While it is always growing, smartphone ownership at the end of 2011 was still at only 30% for people in the 55-65 age group, and less than 18% for people 65 and older.

On the other side of the age spectrum, only 38% of 13 to 17 year olds owned a smartphone. If you are doing mobile marketing or even mobile SEO, you can’t just assume that everyone owns a smartphone.

Some Age Groups Are Still Slower to Adopt Smartphone Technology than Others

Doing a good job for WAP is not something I talk much about, because for the most part in the US the big money transactions seem to happen on smartphones, (unless you are selling loads of ringtones or J2ME games, which is totally different because you are working in such volume.)

When you are creating a WAP site with SEO rankings in mind, it is much more about facilitating loyalty and brand affinity than creating a flashy user interface. It is about staying available, and a bit about embracing your less tech-savvy customers.

For sites that need to have mass appeal like news, weather and health sites, it still may be valuable to provide a WAP site that can allow visitors to complete simple mobile tasks and micro-conversions like finding a store location, signing up for an email program or opting into an SMS campaign.

There is a lower chance that they will benefit from Google’s new smartphone crawler so WAP sites may still have to compete algorithmically against the other pages on the site. They may have to stand on their own, and rank well in Google’s WAP (Mobile-Only) Index.

So let’s talk about what it takes to rank in Google’s WAP index. Here is a sample search for ‘cute puppies’ on a generic smartphone, and a generic feature phone (WAP phone):

Cute Puppies Search Results on WAP Phones and SmartPhones

And here are the top desktop results, for your reference:

Compare the Mobile Search Results to this Desktop Search Result for 'cute puppies.'

The first thing that you will notice in all of the results is the cute puppies! The second thing you will notice is that the smartphone results are much more ‘interesting’ because they include lots of Universal results for images and videos.

On the feature phone side it is much blander, but you will see that there are YouTube videos ranking 1^st through 4^th but do not include thumbnail images for the video listings. Only two of those four videos are present on in the smartphone results, but they at least have thumbnail previews with them on the smartphone.

Some of the results are the similar, but there are differences not only in the rankings and inclusion of Universal Results, but also in which sites are there, and which sites are totally missing.

TheDailyPuppy.com ranks 1^st in the smartphone results, but is not listed at all in the feature phone results; same with CutePuppies.net, ranking 2^nd on the smartphone results but not at all on the feature phone results.

Conversely, articles from Glamour, the Sun and Racked all rank in the feature phone results but are nowhere to be seen in the smartphone results. Also, an Amazon eBook about cute puppies ranks 6^th in the feature phone results, but not at all in the Smartphone results. Other than 2 of the 4 YouTube videos and CuteOverload.com, the websites included in the two result sets are actually totally different. (OMG!)

So What Can We Learn?

• YouTube is your friend in mobile search results – both smartphone and feature phone; (especially if the videos are from 2006-weird! (Have there really been no awesome cute puppy videos since 2006?) This is not a mobile phenomenon though; those same videos are ranking in the desktop search too).
• Feature phone users will rely more heavily on accurate title and description tags because there are no images or intentions to distract them. Have a look at the description tags (snippets) on the YouTube videos. You will see that they are not pulled through on the smartphone results but they are on feature phone results, and if you forget them you just look silly (see results 3 and 4 on feature phone)!
• The YouTube results on both phones seem to rely very heavily on the exact match of the keyword queries in the title tag. Only one of the YouTube results has a word other than ‘cute puppy’ or ‘cute puppies.’
• Image results perform really well in smartphone results, but not as well, or at all in feature phone results. This could be because Google Images has updated how their image results display on smartphones, and this technology & code may be too sophisticated or heavy for most WAP phones.
• Facebook landing pages appear to rank better on smartphones than feature phones. My guess is that social pages will become increasingly important in all mobile results, but currently they are not hitting the radar of the feature phone using puppy lovers.
• Having formatted dates appears to be more important in the feature phone results (see the last 4 results), but having keywords in the domain name seems to be much more important in smartphone results (4/10) than feature phone results (0/10).

I had a look, and it is really hard to tell why CuteOverload.com did so well and was the only site other than YouTube to show up in both sets of results. It is a blog with really long pages, covered with huge images and some videos, so it does not seem like a good feature phone result to me. Perhaps like the news stories, it is being given a slight boost because it is in a blog templates with lots of dates?

Obviously this is just one search, and we would have to do many more searches to really know these things for sure, but you will find that the inclusion of Universal listings in mobile search results varies by industry and the propensity for a search to trigger certain types of Universal Results. It should serve as a good reminder to check to see how search results vary on mobile phones as you consider your mobile search strategy.

Al was at the talk in Sydney and let me know that the smartphone bot had visited some of the sites he is responsible for and told me about the initial results. Mantra.com.au is the site we discussed most; iPhones and Androids are now showing the mobile-optimized urls instead of desktop urls in some (not all) searches.

While I am writing this case study up, Al gets most of the credit for his keen observations about the behavior of the bot and its impact on search results. As it may be useful to have a short case study out there, we’ll review the specific case of the smartphone bot, and how its indexing has played out in the Mantra mobile crawling, indexing and ranking.

Keep in mind this is just one site, and other sites may have different experiences with the smartphone bot, but here is what Al and now I have observed thus far.

Smartphone Bot Crawling

As I alluded above, I have done lots of research to see which sites are being affected and which are not. Many of the large sites do not appear to be showing evidence of the smartphone bot yet.

This includes sites like Facebook, Amazon and YouTube, which all still show ‘www’ desktop urls in searches from Androids and iPhones. Either the bot is crawling them and not indexing the mobile content, or perhaps I am not doing the right tests, to generate the mobile results (more on that later).

One of the most interesting aspects of this case study is that Mantra.com.au was crawled by the smartphone bot in early December, according to Al, slightly before the new bot was even announced (sneaky Google!). Al explained that their content has always been crawled quite regularly, and that they did not do anything special like submit a sitemap for the mobile subdomain or set up any special robots instructions, except to disallow content that did not belong in results at all.

The Mantra site is using conditional 302’s to redirect mobile traffic from the desktop pages to their mobile counterparts. Note that 302’s are much less common in traditional SEO, but very common in mobile user-agent detection and redirection, but a 301 would be fine as well.

The mobile optimized urls do not appear to be exact mirrors of each other, though they do match up in the final element of the file name; for instance, a vacation property in Sydney on Bond Street has the following two urls and meta data:

Desktop Url: http://www.mantra.com.au/new-south-wales/sydney-and-surrounds/sydney/accommodation/hotels/mantra-2-bond-street/

Desktop Title Tag: Mantra 2 Bond Street | Sydney Hotels | New South Wales NSW

Desktop Description Tag: The hotel is centrally located close to Sydney attractions such as the Sydney Opera House, Pitt Street Mall, Darling Harbour and The Museum of Contemporary Art.

Mobile Url: http://m.mantra.com.au/buildings/mantra-2-bond-street

Mobile Title Tag: Mantra 2 Bond Street Sydney NSW

Mobile Description Tag: NONE

Interestingly, the desktop title tag and description tags are still present in the mobile ranking, and so far, the only thing that has changed is the replacement of the desktop page url with the mobile page url as shown below.

This is not exactly what Google had promised in the announcement and description of how the bot worked:

Smartphone Bot Mixes Desktop & Mobile Page Info in the SERP

The crawler is relying almost 100% on the 302 redirect without additional signals of affiliation between the desktop page and the corresponding home page. Mantra is linking back to the desktop site with a text link at the bottom of every page, which uses cookies to stick the user to the desktop site, but it is a page-to-homepage link.

This is great, (and obviously good enough for Google) but it might not provide users or engines as much value as a page-to-page link could in the long term. Also, Mantra is not using canonical tags to help associate the mobile versions of the pages to their desktop counterparts.

Al really did a great job maximizing the crawl efficiency on the mobile site by minimizing DUST (duplicate url, same text). Here is what he told me:

“I’ve worked very closely with our in-house developers to minimize unnecessary redirects within the site & every iteration we’re dropping more & more where possible. We’re handling duplicate content using redirects and have currently handled URL casing (force lower case), protocol (can only view a URL in the intended protocol, but need to get that changed to a 301 as its currently a 302) and I’m waiting on another small update to strip trailing slashes via a 301 as well.”

Al also mentioned that he has made sure that the developers were eliminating unnecessary redirects and keeping the mobile code clean and light. He wins the gold medal here because this will all really ensure that all of his mobile and desktop content will be crawled and indexed without slowing the bots down – which is exactly what has happened.

Mantra Group is also using user agent detection to deliver a low-fi version of their mobile websites, allowing visitors using less capable smartphone devices to transact online instead of simply saying “your device isn’t supported”.

Smartphone Bot Indexing

While this has not been stated outright, there has been no mention of a new smartphone index, and historical Google mobile rankings indicate that they think that it is perfectly acceptable to rank and serve desktop pages to smartphone searchers.

This is also in-line with the recent history of Google updates, in which Google appears to be trying to speed up the delivery of their SERPs by not having to query multiple indexes, but instead tagging all entries in one index with specific ‘Universal’ ranking information – exactly what happened with the launch of Caffeine in June of 2010. (Why the separate mobile WAP index still exists is up for debate, but will be covered in another blog post.)

As far as we know, the new smartphone bot is just attaching alternate mobile attributes and meta data to pages that exist in the desktop index.

In the case that smartphone-optimized pages exist without desktop counterparts, these pages are also getting added to the primary Google index, with mobile indicators, to hopefully prevent them from appearing in desktop search results (or at least, that is what has been implied by Google).

Al explained that the mobile-optimized urls on Mantra.com.au were not showing up in ALL searches, and this he supposed was related to the nature of the redirects and the quality of the pages. In his own words:

“What is interesting is that not all URLs that we have specific redirects for seem to show the optimized URL & I’m not quite sure what the driver for that is. I was thinking that maybe Google have a quality signal associated to whether or not they’ll optimize the URL or not. For example, we use the same breadcrumb markup throughout our site but not all sections of our site show breadcrumbs in the search results – which I assume is a quality/link signal not being strong enough for those particular sections of our sites & I was thinking maybe the same sort of thing exists for mobile optimized URLs”

It could also be that not all of the pages have been crawled and indexed by the new smartphone bot, or some other less obvious problem that the smartphone bot found with the redirect, the content or the similarity of the two pages. Illustrations of the differences in indexing are included below.

A Page Affected By The Smartphone Bot

Where the desktop page used to be, the mobile page now ranks in its place. The link goes directly to the mobile property page without needing to be redirected. The listing shows the Desktop Title Tag and Description, but the mobile page url.

The smartphone listing links directly to the mobile optimized page

 A Page Not Affected By The Smartphone Bot

The desktop page is requested from the search result, but the server redirects to the mobile home page because there is not mobile page that is a direct match to this desktop page.

The listing that shows the desktop site is redirected to the mobile home page

Smartphone Bot Ranking

The most interesting thing about the activity and rankings of the smartphone bot crawl is that the results are not universal across the site, and appear to be keyword dependent.

Generic iPhone and Android queries on the brand name or brand+product were still returning the desktop home page url. The category and top level pages did not yet have a corresponding mobile page, so it makes sense for them, but the homepage did have a corresponding mobile page, so this was a bit odd.

In Al’s words:

“While we’re obviously redirecting our desktop home page to the mobile home page, none of our primary brand terms produce an optimised URL for the home page. ….At the moment, I have specific redirects in place for the ‘property’ content and all other URLs fall back to the mobile home page. As such, you’ll get mobile optimized URLs showing for queries that return hotel content such as [mantra 2 bond st], [mantra crown towers], [mantra circle on cavill] but not a generic query like [mantra sydney] or [mantra melbourne] – unless we have a hotel page that ranks for that term as well.”

Also interesting is the changes in the mobile sitelinks, which are sometimes different between desktop and mobile queries.

Apparently, the new smartphone crawler is choosing its own sitelinks, presumably based on their perceived relevance or optimization for mobile users, and including those instead of the sitelinks that are returned in a desktop search, as shown below:

Mobile Sitelinks	Desktop Sitelinks
Site Links Differ from Mobile To Desktop

What I thought was interesting was that some of the sitelinks returned in the mobile SERP with the desktop homepage listed were to pages that did not have a mobilized version, (for instance Mantra Resorts). This also occured when a mobile url was included with sitelinks, the sitelinks did not always go to pages that had been mobilized, shown below.

Mobile Sitelinks

When in portrait mode, there was only one sitelink, but two are displayed in landscape:

One Site Link in Portrait but Two in Landscape, All to Non-Mobile Pages

Desktop Sitelinks

This time, the sitelinks are the same on mobile and desktop, except desktop has one more: 

Three Site Links for Desktop

This is totally baffling, because on one hand, it appears that the smartphone bot is changing which site links appear, but it is not doing it in a mobile-optimized way.

Here is what Al had to say about that:

“I see room for improvement from Google on this front for mobilising the breadcrumb URLs displayed in the SERPs as well. Currently the title links to the mobile URL but the breadcrumb URLs are the same as the desktop URLs, for which we don’t have mobile specific pages or redirects in place just yet. I’d be great in the future if the “Gold Coast” link in the screenshot also linked to a mobile optimized URL (when we release those URLs into the mobile sites). It is possible that could happen currently but because we don’t have those type of pages on the mobile site & therefore don’t have the redirects, the breadcrumb in the SERPs isn’t being optimized yet.”

To me, this seems like a very bad user experience, because searchers expect to be delivered to a mobilized version of the Gold Coast page (reinforced by the title, description and bread crumb trail that are all pulled in from the desktop ranking), but instead are delivered to the mobile home page, where they will not be able to find the Gold Coast page, because it has yet to be mobilized.

In this case, it would be better if Google had left the desktop page link, because at least that has the information that the searcher was looking for. Hopefully this is a glitch that will quickly be fixed!

Conclusion

So that is the data. It does seem like the smartphone bot is a bit quirky, and there are a lot of odd things that are going on. It is odd that the smartphone bot is affecting sites like Mantra.com.au before sites like Facebook and Twitter. Odd that it is not updating home page urls in mobile search results, and results more likely generated by long-tail searches than generics. It’s also odd that it is changing sitelinks but not to make them direct people to pages that are mobile friendly.

Perhaps the new smartphone bot is on vacation somewhere in Australia, relaxing before full-on, logical deployment, but we will have to wait and find out. If you have interesting experiences, or similar experiences, please post them in the comments – we would love to hear them!

Google is still detecting what handset users are searching from, and adapting the results that they send based on the handset; some phones are set up to pull from the desktop index using mobile indicators and phone-specific ranking factors. Other phones will trigger the mobile-only index that has been in play for a long time, serving mostly feature phones, older HTC and Windows Mobile phones and BlackBerrys.

The image below shows the top mobile search results for the query ‘Taylor Swift’ on an iPhone 4, a BlackBerry Curve and a DROID Incredible. The tool allows you to scroll through the results, but we are only looking at what shows above the fold on the search. Try your own keyword searches here, using the mobile search simulator tool.

See the Differences of Search Results on Different Phones

If you look closely, you can see that both the BlackBerry and the DROID Incredible are showing the same first result, which is a bio page on CMT.com, but the iPhone is showing the Official Taylor Swift website first, and a news story from MTV after that.

The next results on the BlackBerry and the Droid Incredible are both a bio page on Last.FM and then TicketMaster concert dates, a music video on YouTube and then Amazon.com for a CD or MP3 purchase.

Conversely, the next results on the iPhone are from Wikipedia, IMDB, MTV and MySpace. It is only after MySpace that you see CMT Artist Profile page on the iPhone, though ranks first on the BlackBerry and Droid Incredible. Rounding out the results on the iPhone, you get a run of social media inclusions, with 2 YouTube videos, Twitter and Facebook, and the last result is TaylorSwiftWeb.net.

When you look at the end of the BlackBerry and Droid Incredible results, after Amazon,  you see VH1, Twitter, Celebrity Gossip.net Buzworthy.mtv.com and m.Zimbio.com, which is another celebrity biography site.

While it does appear that the BlackBerry and the DROID Incredible are getting the same results, they are not 100% the same because of a difference in the ‘Related Searches’ at the bottom of the page.

On the BlackBerry, there are only four related searches included (taylor swift songs, taylor swift biography, taylor swift lyrics, taylor swift albums), but on the DROID Incredible, there are eight (taylor swift songs, taylor swift biography, taylor swift lyrics, taylor swift albums, taylor swift twitter, taylor swift quotes, taylor swift tour, taylor swift wardrobe malfunction). This change could be related to the phone, or it could be a fluke, or perhaps Google is just testing something.

None of the results on the iPhone are from pages on an ‘m.’ or ‘/m’ and I checked to see if the new smartphone bot was honoring mobile redirects on these pages, and it did not appear to have had an effect yet, except for the Wikipedia listing and IMDB. MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, MTV, CMT and even YouTube still did not appear to be effected by the ‘honoring of mobile redirects’ that the new smartphone bot claims.

When you switch from the iPhone to the other two more WAP-like phones, which appear to be pulling from the WAP index, only one of the results on the BlackBerry or the DROID Incredible was on mobile subdomains or subdirectories, though most do include a little green phone that indicates that the page is somehow mobile friendly (ie: Google’s mobile bot could successfully crawl it.)

It is important to know that search results can change from phone to phone, but also that the inclusions and page templates can change too. Different searches trigger different kinds of results, but having content on an ‘m.’ or having user-agent detection and redirection is not the only way to rank in a mobile search.

It appears that the new smartphone bot only has limited deployment so far, so be watching for it in your log files, in the coming months. It still has lots of big sites and social networks to crawl, but it makes sense that eventually we will see a wider deployment of the bot, so you can hopefully expect it to be by, indexing your mobile redirects – hopefully in the next couple months, after it is done with Twitter and Facebook.

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.

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.

In theory, as long as you have strong rankings for your desktop pages on mobile phones, then your mobile pages should soon be benefiting from those rankings, as long as page-to-page mobile redirects are in place.

But that begs the question – what about feature phones?

When you live in a tech-savvy community like most of us do, it is sometimes hard to remember that not everyone has smartphones. In fact, some studies in the US still showed that in June 2011, more than 50% of subscribers had yet to upgrade from a feature phone to a smartphone (See the colorful graph below.)

There are still lots of Feature Phones in the US, but are those people searching?

Conventional wisdom and studies published by other groups all indicate that feature phone users are much less interested in mobile search than smartphone users are. Though it may be irrelevant for many mobile marketers, WAP still has a place in the marketing mix, and there are still some sites that are targeted at driving WAP traffic.

This new smartphone bot creates a conundrum for mobile SEO, because now we know much more about how smartphone rankings are controlled (or will be controlled as the smartphone bot is more widely deployed), but we are still left in the dark about how the search rankings on feature phones are derived.

Most SEO’s don’t realize that Google still maintains a separate index of mobile sites. In fairness, the WAP or mobile-only index has been getting increasingly harder to access.

History lesson:

You used to access it simply by going to m.google.com until they added the mobile dropdown, and m.google.com began to default to showing smartphone results. Finally m.google.com turned into a landing page promoting all of Google’s mobile product offerings, and the mobile search engine was moved to .google.com/m, with the dropdown for mobile-only or WAP phone results or sometimes, just the text link options of ‘mobile’ and ‘classic’ at the bottom of the search page.

All very confusing, but now to get to the WAP index, you basically have to have a WAP phone, know the generic WAP phone search parameters (covered later) or use MobileMoxie’s free mobile search engine indexing tool.

Comparing Mobile Search Results Side By Side

Below is a picture that compares site indexing for m.cmt.com (with no geo-data) on a desktop, smartphone and WAP phone. What you will notice is that the desktop and smartphone results are identical, but the WAP results have different pages included, with a different order, and even a different SERP template:

The URL for the results in the WAP index (furthest on the right) looks like this:

http://www.google.com/m/search?q=site:m.sears.com/&site=mobile

Notice that there are two mobile references in this URL – the first one is the mobile subdomain (/m/) and the second one is a parameter from the drop down, that says ‘&site=mobile’. That is how you know you are looking at the WAP index, a.k.a. the mobile-only index.

If there is just a /m/ then you are basically looking at smartphone results, which pull from the desktop index, which then use adapted ranking factors and a different page template.

Aside from the mobile domain that we are checking, the URL for the smartphone search results only has one mobile reference in the query, and looks like this:

http://www.google.com/m?q=site:m.sears.com/

One of the first things you will notice that is different between the WAP results on the far right, and the desktop and smart phone indexes to the left of it, is that there are session ID’s indexed, even on the home page of the WAP results.

After the homepage, the second page that is indexed for the desktop and smartphone index is the page for the ‘Kardashian Kollection,’ [sic] but the second page included in the WAP index results is one called ‘shc/s/dap-….‘

You can tell from the title tag that the page is actually for the Kardashian Kollection, but a different version of the URL is clearly indexed here. The following pages are all the same, but this is a clear indication of a disassociation in the two indexes.

Here is another interesting example, where you will notice that there are much more dramatic differences in the indexing of the mobile content – more specifically, that mobile content is only partially indexed in the desktop and smartphone index:

Just the homepage and the login page are accessible to the desktop and smartphone crawlers on this site, because eBay has chosen to block the desktop bots from accessing their mobile content.

Though they have no special treatment of the new smartphone bot on their mobile pages, they are actually blocking indexing of their mobile content by the desktop version of Google-bot (it is actually a bit unclear how those two pages that are indexed got there at all, based on the robots.txt file!):

eBay Mobile Robots.txt Blocks Desktop Indexing

The mobile version of Sears, and some other sites we checked that had very similar indexing across all devices had no mobile specific robots instructions, and appeared to suggest no other special treatment for the mobile pages (for instance, with canonical tags or robots instructions in the meta tags).

The launch of the new Google smartphone bot does appear to have impacted some of the mobile-only WAP indexing in a subtle way, making it appear more like the desktop and smartphone indexes, unless the pages are specifically treated differently.

It will certainly be interesting to see if the WAP phone index is preserved, or if it is eventually melded with the desktop and smartphone index. It does seem to be getting some well needed updates; but it is still off there on its own. With no clarification (yet) from Google Mobile, we are left to wonder what will become of it, and how it may or may not be impacted by the new smartphone bot in the future.

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps even more staggering: the growth rate of their mobile traffic actually exceeded their US growth rate last year (17% vs 16%).

With US smartphone penetration now past 50% (likely to reach 65% by year-end), mobile devices are simply how your Facebook profile is consumed!

Meanwhile, for most of the 4 million businesses with Facebook Page profiles, Facebook’s mobile-friendly version acts as the only “mobile website” they’ll have to drive consumers to for the next 12 months or so.

So as consumers and businesses increasingly think “mobile first” about Facebook, here are a few tips to optimize your Facebook to drive more likes, friends, reach, and engagement with mobile users:

Mobile Organic Search

Pepsi's Facebook Profile on Page 1 of Google

Strange as it may sound, your Facebook page has to be easy to find in Google. Mobile searchers aren’t clicking through to Page 2, ever. You need to be on Page 1 for brand queries at the very least.

Here are some powerful tactics to try:

• You already link from your desktop site to your Facebook profile. Include your brand name as your link anchor text, instead of the usual “Find us on Facebook.”

• Include a few choice keywords in your profile name. This optimizes the title and URL of your Facebook profile for keyword matches. (Note: If you’ve got more than 100 fans, you can manually request a change to your profile. But be careful as this could backfire if you overdo it.)

• Take advantage of your Facebook profile’s text fields (like “about” and “description”) to add important descriptive keywords. Be human, not spammy.

  If you’re a local merchant, quote some reviews from your Google Places or Yelp profiles, and let that keyword-rich user-generated content start working to increase the relevance of your profile.

• Link to your Facebook profile from your other social profiles, like Google Plus, Linked-In, or Yelp. As above, always include your brand name in the anchor text on networks that will allow it (eg, Google Plus, Linked-In).

Even Pepsi's #1 Google Listing Drives Mobile Searchers to Facebook

• When linking between profiles, don’t link to your Facebook profile URL. Setup branded redirect “tracking” links instead (like target.com/facebook). Then you can measure how much activity each profile drives to your Facebook, and vice versa. You have no other way of measuring this across third-party sites. It’s especially useful for monitoring crawler activity on your Facebook.

• If you have a new or smaller site, you may be better off focusing on getting your Facebook profile ranking in mobile SERPs than your own website. Do a classic PageRank comparison between your Facebook profile and your website. There are other factors, but you might be surprised by how much more link equity your Facebook page already has at its disposal.

Expect a few bumps in the road though.

Sure there are 155 million “m.facebook.com” pages indexed in Google with more “m.facebook.com” pages being folded into the mobile SERPs all the time.

Yet, Facebook has not yet begun serving mobile-friendly content to Google’s Smartphone bot. And I suspect rollout of Timeline will have some negative impact on crawlable profile content, and organic listing descriptions.

Mobile Paid Search

M&M's Point Mobile PPC at Facebook Page

More and more brands are using their Facebook profile as a mobile PPC landing page.

See the M&Ms example to the side. I can’t comment on their objectives or results, but I assume the campaign is producing better results than driving mobile searchers to their Flash website.

Here are some ways to maximize mobile engagement:

• Connect to the right mobile landing page. Facebook redirects non-logged-in smartphone users to the m.facebook.com “info” page. This will likely change later this year as Timeline is rolled out for mobile users.

  To drive mobile users to some other Facebook landing page, append the appropriate path (eg “?v=photos” or “?v=feed”) to the “m.facebook.com” profile URL (you have to specify “m.”).

• Be aware, when driving searchers to your mobile Facebook, the links often require the consumer to type a login and password to take action.

  Most consumers abandon at this step, which increases your cost of acquisition and lowers quality score.

• However, Facebook is also the most popular app on iOS and Android, and if consumers have the app installed, they’re already signed-in. One method to address this is to open your page on the Facebook app for iOS or Android using URL schemes (Facebook’s is fb://).

  

• To access your brand’s app profile, simply view source on your Facebook profile, and find your “page_id” code. You can then open the app to your “info” page using the scheme fb://profile/{page_id}. Voila!

Here’s an example for Search Engine Land: fb://profile/7138936668.

As you can see, it’s not a regular weblink. To see it in action on iOS or Android, scan the QR shortcut I’ve provided. If you’ve got Facebook, it will open. (Be sure to “like” Search Engine Land while you’re in there!)

It’s a cool trick.

The risk? Some users don’t have the app installed, and some platforms don’t recognize URL schemes. For these users, this produces a worse experience, not a better one.

At Pure Oxygen, we’ve developed technology to help consumers cross over the web-app chasm, using a technique that’s like progressive enhancement for links.

If they have the app installed, it opens the app (signed-in) to the brand page. If they don’t, it opens the browser page instead. The technology is in beta, but these links have already been effectively deployed in PPC campaigns, QR codes, and as web links.

M&M's Facebook on Mobile Web (Left) Requires Login to "Like." The App (Right) is Signed In

As their IPO filing clearly shows, mobile is not the future of Facebook – it’s now. Like water seeking its level, mobile consumers are already engaging brands that make their presence easy to find, accessible, and easy to engage. There’s a lot for mobile consumers to “like” about those that do!