Twitter Cards Image from Marketing Land

Mobile Application Search in both Apple’s App Store and Google Play is frustratingly similar to general online search in the early 2000s — and the tactics used to make them visible in search resuls also closely mirror the SEO best practices from that era.

Searching for and discovering the right apps is a concern for both developers and mobile users, which may recently have been dealt a helping hand from Twitter with its App Cards.

How Do Twitter App Cards Work?

Currently, you need special approval from Twitter for the app card program, although this should be generally available by May 2013.

Once admitted into the app card program, anyone who Tweets a link to a page or pages that you have designated will have an app card added to the Tweet, which is visible to followers when the tweet is viewed on their Android or iOS device.

You can designate a page (such as your Homepage, About, or App page) by including these Twitter META tags in the HEAD portion of the page code, similar to the Open Graph tags used predominantly for Facebook.

Twitter will then link to the appropriate app store based on the device type the Tweet is viewed on. What this means is that the same Tweet will go to the Google Play location of the app for an Android user, while going to the Apple App Store location for an iOS user.

As this evolves past its trial period, it should be a great revenue generator for Twitter as it charges for impressions/clicks; but, why is this necessary with search engines and app stores presently?

How App Search Works Now

App stores, in varying degrees, leverage the following factors in displaying an app from a search query:

How Do These Twitter Cards Help App Search?

Social mentions — combined with the assumed downloads, comments, and lack of uninstalls — will be sure to help the app’s rankings in respective app stores, all the while helping with visibility in standard search.

Now that Twitter has opened itself to be indexed by Google, as well as allowing a direct feed into Bing, these Twitter app card links can be crawled to help increase rankings in the standard SERPs, both as a linking and social mention frequency factor.

This is such a great idea for social platforms from an advertising revenue standpoint that I can envision it being quickly emulated by Facebook and Google+.

From a search marketer point of view, this is also great as it provides added META information to be optimized toward achieving added visibility to apps/products online.

Perhaps next, we can have an App Store for people.

The Trends in Mobile Search session was moderated by Search Engine Land’s Greg Sterling and included Raj Kapoor of Microsoft, Jason Lehmbeck of DataPop, Bryson Meunier of Resolution Media, and myself.

Raj and Jason presented on trends in mobile advertising with mobile use increasing in the evenings and weekends, and how best to leverage Google Enhanced campaigns as well Microsoft Mobile Ads.

Sandwiched in between was Bryson and myself, focusing on mobile organic search trends with methodologies and data.

First, before we talk about the current state of mobile search, I felt we should answer the question: is mobile really important?

Does Mobile Search Really Exist?

Steve Jobs stated back in 2010:

“…mobile device search hasn’t happened. Search is not where it’s at…”

Fast forward two years, and thanks in large part to Android’s dominance, Search is, in fact, the #1 mobile browser activity, according to comScore.

So, now we can affirm that search is a heavy activity on mobile devices; but, how much?

How Prominent Is Mobile Search?

As worldwide mobile Internet usage increases to just over 10% of  total Internet use in 2012, mobile search has grown even faster to a quarter (25%) of all search. At  Covario, we predict that by the end of 2013, a mobile device will be behind 1 out of every 3 searches.

Google’s mobile search crystal ball with Chrome

Toward the end of 2012, I read an interesting article theorizing that Google will be crawling APIs instead of mobile websites in the future.

API means Application Programming Interface which allows software, including websites and mobile apps, to provide direct integration based on functions permitted by the API.

Websites and mobile apps use APIs predominantly to share content including photos and videos from one site to another, for example, posting a Flickr photo from that site or mobile app/operating system directly onto Facebook, as well Mashups. This often includes permitted sharing of personal information to do so.

In this article, Dan Cristo of Catalyst believes APIs are/is the mobile search puck we should skate to, while I feel APIs may ultimately sharpen the search engines’ skates in getting to the best mobile Web “puck.”

How APIs Could Influence Mobile Search

1.  Direct access to information

APIs can provide timely, immediate access to database information, which in turn the search engines can use for real time results. For this to work in scale, APIs would need a uniform standard and either open or express permissions for search engines to access.

2.  Integration signals

The ease of integration APIs provide can be a signal to the search engines as to how popular and trusted it is. The number, frequency, and quality of services using that API can become a metric, in addition to or, in place of text links for ranking that service in mobile search results.

3.  Improved Social Integration

APIs allow mobile applications and websites to easily perform social sharing functionality, which provides an enhanced and direct social signal to the search engines. These APIs are often a means to an end that the search engines can already access either through direct agreements with social sites or with their own services.

Will APIs Become A Dominant Factor In Mobile Search?

There are several reasons why APIs will not likely become dominant in mobile search.

No Uniform API Standard

Today, there are thousands of APIs with XML, the leading data format, and REST, currently the dominant protocol; but, there is no defacto standard a search engine could crawl and easily discern information. As Mr. Cristo points out, there would need to be an agreed standard similar to Schema.org for microformats.

While the Web is consolidating around the open source WebKit browser rendering engine, and HTML5 has become specification complete in 2012, this not only provides uniformity, but speed and rendering through the browser that can ultimately provide a near app experience as well.

Personal Information & Security

To function, most APIs require the user’s permission and placement of a local file as a key to access personal information. Search engines would not be able to access or understand this information without users’ permission. This would limit APIs’ general usefulness as search engines will either get direct agreements with important providers, such as Bing with Facebook and Twitter, or get sidedoor access to that data, such as Google with Google+ and Android.

Not Every Site NEEDS An API And/Or App

Where I strongly disagree with Mr. Cristo is when he replied to my comment on his article with the following statement:

“It really comes down to whether or not native mobile apps will completely replace webpages or not. I think they will eventually, and I think human wearable computers will put the nail in the coffin of the legacy Web, so to speak.”

Creating a mobile app for each platform has a cost, as the major major operating systems, like APIs in general, have different formats; and then, customization for device types would be needed to continually update each combination. A correctly set up mobile website is singularly created and updated to work across all operating systems and device types.

Also, the practicality of creating an API in lieu of a website for mobile, or in general, doesn’t make sense for 99%+ of those currently with websites.

Where Does This Leave Us Now?

An API and native app does make sense for chronically used services/software, but those are few and far between. Most searches are for one off use, which is much quicker for the user to search via the Web as opposed to going to an app store, download the app(s), install, then finally running. For example, on mobile devices, when a user is looking to do something automobile related, s/he uses Web browsing 92% of the time over an app.

I personally see mobile apps, in general, peaking out shortly, as mobile computing power and network Internet speeds become strong enough to remove the need for native software.  Exceptions will remain with robust gaming and productivity tools requiring a native app, similar to the current experience on desktops/laptops.

The New York Times even suggests an App Burnout already underway as 95% of mobile apps are generally abandoned.

In the future, APIs may play a factor in mobile search results, but it would be in combination, not in lieu of replacing the mobile Web.

What do you think, will there be an app for that?

Apparently the U.S. Patent office works on Christmas Day, or simply wanted to offer Google a Christmas gift before the FTC Antitrust case ruling, as it approved Google’s Blending Mobile Search Results patent under USPTO number 8341147 on December 25th 2012.

Let’s take an initial look at the patent to see what it might tell us from a mobile search marketing perspective.

What Are The Key Points?

• The mobile search result quality scores and the generic search result quality scores were generated according to different scoring formulas.

• Based on one or more terms in the search query, the search query is classified as a mobile query.

• The search service also directs the query to the mobile search engine (step 230).

• To calculate the scores, the mobile search engine uses a different scoring algorithm, or formula, than the one used by the generic search engine. Using the search result quality scores, the mobile search engine ranks the mobile search results (step 245).

What Does This Mean For Search Marketers?

Search marketing translation below each point:

Patent Point #1

• The mobile search result quality scores and the generic search result quality scores were generated according to different scoring formulas.

• Based on one or more terms in the search query, the search query is classified as a mobile query.

• The search service also directs the query to the mobile search engine (step 230).

• To calculate the scores, the mobile search engine uses a different scoring algorithm, or formula, than the one used by the generic search engine. Using the search result quality scores, the mobile search engine ranks the mobile search results (step 245).

OK, What Should I Do About It?

You can’t rely on the same ol’ same ol’ desktop SEO practices while mobile search continues to grow, with it already achieving 20% of all search in 2012 according to RKG and Covario’s own studies.

You can address the mobile searchers intent by targeting mobile related keywords separate from the desktop experience, optimally with the use of dynamic serving or at least a different mobile URL.

Each page needs to provide clear signals that it is targeted to a  mobile device, this can be directly called out in its DocType and affirmed in its page size.

Finally, the page must show that it is useful to the mobile searcher by providing concise, to-the-point information, a phone number, the nearest address, and easy social-sharing functionality.

Google Nexus 4 / Mayan Calendar from Peta-de-aztlan, Creative Commons

If you are reading this Search Engine Land column, then you survived the “final day” of the Mayan Calendar as the 13th B’ak’tun resets to 0 like an odometer after 1,872,000 days, and with it, the start of the 5th world, according to Mayan culture.

This 5th world is said to be one of enlightenment, higher consciousness, and great transformation, which in my view, could only mean a concerted focus on mobile…for those that remain.

Perhaps this world could even usher in that Year of Mobile, which is talked about seemingly every year for the past half decade.

Last year I wrote about how to best prepare for mobile search going into 2012 ,which both Google and Bing affirmed five months later, in their preference of the single URL approach.

Bryson Meunier further added to this with a great piece here at Search Engine Land showing facts and data as to what mobile search is to dispel any outdated mobile SEO myths with reality.

So, how do you skate to where mobile search is going, not where it has been, in this enlightened mobile age entering 2013?

Device Intent

A critical piece of a site’s development and the evolution of search engines is discerning the differing intent of a user when searching with the same semantic term, but on different devices.

Truly understanding the user’s intent is not merely a matter of rearranging the deckchairs of visuals with responsive design, but more a matter of steering the ship to that intent with dynamic serving.

Evolution of Man image from Bryan Wright, Creative Commons

Semantic Clarity

A search engine can better understand implied intent if it can better discern a site’s semantic meaning.

Semantic meaning for a site can be better clarified and discerned using markup coding and HTML5 elements, which Google rewards by increasing that site’s potential with rich snippets in its results.

Google has even made this easier with a WYSIWYG markup tool, which puts the correct Schema.org microdata in your code delineating the meaning of your site’s data, to further this expansion.

Spatial & Temporal Awareness

Google wants greater semantic clarity with an emphasis on location and time data, which goes to the heart of a user’s intent on mobile devices.

This location and timing data, Google can use to better the website and advertiser results it displays in combination with data from a user’s actual device.

HTML5, with the user’s permission via the browser, is evolving to provide that access to a user’s location, camera, voice commands, and most all of the devices’ functionality to sites and search engines.

In the interim, this data can be accessed by Google directly from the device itself, as its Android platform is already on 75 percent of all mobile devices worldwide and a near necessity layer on iOS devices for mapping, search, and video watching.

Mobile Survivalist Preparation

This may remind people of another doomsday scenario involving Skynet from Terminator becoming self aware, but that originally was to have already started on August 4, 1997, interestingly, exactly a year and a month before Google incorporated on September 4, 1998.

Just as the actual dates for Skynet’s self awareness in the Terminator series got constantly pushed later in time, so too, will the Mayan calendar’s end; but, today’s reality of mobile search is what people should really prepare for to survive online.

This underscores why it is critical for auto manufacturers, local dealerships, reviewers and local automotive resources to render their sites properly for nearly half of their current traffic, but to also be at the forefront of getting higher visibility for an ever-increasing share of mobile searchers.

Automotive Mobile Search Data

Just before Thanksgiving, in partnership with Nielsen data, Telemetrics released an insightful study on car-related mobile searching. The study revealed the importance of focusing on mobile SEO vs. standard desktop SEO, or being dependent on mobile apps with these key points:

• In the release (but not that I can discern from the actual report) it states 15% of auto consumers were using mobile search back in June 2012. As of November 2012, the query car on phrase or broad match in Google’s Keyword Tool reveals over 30% of the searches are coming from mobile devices.

• Mobile car searchers are using the Web over apps 92% of the time.

• Car searching is only an occasional habit, thus doesn’t necessitate users to download an app for chronic use.

• Online auto users can be broken down into:
  • Car researchers
  • Car deal hunters
  • Gear heads
  • Circumstantial or emergency car users

• About half the smartphone searches are looking to purchase a car within a day.

• 63% of mobile car searchers will click on an ad if it provides a discount or mobile coupon.

Automotive Mobile Search Results

For actual year-make-model automobile searches, the mobile percentage of search queries jumps to around 40%, such as for the 2012 Mitsubishi Eclipse. The site type most used by all car searches are informational, with the top two being Kelley Blue Book and Edmunds.

Let’s look at the results:

Desktop Results

Mobile Results

Automotive Mobile SEO Takeaways

• In this case, the top results on desktop and mobile are essentially the same, sans the ads on mobile that aren’t present on desktop.

• None of the top sites use an m. subdomain in the results themselves or resulting destination page, but a single URL for mobile.

• Mobile search has shorter display character limits for the Title and Description — for Mobile, the Title Tag should be up to 55 characters and Meta Description 100 characters for visibility purposes.

• Responsive design does not allow differentiating Title Tags, Meta Description or content on the same URL… but Dynamic Serving does, which Google approves and saves in load time.

• Both Kelley Blue Book and Edmunds are using dynamic serving.

• Edmunds varies the Title Tags on its mobile version pages to focus on review terms, while KBB looks to be in transition for its 2012 Mitsubishi Eclipse page as it just has “SEO Landing” in the Title Tag on the mobile page vs. “2012 Mitsubishi Eclipse — Kelley Blue Book” in the desktop version.

• Both sites’ search results are currently depending on their desktop serving, but are providing different mobile Meta information to put them ahead as Google refines its mobile results going forward.

Mary Meeker just recently accelerated her prediction on mobile Internet growth and with it, mobile search, as Google must adjust its results for differentiating mobile searchers’ intent and needs. The past may be prologue; but, having your finger on the search pulse, you can discern where mobile search is going.

At the recent 2012 SMX Advanced iSEO session, Cindy Krum stepped in to represent the “one URL” approach in the session’s debate vs the m. strategy.

Although the one URL approach with responsive design is preferred by the search engines, that alone is not Mobile SEO.

Using responsive design to render for different devices under one URL is a great first step, but that means assuming the same keyword trend and intent applies to all devices.

This article you are reading on Search Engine Land uses simple responsive design via the WP-Touch plugin for WordPress, as it simply changes the presentation for smartphone viewers while retaining the exact same content and the exact same Meta information targeted toward desktop searches…this approach works fine for news and blogs.

For products and services, the search behavior and intent changes, as a user searching for a product on a laptop is more inclined to be looking for the best price and shipping options while the same search on a mobile device has the intent of looking for the closest location and whether it is in stock there – this is when true Mobile SEO is needed.

Understanding user intent on different devices is even more important now that singular keyword search terms have increased nearly 20% from last year and long tail terms are decreasing according to a recent Hitwise report.

The key to Mobile SEO is to make sure, along with adjusting the design and content to focus on each device type’s search behavior and intent, that it is further amplified in your Title Tag and Meta Description (as well triggering the proper DocType) under that one URL, using dynamic serving* rather than just a responsive design approach.

This can be accomplished by using dynamic serving on the same URL as Google details how to properly setup this approach. A developer is even trying to coin the term as the RESS method – Responsive Design plus Server Side components – with his own templates. There are plenty of open source templates that do the same thing as it would allow HEAD section flexibility with responsive design while reducing load time.

As a commentor in Tony Wright’s recent article stated, “I know people from some agencies who talk about things like Mobile SEO for instance, and have NOT implemented any of the best practices or even had good quantifiable case to prove their points – yet they are “experts” in the matter.”

So now that proper design and practice have been clarified for Mobile SEO, in my next article, let’s look into actual implementation and achieving higher rankings in smartphone vs. desktop search results.

*Editors’ Postscript: After the initial publication of this article, Google provided the following statement to clarify the difference between responsive web design and dynamic serving, which are actually two different configurations that Google supports:

Both of these configurations serve requests from smartphones and desktops on the same URLs, and the difference between them is:

1. If the site serves the exact same HTML to both smartphones and desktops and uses only CSS to change how the site looks, this is called responsive web design.

2. If the site serves different HTML to smartphones and desktops, or uses client-side Javascript to change the HTML, this is called dynamic serving.

What Are The Mobile SEO URL Options?

1. Same URL or One URL strategy
2. An m. subdomain
3. A third party site for mobile pages
4. A .mobi TLD

Why Is The One URL Strategy Better For Mobile SEO?

With the large enterprise companies we work with at Covario, our position has been to recommend the one URL or same URL approach over the m. subdomain.

The one URL approach for mobile has also been recently echoed as a preferred choice by both Bing officially and Google unofficially.

This approach requires user agent detection to trigger different rendering of the page based on the mobile device type which can also include the DocType and HEAD section of the code. Google specifically affirmed this is not cloaking back in their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

The key is to change these sections for feature phones and smartphones as Google has two different mobile crawlers for these devices since the search results between feature phones and smartphones do differ from each other, as well as from the standard desktop search engine ranking results.

To be proactive, it is best to do this as well for tablets and TV rendering, which should get specific crawlers from the search engines in the near future.

In the end, why is this single URL approach better for mobile SEO?

• Link empowerment since all the link equity would be consolidated into one URL
• Mobile URLs rarely have much link equity on their own
• A URL being in an m. does not inherently have any advantage in mobile search
• Google and Bing have both affirmed its not cloaking to show different content on the same URL for the different mobile device types
• There is no need to create a subdomain every time there is a new device type
• Results in reduced load on your web server; and
• Definitively establishes a direct relationship of the different mobile renderings to your desktop instance

When Is An m. Subdomain A Better Option?

Using a subdomain for your mobile rendering is a close “1B” option to the one URL strategy and could be the preferred direction in many circumstances.

If you are only going to have a limited mobile site that doesn’t have a one-to-one relationship to your desktop instance, then having a subdomain for mobile would make sense.

Also, if your site already has a long established mobile subdomain the advantages of bringing it to the one URL does diminish.

The disadvantage is that you would need to have user agent detection on both your www- desktop instance as well your m. mobile instance to properly redirect the user to the other based on their device.

Then, you would need that user agent detection on the mobile subdomain to trigger different mobile content on the same mobile URL for feature phone and smartphone users.

Finally, you would then need to create a subdomain for each future device thus a tablet. subdomain then a tv. subdomain and possibly in the future a car. subdomain or appliance. subdomain.

There are of course, differing views on the one URL strategy, including that of my fellow columnist Bryson Meunier, who does prefer the the m. subdomain over the same URL strategy overall and I’m sure he will further expand on his position why in a future post.

Why Use A Third Party Site For Mobile Or A .Mobi TLD?

Using a third party site for your mobile pages such as Google’s mobile site service should only be a stopgap solution until you can capably provide mobile pages under your own domain, which is SEO 101.

As far as an SEO reason to use a .Mobi TLD for your mobile instance, the answer is the same to any inferred advantage this TLD has in the mobile results…none.

Since there wasn’t the same data pull last year, it could be compared loosely to data from Brand Anymore in late 2010, which determined that of 7,000 retail websites only 4.8% were mobile ready – a nearly doubling of the Web’s mobile readiness in a year.

In the Mongoose Metrics data set, 118,000 of the 1,000,000 sites could not be crawled for a variety of reasons, resulting in approximately 882,000 sites that could be used for this data.

As 79,133 sites either rendered a mobile version on the same URL or redirected to a mobile version of the site under a different URL when a smartphone user agent was detected, this number dropped to 76,241 when a feature phone user agent was used.

Interestingly, these sites used a JavaScript mobile redirect more often for feature phones than smartphones.

The two user agent types being used were the same that Google uses to determine a site’s rendering for the two mobile phone types.

Why this is important is due to consumers preferring a mobile website over an app for price comparisons, reviews and actual purchases on their mobile device, according to the results of Adobe’s Mobile Experience Survey in 2011, which means they are most likely to use a search engine.

When a consumer does click on your site in the search results, over half of these potential customers would not recommend a business with a bad mobile site and furthermore, 40% would then visit a competitor site after a bad mobile experience on yours.

Some tips were provided here at Search Engine Land to understand and prepare for mobile search in 2012.

Is you site ready for the estimated 1 out every 4 searches in 2012 coming from a mobile device, or are you part of the 91% of sites that aren’t?

You can see mobile results directly from your desktop for feature phones at http://www.google.com/xhtml and for smartphones at http://www.google.com/m, but the rankings don’t quite correlate to what you would actually see on those device types.

So how can one qualify those different mobile results without having to do an actual search on those different types of mobile devices themselves?

An easy way to do so is by masking your desktop browser’s user agent by using the User Agent Switcher plugin on Firefox.

For a features phone, you can use simply use the feature phone user agent Google uses for its mobile crawler:

SAMSUNG-SGH-E250/1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Browser/6.2.3.3.c.1.101 (GUI) MMP/2.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Feature Phone Google Results

For a smartphone, you can use simply use the smartphone user agent Google uses for its mobile crawler:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Smartphone Google Results

Then you can use a rank checker within FireFox such as the SEOBook Rank Checker tool to gauge how you rank in feature phone, smartphone and desktop results.

You will see some similarities, but you will be amazed when you see actual ranking differences from desktop to feature phone to smartphones.