Mar 4, 2013 at 12:21pm ET by Larry Kim

There’s been a lot of confusion among paid search marketers upset about the lack of device targeting in Enhanced Campaigns. This article will tell you how to advertise your mobile app using AdWords while checking out the new app promotion ad format in AdWords. One of the most common hypothetical use cases for device targeting in AdWords has to do with mobile apps. For example, a mobile app developer who doesn’t want to target desktops because their app only works on say, iOS tablets – it would make no sense for these ads to show up on Windows desktop computer searches. One Search E [...]

How To Do Mobile Keyword Research In 2013

Feb 4, 2013 at 11:45am ET by Bryson Meunier

As promised last month, I’ll be sharing more information about how to do mobile SEO specifically and less about why to do mobile SEO. This month, I’m going to go through how to do mobile keyword research. First, though, a brief explanation of why to do mobile keyword research. Mobile Keyword Research Then & Now One of the primary reasons for doing mobile keyword research is that you could be missing out on keywords that your audience uses on mobile that they don’t use on desktop (e.g., [keyword + “nearby”]). There are some categories, such as restaurants, where upwards of 30 [...]

Comparing Mobile Blog Designs: What Works Best?

Jan 28, 2013 at 12:27pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

One area of mobile site design that is particularly important for mobile SEO is the blog. Blogs get special treatment in search engines, as sources of fresh content and easily-digested RSS feeds. 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 cove [...]

eBay Offers A Mobile Search Shortcut For Online Stores

Dec 31, 2012 at 11:52am ET by Sherwood Stranieri

Last month, I touched on several ways that businesses could use apps as an alternate channel to reach mobile searchers. Online retailers have a couple opportunities to use apps in this way, by tapping into the eBay and Amazon marketplaces. Let's take a closer look at eBay, and some strategies for using it to extend the reach of your existing catalog. 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 advantag [...]

Mobile Search Beyond Google: In App Search Tools

Dec 3, 2012 at 2:49pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

A couple months back, I covered the rise of a new generation of Windows Phones, and how they will slowly bring more mobile search market share to Bing. But, there's more to mobile search than just Google and Bing. 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. [caption id="att [...]

Last Minute Tips To Use Mobile Search To Ramp-Up Holiday Sales & Beyond

Nov 5, 2012 at 12:53pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

This holiday shopping season is predicted to the the biggest ever for mobile commerce. A new survey from Deloitte expects that holiday sales from mobile devices will hit $36 billion this year, accounting for 5.1% of the $925 billion online total. 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 [...]

10 Simple Tips For Effective Mobile SEO

Sep 10, 2012 at 11:33am ET by Adam Riff

There is little doubt that mobile search is the hot topic in the SEO world at the moment. Some brands are now finding that more than 30 percent of all searches come from mobile devices, according to Mobile Marketer. It’s fair to say that mobile search is quickly moving out of the Stone Age and into the digital age. That's the premise of a new insight paper, Mobile SEO Best Practices, published recently by my company, MediaWhiz (disclosure: I lead MediaWhiz's search marketing and digital strategy divisions). In addition to a list of our top-10 tips for effective mobile SEO, the paper offers [...]

Switchboard Tags: Like Canonical Tags, But For Mobile SEO

Jul 16, 2012 at 3:15pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

When Google published their new guidelines for mobile SEO, the item that made headlines was their declaration of responsive design as the preferred option. Last month, I covered the basics on how responsive design works and how to optimize it. 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-do [...]

How To Tune-Up Responsive Design Websites To Improve Mobile SEO

Jun 18, 2012 at 11:45am ET by Sherwood Stranieri

A couple weeks back, Google annouced new standards for mobile website design. Among the practices identified on their help pages, responsive design has been singled out as the best option from a search perspective. Let's look at how responsive design works, and how we can build sites to achieve maximum SEO performance on both the desktop and mobile environments. 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 c [...]

Getting Started With GoMo & DudaMobile, Now Backed By Google Analytics

Jun 11, 2012 at 11:17am ET by John E Lincoln

Mobile is all the rage right now. Just a few days ago, Google came out and said that they recommend responsive design for mobile SEO and now, the Google Analytics division has just launched a new mobile solution. Allow me to tell you about this… Just recently, I received an email from Google Analytics offering me the opportunity to, "Make your website mobile-friendly in minutes, and measure the impact with Google Analytics!" This sounded like a great offer to me, so I decided to explore it further. Basically, Google Analytics is offering a new mobile solution known as Google Analytics [...]

7 Real Mobile Duplicate Content SEO Issues

Apr 30, 2012 at 12:14pm ET by Bryson Meunier

Ask someone who’s new to mobile SEO about it and they’re almost sure to tell you that mobile sites are duplicate content. The fear is that having the same content on two URLs will do the same thing it does in traditional SEO and split link equity and social shares, making it more difficult for either page to rank. 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 [...]

Mobile SEO Is A Must For Acquiring Mobile Shoppers

Apr 23, 2012 at 12:01pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

Owners of ecommerce sites are a pretty observant bunch. The clarity that sales provide (or lack thereof) can make marketing a bit easier to quantify. 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 ap [...]

Building Mobile Landing Pages That Succeed In Mobile Search

Mar 26, 2012 at 12:06pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

Inertia is always a problem when you're starting something new. The start seems like a very tall wall, and we often make that wall taller by imposing a lot of requirements and parameters on what needs to be done. 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 s [...]

Untangling Your Mobile Metrics With Better Redirects

Mar 5, 2012 at 12:32pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

A lot of mobile sites owners have trouble making sense of their metrics. In some extreme cases, they can't track referrals from any website besides their own desktop site, which of course is sending visits their way whenever someone approaches from a mobile phone. The trouble is potentially two-fold: not only is it hard to track visitors, but once Google's December changes take effect, it may be hard to attract those visitors in the first place. One common source of this tracking problem is the series of redirects that make-up the desktop-to-mobile switchboard. Three aspects of this s [...]

How To Best Optimize Your Mobile Site For SEO

Feb 27, 2012 at 10:11am ET by Bryson Meunier

Last week my colleague, Michael Martin presented Mongoose Metrics data that demonstrates that less than 10% of you are mobile ready in 2012. He also presented some pretty compelling reasons for going mobile in 2012, including the Compuware study that 57% of customers would not recommend a business with a bad mobile site, and 40% would actually even go to a competitor with a better mobile experience. 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 yo [...]

7 Key Mistakes That Cost Advertisers ‘Mobile Super Bowl I’

Feb 13, 2012 at 12:57pm ET by Brian Klais

By now, you may have already put Super Bowl XLVI in the history books. But let's remember: this was the first to occur in the post-PC mobile era. (It was supposed to feature my Green Bay Packers, but that's another story.) This was Mobile Super Bowl I: a record TV audience. Half with a smartphone. All watching brands spend $116,000 per second to reach them. During the game, mobile consumers stepped up, delivering record mobile search, social, and video activity. Yet most advertisers looked unprepared, seemingly without a mobile game plan. Many enabled Shazam users to tag commercials, but [...]

Using The Mobile Ratio To Measure Mobile SEO Success

Feb 6, 2012 at 11:44am ET by Sherwood Stranieri

Anyone involved in online marketing has an innate sense that mobile is a big deal. We're never more than an arm's length from our phones, and we have a curious tendency to do everything on them. I once sat in front of a dark, Netflix-enabled flat-screen, watching Netflix on my iPhone. It was just easier, and I had it on, and I could switch back and forth with Facebook, and... ok, maybe I have a problem! In any event, our personal fascination with mobile phones shouldn't dictate our work decisions. And one question that needs deciding more and more these days is around mobile search: [...]

How To Improve Mobile Commerce SEO Using JQM

Jan 2, 2012 at 12:32pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

Last month, I took a look at mobile commerce and the issues that online retailers face when trying to adapt their desktop content (or worse, their offline catalog) to a mobile website. I left-off with a promise to revisit mobile site design, since this can have a big impact on your options for slicing and dicing content to maximize SEO performance. Dim Sum Versus Steak Let's start with user needs. Jacon Nielson recently published a study confirming that bite-size chunks of content are best for mobile users. "When in doubt, leave it out" was his sound-bite takeaway. Given our own personal exp [...]

SEO Considerations For Google Mobile Search In 2012

Dec 26, 2011 at 12:02pm ET by Michael Martin

Mobile search has never been just one result type. It provides different results and presentation formats, depending on whether the search query is from a feature phone, smartphone or tablet. Google has just announced a specially designated crawler for smartphones apart from what it uses currently for feature phones, which foreshadows a deeper divergence of results between the two mobile types, as well as from desktop results. Until recently, the results for the different mobile types has been assumed to be the same as those for the desktop or simply just more Google local results. H [...]

5 SEO Tips To Get Mobile Apps Ranked In SERPs

Dec 19, 2011 at 12:41pm ET by Brian Klais

Retail brands with popular mobile apps are benefiting tremendously this holiday season from prominent mobile app visibility in Google's organic search results. Search for Groupon, eBay, Amazon, Target, QVC or numerous others. Alongside the brand website listing, local listings, and social profiles, searchers are starting to see links to these brands’ iPhone, iPad, and Android app profile pages, right on the first page of Google. These app page URLs are presenting powerful new opportunities to "occupy" Page 1 of Google SERPs for desktop and mobile searchers, with big payoffs. [caption id [...]

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