?

Chu: Mobile search results will vary depending on device capability and the level of integration we can do at the device and app store level.

For example, in Windows Phone 7.5, we integrated app answers as part of search results to help people discover apps more easily and developed a feature called “Local Scout From Bing,” which takes into consideration a person’s location and specific local interests to help them find things like restaurants and activities in their immediate vicinity.

Q.  Do you see a high bounce rate from mobile searchers arriving at desktop content in search results, or do the majority of the searchers take the time to pinch and zoom to find the answers they need?

Chu: Mobile tasks are completed much faster than PCs, with 70 percent of mobile tasks being completed within one hour. On the PC, it can take up to a month.

Q.  What percentage of mobile search has local intent?

Chu: More than 50 percent of mobile queries have local intent, and 46 percent of those queries are info-tainment related.

Q.  Does Bing consider tablets to be mobile devices?

Chu: We’re paying close attention to how consumers use tablets and other advanced devices, as consumer behavior on these devices is evolving quickly. Today, we consider tablets to be part of our multi-platform mobile strategy. We provide both browser- and client-based solutions that are built to work on a variety of mobile devices such as Windows Phones, BlackBerry, Sidekick, the iPhone, Android, and the iPad.

We design our applications and experiences to be optimized for specific devices, whether that’s tablets, iPhones, Androids, etc. For example, we recently launched a feature called Lasso on our Bing for iPad app that was designed with touch-interface in mind and allows people to search with the circle of a finger.

Q.  Should marketers create separate sites that are tablet-optimized?

Chu: Consumers are using tablets at times and places in ways that are different than they use PCs. As marketers look to the audiences they want to reach, they should consider whether or not a tablet-optimized site can deliver the results that they want before making that decision.

Q.  Apps are popular ways of delivering a mobile user experience, but they often aren’t indexed as mobile web sites are, and aren’t able to be returned in mobile search. Google and Yahoo have tried to solve this problem by returning mobile apps for certain queries.

How does Bing plan to provide an accurate view of the best of the mobile user experience when a lot of it isn’t able to be spidered?

Chu: When using our iPhone app or m.bing.com on your iPhone, Bing offers “app search,” which surfaces a list of available iPhone apps that relate to the search, in addition to normal search results. We also offer a build-in app search capability as part of the Bing on Windows Phone 7.5 experience. Neither Apple nor Android devices currently offer built-in app search capability.

Q.   The keyword suggestions in Bing mobile search appear to be actual mobile queries, as they contain queries like mocospace and ringtones that don’t show up in desktop search suggest. Is this accurate?

Chu: Yes, Bing for Mobile automatically surfaces popular searches suggested based on what’s currently hot on Bing for Mobile. We offer the same experience, called “Popular now,” on the PC.

Figure 1. Search suggest on m.bing.com shows popular mobile queries that could be used for mobile-specific keyword research

Q.   I saw Steve Ballmer at SMX West 2010, and he said, “Mobile queries are just gonna keep going up and up and up. I don’t think we’ll see a drop in queries from PCs, but we’ll see a rise in mobile devices queries. Exact numbers are hard to predict. Some queries will feel similar between the two, but there’ll also be a whole new class of queries that are specific to mobile.”

Is this still accurate as we approach 2012? What would be examples of this whole new class of queries that are specific to mobile?

Chu: Yes, we continue to see mobile queries rise across the board (Android, iPhone, RIM, Windows Phone), and we recognize the importance of identifying the signals, context and location of mobile search queries in order to offer the best search experience.

We’re working to expand the search box to take new signals into consideration to help people do, not just find, on the go.

People are using new signals — like Voice and Camera features on their devices — to start searches and complete tasks, such as identifying songs by using the mobile microphone. These are just a few examples of a new class of queries that are specific to mobile devices.

Q.   What are the most important things that marketers can do to optimize their content for Bing mobile search results?

Chu: For a marketer promoting a web destination, the best way is to use the webmaster tools on Bing.com. Many content developers submit a mobile URL through the webmaster tools, while others find it’s best to have their site detect what type of device is visiting [i.e., tablet, advanced smartphone, PC], and then redirect the end user to an optimized page. Both of these practices work well with Bing.

For marketers promoting a business with a local physical presence, two of the best basic SEO practices for businesses to follow are:

1. Ensure that you are listed in Bing Business Portal and that all business info is correct and always up-to-date
2. Provide superior service and encourage customers to give them good ratings and comments in popular review sites such as Yelp, Urbanspoon and City Search.

Thank you to Andy Chu and the Bing Mobile team for taking the time to talk to me about mobile search and SEO. Bing’s support of webmasters is well-known in the webmaster community, and nowhere is that support needed more than in the relatively nascent field of mobile search, where standards are young and the rules are still being written. It is appreciated.

And Google, whenever you’re ready to talk … we’re listening.

What content (if any) would be interesting to users of a mobile site that wouldn’t necessarily appeal to a stationary user on a desktop or laptop?

As search marketers, we should already understand the power of keyword research in letting your users tell you what they want and how they want it said on your website, and keyword research can help prioritize what content goes on a mobile site as well.

For example, you may sell car insurance to an English speaking audience in the United States, and you want to see how users are interacting with that type of content on mobile devices versus desktop devices.

Using the Google keyword tool in AdWords, you can filter by mobile volume in the advanced features, and select category data for insurance keywords for mobile users and desktop users.

If you put that data in a table like the one below, you can quickly see opportunities for content that mobile users are looking for en masse.

In the table above, you can see each keyword, its search volume on mobile devices and desktop devices, as well as the metric mobile percent of total volume, which will tell you which keywords and concepts are most viable for mobile sites.

In the mobile percent of total column, the lowest values are highlighted in red, and these indicate keywords with less than 14%, which is what Google claims mobile searches are on average.

The cells highlighted in yellow indicate keywords that have more volume than average, but not more than 30% of the total search volume, and green highlighted cells indicate keywords with more than 30% of the total searches coming from mobile devices.

These are going to be the keywords that mobile searchers are looking for more than desktop searchers, and the keywords and concepts smart marketers will build their mobile sites around.

In this example, there’s a clear winner which all auto insurance companies should consider putting front and center on their mobile sites, even if it’s just a small part of their desktop site: roadside assistance.

It’s also important to have information related to the core offering: auto insurance, of course; but this content isn’t likely to draw an engaged mobile audience in the same way that the related concept of roadside assistance will, and can be de-prioritized in the site architecture as a result.

This content should be usable and mobile-friendly, but if it’s not substantially different from the desktop content, it should have a canonical tag pointing back to the desktop site to conserve link equity.

If you do this same exercise with branded keywords you get even more insight into what your specific audience requires from your mobile site.

If State Farm, for example, were to look at branded keywords for their mobile insurance site, they would see their mobile users are asking for different things than their desktop users.

The keywords with the highest search volume and greatest mobile to total volume ratio are related to finding a phone number (for both customer service and the claims center), getting roadside assistance, finding locations of State Farm offices and directions to State Farm Arena in Hidalgo, Texas, and more information about an actor in their television commercials.

When you visit the site, however, you see that it’s lacking much of this content.

State Farm deserves more credit than most brands, as they have clearly thought about the mobile user experience and included mobile-specific content such as the Accident Help section of the site.

But if they also would have done this quick exercise, they would have seen that there are zero searches from mobile devices for the term [accident help], and more than 40,000 searches per month for towing keywords, including roadside assistance.

Furthermore, they would have heard from the mobile searchers themselves, and considered what they’re looking for from this brand’s mobile website.

All brands should be able to do these two exercises and find the content their mobile users are looking for on their mobile websites, but brands don’t have to stop there. A look at the top Google Mobile keywords for 2011 can give brands ideas for more branded content for mobile sites including the following:

• Branded Mobile Content, such as ringtones, wallpaper, games and apps don’t make a lot of sense for your desktop site, but they’re a natural fit for mobile. If you can build games and apps in HTML 5 as a mobile web app hosted under your domain, you’ll get more of a rankings boost for the rest of your mobile content than if you put it in an app store. Beyond that, research indicates that smartphone owners search on their phones when waiting in line, eating, using the bathroom, and killing time in general, so providing mobile entertainment is something they’ll likely thank you for.
• Mobile coupons, sweepstakes and other offers are a great way to get desktop users to try your mobile site, and they tend to boost link equity in the process.
• Videos and information about your television commercials might not seem the right fit for an on-the-go audience, but research indicates that 68% of smartphone users search to find more information about something they’ve seen in traditional media, and providing that information to users can be a great way to both track your traditional media investment and introduce more customers to your mobile properties.
• Giving mobile users the opportunity to interact with your brand on Facebook or Twitter is a natural fit for mobile sites, as nearly 40% of social network users access social networks from their mobile phones.
• Celebrity spokespersons, while not right for every brand, could bring the right brand a lot of visibility in mobile search, if the campaign is right.

Those are just a few ideas to help get started going beyond transcoded desktop content to a better optimized mobile user experience. If you have others, or know of sites that do a great job with mobile-specific content, please let me know in the comments. I’ll include the best ones in a future column on mobile SEO case studies.

Full disclosure: State Farm is an Omnicom client and a Resolution Media client for paid search.

There are some who would say that there is no difference between desktop SEO and mobile SEO. It’s a topic that often garners friendly debate – Andrew French,  a fellow Mobile Mondays columnist, has even gone so far as to say there is no mobile SEO, just SEO for mobile search.

To me, this is like saying “there is no oncology, just a branch of medicine for cancer.”

On the one hand, yes, oncology is a branch of medicine for cancer, just as mobile SEO is a niche within SEO that deals with SEO for mobile search. On the other hand, if my general practitioner thinks I might have cancer, my next step is not to have him or her diagnose and treat the cancer. My next step is to a specialist, an oncologist, who will help me diagnose, treat, and hopefully remove that cancer.

Likewise, SEO for mobile sites can be done by SEOs, or even webmasters without an SEO background, who apply general SEO principles about accessibility, relevance and marketing to mobile search. But there are nuances and differences in optimizing mobile sites that don’t apply to desktop sites, and some that apply more to mobile sites than they do to desktop sites.

Sherwood Stranieri covered one of these differences in The Mobile Content Dilemma: Brevity Vs. Optimization. When it comes to text on a website, SEOs in general are going to push for more keyword-rich text to convey the relevance of the page to search engines, and Web designers are going to push for less. This applies even more to mobile sites, and it becomes harder to justify the SEO best practice of putting at least 250 words of relevant text on a mobile webpage.

There are different standards for mobile sites because of the different user experience, and SEOs who try to apply general best practices to optimize these sites are generally going to fail at implementation. Someone who has done mobile SEO regularly, however, will understand the nuances and attack the problem with enough precision to make a difference.

Mr. Stranieri’s is one example of a difference between mobile and desktop SEO, but it’s not the only one. In an upcoming seminar, I’ll be presenting 18 differences between mobile and traditional SEO, and there are probably even more than that. Let’s focus on a few of the more crucial differences here.

Google slide from Searchology 2009 on searching the mobile Web

Mobile Web Versus Apps

Mobile SEO is not just about optimizing mobile sites. In my career, I’ve actually optimized more apps than sites, as many companies decide to build an app instead of a mobile site. If you are an SEO, when is the last time you began an SEO project knowing that you wouldn’t be optimizing a site, but a piece of software?

It doesn’t happen very often in 2011, because most marketers are now convinced of the value of putting branded digital content up on the Internet, and allowing potential customers to find it through Google or other search engines, but this isn’t yet the case in mobile marketing.

Some analysts are coming around to the mobile Web, but too many companies greenlight mobile apps without understanding that even the most visible iPhone app only reaches 7% of the mobile population.

If you’re a generalist SEO without knowledge of the apps versus mobile Web debate, you may not know the arguments to make to do SEO in the first place, and you might not realize that apps can be optimized as well.

Mobile Often Uses Different Search Behavior

First, understand that not all mobile users are searching with keywords.

With Google Goggles, Gesture Search, Voice Search, and other mobile-first modes of search, a mobile user doesn’t have to go to the Google home screen and type in a query anymore and that can change how their intent is conveyed. And, sometimes the mobile context is going to change the frequency or type of their needs.

Sometimes searchers use the same keywords, but there’s a different meaning (e.g. coupon that is printed out vs coupon that is scanned from a phone), and sometimes they use different keywords altogether. Google research also indicates that they search at different times and in different contexts than desktop searchers.

To find these differences, you really need to include mobile keyword research as a part of your regular keyword research routine, as looking at desktop keywords exclusively is no longer enough.

Mobile Search Has Different Quality Signals

If you read Mobile Mondays or Search Engine Land regularly, you’ve probably heard of QR codes, which have been called paper-based hyperlinks that have the potential to disrupt your URL strategy. Indeed, QR codes are a separate type of link that the search engines could use to understand how searchers interact with the physical world in order to bring them more relevant content when they search for it.

But it’s not the only type of signal that the engines can use to make a better mobile search experience. Mobile links versus desktop links is another that was mentioned in a Google patent for blended mobile search algorithms, but any of the following could be used to that effect: access through SMS, mobile bookmarks on Android, mobile usage data in Google Reader and Google+, and mobile versus desktop search volume.

Given the similarity of smartphone results to traditional results it’s unlikely that any of these are playing a big part in Google’s mobile search quality at the moment, but given that Google will need to focus on speed, relevance and simplicity in order to remain competitive in mobile search, it’s fair to expect the search results will be improved by any or all of them in near future.

Mobile Search Uses Different Ranking Algorithms

At Searchology 2009, Google Director of Engineering Scott Huffman revealed that separate mobile algorithms exist to provide a better mobile user experience. This was confirmed in a NY Times feature in late April 2011, in which location was one factor that changed the search results for mobile versus desktop searchers.

Indeed, when I looked at smartphone versus desktop rankings for Resolution Media clients in Google Webmaster Tools, I found that there were variations in ranking for 86% of the smartphone rankings studied. I’ve since detailed 14 of these differences in the search results..

Mobile Has Different Levels Of Engagement

Finally, one of the biggest takeaways from Google’s Zero Moment of Truth ebook for me was its discussion of mobile, which Google says is “not ‘the wave of the future’ any more — it’s right now”.

According to the book, “First position matters even more in mobile. That’s true whether you’re talking about search results or ad positions. The digital shelf gets really small on the mobile screen! A drop from first to fourth position on mobile phone can mean a CTR drop off of more than 90%.”

In other words, if you’re forecasting traffic for your SEO campaigns and you’re not taking into account mobile click through rates and mobile search volume, you could be seriously underestimating the number of mobile visits from natural search.

A mobile searcher (compared to a desktop searcher) is highly engaged, but is less interested in scrolling than a desktop searcher. So if you don’t already have that number one spot and you’re not optimizing for it, it could be argued that you’re not really doing mobile SEO, and not really optimized for mobile search.

There are other differences between what’s commonly called mobile SEO versus desktop, traditional or regular SEO. I’ve touched on five here, but I consider eighteen when optimizing for mobile search.

If you’re not also considering differences when doing mobile SEO, you may not actually be doing mobile SEO. What’s more, you may not be doing SEO for mobile search particularly well either.