In the mobile space, blogs are also one of the few areas where users expect to find lengthy text — so, the pressure to abbreviate content for a small screen gets dialed back, making blogs even more useful for mobile SEO.

Cobblers’ Shoes

To take a closer look at the different approaches available to mobile marketers, I decided to look at the blogs of mobile phone manufacturers. As a writer covering the space, I visit these sites pretty often, especially when they discuss future trends in the mobile Web.

Today, we’ll look at four companies, and how they illustrate the full spectrum of investment that you can make in a mobile blog.

Starting At Number Five

Apple: One would expect that the leading innovator in mobile phones would have an excellent blog, especially when viewed on my iPhone 4s. But, that assumption gets dashed on two counts: 1) Apple doesn’t have a blog (!) and 2) their closet match, the news room, is a pinch-to-zoom nightmare, even by pinch-to-zoom standards. Also, the title tag is a rather terse “Apple – Hot News.” Thanks to this astounding effort, Apple earns a #5 in our list of four companies.

Samsung: As the runner-up in most conversations about mobile, Samsung has the next-worst mobile experience of the group. At least they have a blog for the company, and even one dedicated to their mobile developers. But once again, it’s time for a magnifying glass. Perhaps the large screen on Samsung’s Galaxy Note would be useful here.

Honorable Mention

Nokia marks the tipping point. Not only do they have a blog, but it’s formatted for mobile! And, it’s frequently updated with a wide variety of topics. Their posts also get piped out to Google News, and show-up when searching for info about the company or specific phones. Areas for improvement? The headline-only home page discourages exploration, and the post titles aren’t well optimized. A post about “mobile maps” that just mentions “maps,” for example.

And The Crown Goes To…

Motorola produces a mobile blog that is not only friendly to searchers, but the bottom line as well. The home page shows full-length posts, right-sized images, and titles with product keywords prominently displayed.

The big surprise is how easy it is to get from here to actually buying a phone. Models mentioned in these posts are linked to product pages, and from there, you can click through directly to Verizon (in the case of Droid models) and see pricing. That’s content to transaction in two clicks! That’s money in Motorola’s pocket (and kudos to Verizon for not throwing-in a zip-code request to spoil the party.)

Motorola knows that content marketing sells smart phones, and makes it easy to actually buy one from a smartphone.

Lessons Learned

It’s really about a willingness to cater to your customers. All these companies obviously know the mobile space, and know the limitations of the mobile Web. And ironically, all of them are deeply involved in mobile search, via products like Apple’s Siri, Nokia Maps, and Samsung’s S-Voice.

But, knowledge without intent results in missed opportunities. Nokia and Motorola see the opportunity to reach customers through their own devices, and that speaks volumes about their willingness to provide a good user experience – not just for their blogs, but in their actual products, too.

Starting At The Desktop

Before mobile was part of the equation, there was a well-established practice for leveraging eBay for online retail. Of course, it goes without saying that many retailers use eBay as their sole storefront, taking advantage of the existing audience, feedback scores, and shipping options to make DIY selling pretty easy, even for the novice.

But, when retailers start expecting heavy business, eBay’s fees and commissions start becoming painful. For many product categories, the combined eBay and PayPal fees can approach 15%.

For this reason, high-volume sellers often elect to run their own stores on other platforms. But, even these retailers will sometimes keep a toehold in eBay, to get access to their huge audience and drum-up some brand awareness.

Toeholds In Mobile Search

It’s this toehold strategy that translates well to mobile. For a successful store with a conventional desktop-oriented website, jumping into the mobile market is a daunting task. The three biggest questions facing you:

• Is there a market for my products among mobile shoppers?
• How do I reach those mobile shoppers?
• What will be the upfront and ongoing costs?

In short: will it be worth the effort?

The toehold strategy can help you get past this roadblock. As with desktop-based retail, eBay offers access to a huge audience, and the comScore numbers for their mobile activities are just as impressive.

The fee structure that causes so much heartburn in a desktop scenario still applies here – unlike PPC advertising, there’s no price break for posting products on eBay Mobile. But, while eBay’s cost equation won’t change in this situation, yours certainly will.

Even the largest online retailers make use of eBay to expand their customer base. Buy.com currently has nearly 1.6 million listings on eBay.

Why Buy The Cow…

The biggest hurdle to reaching mobile customers is making your store mobile friendly. If you were lucky enough to build your store on a platform that supports mobile from the start – great! You may only need a few content tweaks to optimize your SKUs for mobile shoppers.

But, many platforms aren’t mobile ready, and so, Web development costs need to be factored in. As we all know, quality development work isn’t cheap, and that applies doubly to mobile development.

This is why eBay’s fee structure suddenly makes a lot of sense. You get a mobile storefront and instant access to a large audience of shoppers, all without the upfront planning and investment that a mobile website would require. Suddenly, that 15% doesn’t sound so bad.

Best of all, eBay gives you the ability to start early, see how mobile shoppers react to your products, and run experiments to see how you can meet their needs. With those learnings in your pocket (and some revenue, too) you can make more confident decisions about your next step in mobile retail.

The app stores for iOS, Android and Windows offer countless of downloadable apps that offer built-in search engines. Some of these apps are from major players in their respective verticals and may have a more direct impact on your business than the general search engines.

Let’s look at a few business types and the apps that provide good search opportunities.

Apps offers another path for search marketers looking to get their businesses onto mobile screens. Shown here are search results from the eBay, YouTube, and Yelp apps.

For Retailers: eBay, Amazon

According to a new IBM study released last week, 25.3% of Thanksgiving Day traffic to retail sites came from smartphones and tablets.

Putting a subset of your inventory on one of these sites can be a great shortcut to reaching mobile users. True, there’s a fee structure around transactions in these markets; and, outside of mobile, you might have a hard time justifying that extra cost. But, when it comes to mobile, participating in these markets avoids another, much larger cost: the investment needed to build a mobile-friendly store of your own.

For Travel Or Fashion: YouTube

If you’ve been on the fence about using video to promote your business, mobile usage could put you over the edge — way over the edge.

According to YouTube, mobile devices now account for a quarter of its traffic. Combine that with the fact that YouTube is the second most popular search engine (that’s right — it beats Bing!), and the result is a search box that can bring a lot of viewers to your content.

This approach is a great way for any business where the visual aspect of its offering is the primary selling point to get on mobile phones. (Trying to brainstorm ideas for video? Start here.)

For Restaurants: Yelp, OpenTable, Siri

I’ve written about how mobile websites can play a key role in attracting diners. But, native apps can be another path to the same goal. For example, Yelp recently released metrics around mobile usage, which now accounts for 40% of its activity.

Other Local Businesses: Apple Maps

Despite all the criticism of Apple’s new mapping function, this app will eventually take over the iOS ecosystem. Since iOS users are the most active shoppers in the mobile space, this will become a major factor for businesses that attract a local clientele. Andrew Shotland has a great review of Apple Maps’ search functions, including a list of the databases these functions tap into.

Your Holiday To Do List

So, if you have a mobile store up and running, you’ll want to make sure your mobile store is ready to attract, inform, and convert incoming shoppers. Here are some great tips from past columns that should be part of your to-do list:

• If you have a responsive design mobile site, you’ll want to take a second look at the Tune-Up post from June. Responsive design websites are ones where the same code is driving both the desktop and mobile experiences. Definitely a good way to go, but using this kind of one-size-fits-all approach can lead to issues with long downloads.
• If you’re hosting your mobile site as an m-dot subdomain, you might see better performance, but will have a tougher time measuring it accurately. Check out the post on mobile search metrics to get up to speed on common pitfalls.
• M-dot sites will also want to take advantage of the latest switchboard tags offered by Google. These tags are essentially the mobile equivalent of the canonical tag: they tell Google which mobile pages correspond to your desktop pages. This helps get the right pages listed in the mobile SERPs, leading to a better user experience and increased sales.
• A second look at the keywords used on your product pages could be beneficial. Aside from the obvious choices — product names and their equivalent generic terms — you’ll also want to consider review-type keywords and (for electronics and B2B) part numbers. Check out this post on mobile retail strategies for a deep dive.
• Holiday travel is the busiest time of year, and businesses need to be aware of the differences between desktop searchers and mobile searchers. Check out this post on mobile search for the travel industry to see how restaurants, tour guides, and other destination businesses can attract tourists.

Responsive design can be a great way to use one website to satisfy both mobile and desktop users. But care needs to be taken to prevent long downloads.

Planning For 2012/2013

There are a couple other trends to watch for that won’t impact this holiday season, but are sure to play a role in next year’s shopping landscape:

• As Apple sells more iPhone 5 and 4s models, Siri will continue to grow in popularity and capabilities. Learn more about Siri’s preferences and quirks, including its lack of reliance on Google, in this post from last October.
• Siri isn’t the only thing steering attention from Google. Microsoft is making a big push into mobile phones this fall, and will put all its marketing muscles into the new Windows Phone 8 platform. As you might expect, all the preset search functions point to Bing rather than Google, so this is likely to spread search traffic more evenly across the engines. Definitely something to watch as you plan PPC budgets for next year.

But from a mobile search perspective, iPhone 5 is pretty much more of the same.

A more effective version of Siri will be standard in the new phone’s iOS 6 – but that was a game changer from the iPhone 4s.

iPhone 5 has certainly caused a sales storm, pushing more smartphones into more pockets. But from a marketer’s perspective, that’s old news: the smartphone installed base is already growing by leaps and bounds, so an added leap (or bound) doesn’t change your outlook on the industry.

New Players Could Change The Game

The launch of Nokia’s new Windows-based smartphones earlier this month was eagerly anticipated by… not nearly as many people. But it may have a more measureable impact on the mobile search space, because it heralds the launch of Windows Phone 8 on a device custom-built to accomodate it.

Microsoft is once again running its playbook: Use market muscle to introduce a product in a new space. Then fine-tune it until it becomes relevant and useful to a broad audience. Windows, XBox, and Bing all grew-up in that house, raised by a parent that gave them plenty of time to mature.

With the arrival of Windows Phone 8, Microsoft’s mobile OS is finally hitting prime time. The refinements have been made, the apps are available, and now Nokia is making devices that literally match the OS (right down to the on-screen tiles matching the color of the case.)

Why Do We Care?

The reason, of course, is that Microsoft is bundling Bing into every nook and cranny of the new WP8 phones. Not just a search widget, but a bevy of functions working to bring useful information to the phone’s owner. Some of the more significant ones to marketers include:

• Bing Local Deals, drawing deal info from partner Scoupon.
• A search box available from the lock screen, enabling more spontaneous searching.
• Nokia City Lens: An augmented reality feature for walking through a city, with everything in view of your camera tagged to idenfity what and where they are. Very much like the Yelp Monocle in their iPhone app, but built in as standard equipment.

Nokia City Lens is the first use of augmented reality that will be standard equipment on a major phone release.

Of course, as with any phone, you can install the search engine of your choice when you activate and configure your new phone. But with Bing’s tight integration in the device, and the fact that Bing holds its own against Google for relevant search results (*especially* in a messy post-Panda world) it’s likely that a lot of WP8 users will leave the defaults intact, sending a lot more mobile search traffic to Bing.

The Past Repeats

We’ve all seen this before: Microsoft defaults to Bing in a number of applications and web properties, and Google of course plays this strategy with Android and its default search box. So is this innovation? Nope.

But does it shift mobile search activity share to Bing, with every percentage point of market share that WP8 wins in the next 12 months? Absolutely.

This is good news for mobile search, and search marketing in general. Having a single player in search – even one as proficient as Google – is not healthy. With Bing’s new lifeline into the mobile world, we’ll see a more balanced distribution of searches, leading to more efficient PPC campaigns and (hopefully) a less Panda-rific SEO landscape.

• Yelp recently shared that mobile usage now accounts for 40% of their activity, up from 27% in 2010.
• According Groupon’s CEO, 30% of all transactions on Groupon’s platform are now attributed to mobile device use, and those usage levels have tripled in just one year.

Given these trends, it’s very likely that we’ll see restaurant search hit the tipping point in the next 12 months, with more mobile-based activity than desktop-based.

Keyword Trends Tell A Similar Story

If we look at the top-20 restaurant searches by volume, we see a similar story developing:

As mobile searches increase, the Mobile Ratio (a comparison of mobile to desktop search volumes) drops closer to the 1.00 mark, signaling that traffic levels are equalizing. These July numbers show user activity that agrees with the trends reported by Yelp and Groupon.

How To Order The Right Dish For Mobile

With mobile search rising in importance, you want to make sure you spend the next few months aligning your online activities with mobile, to get in front of this audience as they switch over to phone-based searches. A few ideas for restaurant owners:

• The next time you redesign your website, think seriously about a website design that is “mobile-first” – a phone-friendly website that also will work fine for desktop PCs. Most websites do the opposite (at best) but in the restaurant category, he market favors mobile, so your site design should, too.
• If you’re not ready to redesign yet, be sure that your homepage has a clickable phone number, with driving directions one click away. This is good common sense for all customers, phone-based or not.
• Should you do an app? Probably not – you want to be found by both new customers and old. Apps are great for keeping in touch with established customers, but only if you need to interact with them a lot. Domino’s pizza-delivery app is a prime example of that – they expect frequent business, and use the app to automate the process. If you just need to take reservations, then…
• Make sure you get listed in the search engines that phone users rely upon. Google Places and Yelp are the prime candidates, and if you have the right systems in place, OpenTable can be a big advantage in getting spontaneous bookings.
• Google’s Mobile AdWords can be the best money you spend this year. If your average table brings $100, you might spend $20 on twenty dollar-clicks to get a call for a booking. Maybe less, if you’re outside a major metro area. That’s a lot better than giving half your receipts to Groupon.
• Encourage customers to submit Yelp reviews, and suggest that they mention the specific dishes ordered by the table. This will help down the road when iPhone’s Siri becomes a bigger source of traffic and bookings, due to the fact that Siri lets you search by menu item (“Siri, who serves ravioli?”)

But the second option Google discussed got lost in the headlines: increased support for purpose-built mobile sites located on m-dot subdomains (e.g. m.brand.com. ) This type of site had previously been flagged by Google’s Matt Cutts as being the favorite from a usability standpoint.

While Google now favors responsive sites, their support for m-dot sites hasn’t gone away. In fact, Google introduced a new set of tags to better address the switchboard functions that are needed for this type of website.

How To Implement Switchboard Tags

Google provides two options for tagging mobile and desktop pages to create a connection between the two, ensuring that indexing and link equity and are shared between counterparts that are – from a marketing standpoint – interchangeable.

One way is to flag the relationship within your page code, by inserting tags on each page. Taken from Google’s developer pages:

Google created a set of tags to replace the old redirect-based switchboards that were used to shuttle users to the version of the site matching their device.

The other method relies on labeling you can add to your XML sitemaps. Take a look at the sample below, you’ll see elements that resemble the tagging shown above. Also note that you’ll still need the canonical tag to appear on your mobile page:

Google also provides a method to switchboard your mobile pages using your XML sitemap.

Do I Still Need Redirects?

Prior to these tags, mobile best practices required the creation of a switchboard, consisting of agent-based redirects that sent users to the right destination.

But while Google (and presumably Bing/Yahoo – see below) will use switchboard tags to guide incoming searchers, that still leaves your traffic from other sources.

Let’s say you have a link to your “www” address on Wikipedia, and an iPhone user clicks on it. The tags won’t help you here, because Google isn’t part of the transaction – it’s referral traffic, straight from another site.

The best way to find out if this is an issue for your site is to look at referral traffic in your metrics.

How many mobile users are landing on your desktop site? How about vice versa? If this spillover traffic exceeds, say, 10% of your referrals, you probably have a solid business reason to put redirects in place.

What About Bing & Yahoo?

Bing actually beat Google to the punch on this issue, coming out in favor of responsive design last year, saying that one URL for all users works best.

What Bing did not do is provide a proactive measure for webmasters to implement in their mobile sites. But they’ve collaborated on industry standards before, specifically on sitemaps. So it’s likely that Bing will also adopt these tags for future updates. And since Bing powers Yahoo’s search engine, that should create a consistent standard for the U.S. search space.

A Quick Recap Of Responsive Design

If you’re new to the mobile space, you’ll find that there are three approached to mobile site design: 1) build a brand-new mobile site, 2) use your existing desktop website (which smartphone users can read using pinch+zoom), or 3) build a new website that looks good on both desktop and mobile screens.

Responsive design is a way of accomplishing the third option. Webpages can be equipped with style sheets that look one way on the big screen, and can reshape themselves to fit the small screen. The most sophisticated designs can adjust a lot of properties on the page, including fonts, icons, and menus.

The important thing to remember about responsive design is that it looks different to users on different devices, but uses the same page URLs and coding to deliver content to all users.

Travel Light Or Pack Everything?

The challenge with responsive design is that we now have to look at our desktop website in a new light. Obviously the visual differences will be significant, but these are handled by style sheets.

For a great example of this, look at Starbucks.com on your desktop Web browser, and then shrink the size of your viewing window. The site will literally transform before your eyes, collapsing elements and making them fit on a smaller screen. So visuals can be dealt with.

Coding is another issue. The code for this page never changes, regardless of screen size or device. Over the years, desktop webpages have become fully-equipped apps, with tons of extra code included to handle menu animations, tracking pixels, form submissions – you name it, it’s got it. We’re talking source code that often approaches or surpasses 100kb in size, with images easily tripling that.

From a desktop perspective, this isn’t anything to worry about. Broadband dominates the US market, and it’t getting faster every year. But if we try to experience this webpage on a mobile phone, we’ll have issues. That 300kb download is now being pushed through a 3G or 4G connection. At their best, these networks can handle 300kb, but in busy neighborhoods or during peak hours, they can slow to a crawl.

It’s a throwback to the early days of dial-up Internet, when you had to account for every second of download time. Impatient users, forced to wait for a long download, can lead to high bounce rates and lost business.

Tools like the Blaze.io mobile speed test can help you visualize download times, and identify elements that could be downsized or consolidated.

Slimming Your Website Down

To reverse the trend of ever-expanding code is impossible, because the functionality that comes with it is too useful to forego, even for mobile users. But there are steps that can be taken to minimize the impact on mobile users.

As a happy side effect, these suggestions can also speed-up the desktop experience, reducing hosting costs and improving response times:

• Resize images the right way. Style sheets can give you the ability to shrink a photograph to fit the mobile screen. But the photo’s image file will still be as heavy a download as it was for desktop users. Make sure that your style sheets select a different image file for mobile users, one that is pre-shrunk size-wise, and pre-compressed in terms of kilobytes. 50kb is an ideal to shoot for with photos; 5k for icons and buttons.
• Consolidate external files. All that functionality is usually powered by an array of external scripts that must be called into the webpage. The size of the files is one consideration, but the sheer quantity of files can also be an issue. If possible, consolidate all CSS into one file. Same with JavaScript. Fewer downloads mean fewer server calls and less waiting for mobile users.
• Consolidate styles. Webpages have become very sophisticated graphic design documents, with rules dictating every font, margin, and border. Often, these styles have been developed over time, and often include redundant information info that could be consolidated. For example, if every element on your page is rendered in Verdana, that can be applied at a macro level, and not repeated with every element. Clean styles result in a smaller style sheet.
• Go light on the libraries. Standard JavaScript libraries like JQuery can be a huge help in developing functionality. But in many cases, you’re using only one or two functions and downloading an entire library of tools that aren’t used. If isolated functions are needed, copy them into your consolidated JS file and avoid the lengthy download.

With these changes in place, you can have a responsive design site that continues to satisfy the desktop users, while providing a fast-loading experience that will keep mobile users happy.

There isn’t a need to tie promotional activities back to branding metrics, or tricky-to-quantify engagement on the site (“Do we want more page views, or do less views mean the site delivered on the first try?”)

Thanks to that clarity, store owners keep a close eye on their data, and have probably seen mobile devices show-up on their radar a lot more than they used to. Combine that with the buzz around smartphones, and the idea of a store app quickly becomes a topic at the conference room table.

And rightly so. Smartphone users are a highly motivated crowd, and for the time being they represent an audience that is somewhat more upscale. But a smartphone can’t deliver more than the eye can absorb on a 3-4 inch screen, so usability becomes a paramount concern.

Hence the appeal of an app: nothing delivers content with the ease of use and instant response that a native app can provide.

Apps Drive Sales, But What Drives Downloads?

So an app becomes the centerpiece of your new mobile marketing strategy. But is it the whole strategy? To have your app make a dent in sales, you need to get it into people’s hands. There are lots of ways to accomplish that, but simply making a great app and releasing it in the App Store won’t do the trick.

And so it’s time to go back to your metrics – they may be trying to tell you something. Are your new customers coming from search? And is that activity centered around product searches – items you stock that they want? For many store owners, the answer to both questions is yes.

If that’s the case, then you have a great channel for promoting your app, staring you in the face: a mobile-optimized website.

For a lot of companies, having an app and a mobile site might seem like an unnecessary duplication of effort. But when you look at customer acquisition, you can see the value of having your site become a more effective tool for getting first time customers to 1) buy from their phone and 2) download your app for that second purchase.

Or even for the first purchase: if you show customers know that you have a product in stock, plus other products they may be interested in, the positive experience may persuade them to download right now.

Keeping Your Mobile Website Focused

How do we produce a cost-effective mobile site when dollars are already being spent to develop an app? The key here is to focus on the mission at hand: acquiring customers through product search.

Again, back to your metrics: your incoming traffic is probably driven by a handful of top products. So the process of building a mobile store doesn’t have to be a heroic effort to replicate your 1o,000 SKU inventory. Focus on the top 100 products, and use mobile SEO to make those pages perform well in searches for those product names.

Key Features For Mobile SEO

• Mention the product name in your HTML page titles (as you probably do on your desktop website.) But keep it short: Google Mobile only gives you 55 characters to work with (versus 70 for desktop.)
• Re-process your product images to get the files down to the smallest possible size. 50kb JPEGS are an attainable goal if you’re careful with the compression. Google looks at download speed, and factors it into search results.
• Conversely, resist the urge to downsize your product copy. Try to package it as bulleted lists to make it more digestible on a small screen. But don’t leave out details that contains keywords that your customers might use.

Image compression software can help optimize your site for mobile SEO, producing high-quality images that download quickly.

Then decide what the next step should be. Should “Buy Now” be your call-to-action? Should it be “Download Our App”? Or maybe a button for each?

A-B testing will provide the best answer for your particular audience. Either way, you’ve got that mobile user in your store, looking at your inventory, and getting to know you – probably for the first time.

With a coordinated strategy in place, your mobile website can help drive new buyers to download your app, increasing its reach and building a mobile customer base that will come back again and again.

Mobile marketing must seem that way to a lot of companies, and as a result, far too many of them are sitting on the sidelines. Fortunately, there are a few vendors out there offering a shortcut to the mobile Web:  a turnkey publishing platform that allows a marketer to quickly deploy mobile landing pages.

The question is: how effective are these pages in the context of mobile search?

The Case For Mobile Landing Pages

Turnkey landing pages are usually considered because of special circumstance:

• Budget. When most dollars get spent to support desktop sites, the remainder may not actually be enough to support a full-blown mobile effort.
• Direct response campaigns. Sometimes a media campaign concept drives the need for mobile landing pages to catch the resulting traffic. QR codes at trade show booths, mobile offers sent via text, and even plain-old PPC ads can drive the need for a quickly-built mobile site.

The systems available to deploy mobile landing pages change every month. So rather than single-out a single platform and dissect its features, let’s look at the factors you’ll want to keep in mind when evaluating and using these services.

Laying A Foundation

The first thing you’ll want to investigate is whether or not these landing pages can be read by a search engine. Here are a few features to look at closely:

• Dynamic Pages. Some turnkey systems use dynamic pages to quickly create pages that can respond to campaigns or even individual ads. Dynamic pages include lots of parameters in their URLs, and can cause problems for mobile search, just as they do in the desktop world.
• On-Page Coding. Mobile landing pages sometimes use special coding to create a seamless app-like experience. I’ve talked about JQuery Mobile in the past, and there are other frameworks such as XUI, JQTouch, not to mention plain-vanilla JavaScript. These schemes don’t get a 100% thumbs-up or thumbs-down – it depends on how they are used. The key is to ensure that your landing pages are actually composed of distinct pages, instead of a single downloadable page with a chameleon-like ability to alter its content.
• Navigation. If your turnkey site is built to catch campaign traffic, it may just be a collection of free-standing landing pages, with links to connect them to each other. If that’s the case, you won’t benefit from the SEO support these pages would lend to each other. Furthermore, without nav links, you may lose a connection back to the home page, which typically has the strongest SEO scoring.
• Flash. Flash is not usually employed on these sites (thank you Steve Jobs) so that’s one less thing to worry about.

Getting There From Here

Looking at all the points above, you might get the impression that optimizing your mobile landing pages will be an end in itself. And it partially is: you’ll be living with them for a while, so it’s worthwhile to see what sort of SEO performance can be extracted from it.

But you can also take a broader view. If the turnkey site and its campaigns are successful, it’s likely that more mobile projects will follow, including the creation of a more comprehensive “official” mobile website.

With that in mind, your turnkey site can be considered a precursor, one that can be used to lay a foundation for the construction of a future brand presence.

A bit of preparation can help to make that happen:

• Domain Name.  Try to anticipate the URL that will be used for your future mobile site. If you can start using that URL today, you’ll create a footprint that will help search engines discover your next website more quickly. Conversely, you should talk to your vendor if they suggest a URL based on *their* domain name, because you may lose access to it when you transition to your next mobile website.
• Recyclable URLs. What works at the site level also works at the page level. Choosing locations for landing pages that will echo the page locations of a future website will also help smooth the transition. Granted, it’s hard to predict what your future site will look like, but for basic pages like “About Us” or pages promoting on your bread-and-butter product lines, some predictions can be made.

Your short-term mobile landing pages (left) may not have as much content as your future mobile website (right.) But the more they resemble each other in structure, the better your mobile SEO will be down the road.

Altogether, mobile landing pages are a great tactic for getting yourself into the mobile space. And with advance planning, that short-term success can be leveraged into an asset that can feed into successive projects, creating a win-win for both mobile search and your time-to-market.