Jul 30, 2012 at 2:37pm ET by Aaron Doades

2012 is the year of mobile. Or is it 2013? Or maybe it was supposed to be 2011. Regardless of the calendar year that we’ll end up attributing the explosion of growth to, the mobile tide has been on the rise for some time. This past April, the Interactive Advertising Bureau released a report citing that mobile is the fastest growing media channel, with ad spending up 149 percent in 2011. As mobile continues to grow from a buzzy talking point to a standard marketing approach, it’s worthwhile to take note of some important trends related to mobile search and how they are bound to affect [...]

Responsive Design Alone Is Not Mobile SEO

Jul 9, 2012 at 2:35pm ET by Michael Martin

Finally, Google and Bing have both made it official that for mobile search, it is best to have One URL to Rule Them All, something I have been advocating for over 2 years. At the recent 2012 SMX Advanced iSEO session, Cindy Krum stepped in to represent the "one URL" approach in the session's debate vs the m. strategy. Although the one URL approach with responsive design is preferred by the search engines, that alone is not Mobile SEO. Using responsive design to render for different devices under one URL is a great first step, but that means assuming the same keyword trend and in [...]

Google’s “Voice Assistant” Not Quite Siri-Smart But Most People Won’t Notice

Jun 29, 2012 at 4:00pm ET by Greg Sterling

At Google I/O this week Google introduced spoken search results, which mimic Siri's functionality on the iPhone. Siri had been a major point of differentiation between Android handsets and the iPhone, despite Google's preexisting voice search. The new Google female voice actually sounds less like a machine and more natural than Siri. And there are already a number of video demos favorably comparing Google's "Voice Assistant" to Siri (see below). Since Google didn't give her a name (or not one that we've heard yet), I'll call her "JB" for Jelly Bean. The following side-by-side video belo [...]

Does Google’s Mobile SEO Preference Change Mobile SEO Best Practices?

Jun 25, 2012 at 12:08pm ET by Bryson Meunier

Google did not just tell all of you to make your sites responsive. Actually they did, but that’s not all they said. At SMX Advanced, Pierre Far of Google announced something else as well. Responsive Web design is Google’s preferred option he said, but only if it’s best for a site’s users. You may think this is trivial, but it’s not. Just ask the sites hit by Panda and Penguin how important paying attention to users is for sustainable SEO. Google Gives Clearer Guidelines On Mobile SEO, But Still Some Questions Let’s review. In the overview of Google’s recommendations for smar [...]

Apple Changes Ranking Algorithm For App Store Searches?

Jun 25, 2012 at 10:51am ET by Barry Schwartz

TechCrunch reports Apple seems to have changed how they rank apps within the App Store search results. Prior, having the keyword in your app's name would tend to work well in terms of ranking the app in the app store. Now, according to several app developers, Apple is also ranking the apps based off of download numbers and maybe even reviews. It seems as if Apple is weighing the app names and keywords less in their app store search ranking forumlas. My company has several apps in the market, and I noticed a ranking change for several of the apps. Whereas some of my paid apps that had [...]

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 [...]

Quixey: A Search Engine For The Apps Era

May 7, 2012 at 10:00am ET by Greg Sterling

Are apps just websites in another form? Are they another way to package and sell software? Are they a successor to the "open web." Regardless of where you stand on the issue, the app has made its mark and doesn't appear to be going away any time soon. Many have lamented the rise of apps and the return of "closed" proprietary platforms (e.g., Apple, Facebook). Recently in a widely discussed interview Google's co-founder Sergey Brin pointed to "walled gardens" and government censorship as threats to the established web. He later clarified that the biggest threat to the web was from governm [...]

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 [...]

More (Local) Searches Coming From iOS Than Android — Study

Apr 25, 2012 at 12:58pm ET by Greg Sterling

Ad network Chitika, which regularly publishes findings from activity on its network, has released some data that show owners of iPhones and iPads search more than Android owners. This is a bit counter-intuitive and unexpected, given how prominent search and the search box are on the homescreen of most Android handsets and how deeply integrated Google is into that experience. Chitika "looked at hundreds of millions of impressions between April 8 and 14 and broke down traffic depending on operating system, search traffic, and the type of search query." The company also broke out local searche [...]

AT&T Interactive: More Than 30 Percent Of Searches On Network Are Mobile

Apr 18, 2012 at 6:39pm ET by Greg Sterling

AT&T Interactive released its Q1 2012 "Local Insights Report" (.pdf) earlier today. The report covers search activity on AT&T Interactive's various properties (online, mobile and IPTV), which together comprise its YP Local Ad Network. The data in the report are gleaned from more than 190 million monthly searches across the network. Below are the overall most-searched categories and the fastest growing across the YP Local Ad Network (Q3 vs. Q4 2011): The top mobile search categories are similar but not identical to the list in the graphic above: Restaurants Automotive Movi [...]

App Search Engine Appolicious Introduces “AdWords For Apps”

Mar 27, 2012 at 5:59pm ET by Greg Sterling

Appolicious, an independent apps marketplace and search engine, has introduced "AdWords for Apps": a new PPC advertising system for app developers and publishers. The company says it's the largest independent apps engine and market. Chomp, which was recently acquired by Apple, was its primary competitor (other than iTunes and Google Play). Between iOS and Android there are more than 900,000 apps. App discovery is now a major problem for both consumers and developers -- hence the new advertising option on Appolicious. Chomp was planning to introduce a similar capability and then was boug [...]

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 [...]

Microsoft And Nokia Unify Maps On PC, Mobile

Feb 28, 2012 at 5:21pm ET by Greg Sterling

Microsoft and Nokia announced the fruit of their recent mapping collaboration today. Each company has a blog post describing what's changed and improved (Bing, Nokia). The effort comes out of the companies' strategic partnership in mobile. As part of that arrangement Microsoft is relying heavily on the Nokia-Navteq mapping and data infrastructure. Nokia for its part has made Ovi Maps much more Bing-like in appearance. Essentially the UI has been simplified, colors have been muted and there's an improved "visual hierarchy" at each level of zoom. It's challenging for me to specifically tell w [...]

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 [...]

In Chomp, Apple Gains A Social Search Engine For Apps

Feb 24, 2012 at 10:04am ET by Greg Sterling

Reported first by TechCrunch last night, Apple has paid a reported (but unconfirmed) $50 million for Chomp and its roughly 20 employees. Chomp offers both iOS and Android apps and a desktop site and is dedicated to solving the problem of app discovery. Chomp can either be described as a search engine for apps or "Yelp for the app store," because of its reliance on reviews as a ranking signal and its engaged community of users. The CEO Ben Keighran and his CTO are apparently already working at Apple/iTunes in anticipation of a significant redesign of the app store, using some of the infra [...]

Less Than 10% Of The Web In 2012 Is Mobile Ready

Feb 20, 2012 at 9:36am ET by Michael Martin

Mobile's overall share of Web traffic in the United States has increased to about 9% (according to StatCounter) which is also the same percentage of Quantcast's Top Million sites that are deemed ready for mobile in 2012 according to data from the Mongoose Metrics Data Series. Since there wasn't the same data pull last year, it could be compared loosely to data from Brand Anymore in late 2010, which determined that of 7,000 retail websites only 4.8% were mobile ready - a nearly doubling of the Web's mobile readiness in a year. In the Mongoose Metrics data set, 118,000 of the 1,000,000 [...]

Report: 52 Pct Of Local-Mobile Search Clicks Turned Into Calls

Feb 16, 2012 at 9:42am ET by Greg Sterling

Local-mobile ad network xAd released a treasure-trove of data from Q4 2011 this morning. The US-based information is drawn from mobile sites and apps that run its ads and the related user behaviors that xAd observes. These data are interesting in part because xAd has what is probably the largest network offering local search and display advertising outside of Google (AT&T might dispute that claim). The following were the most frequently searched local content categories in Q4: Ad performance reported by xAd exceeds comparable online CTRs for both search and display. The network s [...]

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 [...]

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