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% […]
“2012 will be the year of the tablet,” said Kenshoo CMO Aaron Goldman in a recent Search Insider column. With the figures he’s seeing, it’s hard to disagree with him. According to Goldman, 7% of all online sales Kenshoo saw over the holidays came from a tablet, and “Of the sales transactions completed via mobile, […]
Happy New Year to my fellow mobile search enthusiasts, and welcome to another exciting year for mobile search! It seems every year about this time consultants and pundits like me become clairvoyant and share their wisdom with those of you who lack the capacity to see beyond the daily planner. While I usually avoid such […]
Not too long ago, the article Mobile SEO is a Myth got a lot of people fired up about the foolish notion that mobile SEO is a construct developed by salesmen to sell more SEO services. I responded in the comments to the author’s points, and have addressed this point in multiple articles over the years, so […]
Earlier this month Google announced Go Mo, clearly labeled as “a Google Initiative”, as though it represents the official Google position on the value of mobile content and mobile sites. But what is the official Google stance on mobile sites, search and SEO? Will having mobile content help in search results? Many people will claim […]
If you read this column on a regular basis, you may think that Google is the only game in mobile search. The fact is, SEOs optimize for traffic, and Google is the mobile search market leader, so it is often the focus of our mobile optimization efforts. But it’s not the only game in town. […]
I’ve spoken a lot in these columns about the differences between mobile SEO and desktop SEO, often warning webmasters to do more than just reformat their desktop content for smaller screens. But if you’re in the process of creating a mobile site, you may be wondering what to put on your mobile site that’s different […]
One of the questions I get most often about mobile SEO is this: I’m already doing SEO– do I really need to do mobile SEO separately? What’s the difference between the two? There are some who would say that there is no difference between desktop SEO and mobile SEO. It’s a topic that often garners […]
You may have read in SEOMoz a few years ago that link building is unnecessary for mobile rankings. When it comes to smartphone search engine results, data suggests otherwise. When I took a random sample of 11 of the most popular mobile queries and examined the characteristics of the top 5 Google smartphone results for […]
For those of you expecting me to make good on a promise from my last column to continue the theme of how mobile is changing SEO with regard to link building, look for that next month. Since Google’s Inside Search event had a mobile theme, I think it’s more important to address the implications of […]
Many analysts are making the case for separate device targeting in mobile paid search these days, but due largely to the subtlety of the differences in natural search results, too many SEOs are under the mistaken impression that desktop and mobile SEO are one in the same. Because this ignorance affects all of us by […]
When you write a monthly column on how mobile impacts search and social, it can be easy to forget that most businesses still aren’t thinking about mobile as something that impacts them today, and aren’t really planning for a future in which most of our online activity will take place on mobile devices. For the […]
Last week, I was on a panel at a CTIA pre-conference show in Orlando, and a question that was asked during several sessions at the conference was “what should we invest in: a mobile site or a mobile app?” I heard this same question in a panel I was on at Digiday Mobile in September […]
My Google Reader feed went haywire with “mobile SEO” alerts when Google posted their “Making Websites Mobile Friendly” advice on the Google Webmaster Central Blog. The odd thing is, they didn’t say anything about SEO or search quality in the post, which has to do with how Google crawls and indexes mobile websites today. SEOs […]
Raise your hand if you’ve had to choose between mobile and social for your emerging media budget this year. Budgets sometimes have a line item for social and a line for mobile, but in truth, sometimes it’s difficult to tell them apart. Case in point: this past week Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said “My sense […]
Often, when people in the industry talk about the two sides of SEO, they’re talking about black hat and white hat tactics. Having worked as an SEO since 2003 and in Internet marketing since 2000, both with Fortune 50 and mom and pop businesses with business goals as different as night and day, I think […]
Happy new year everyone, and welcome to the year of mobile! I’ll pause to let my mobile colleagues stop laughing, as the year of mobile has been an industry joke since at least 2005, if not before. Did you know O’Reilly declared 2005 to be “the year of local mobile search” in March of 2005? […]
Usablenet is one of the most popular mobile web platforms available, because they provide a turnkey solution for businesses that are looking to take advantage of mobile web traffic. According to their web site, they have built mobile solutions for over 300 companies, many of which are Fortune 100 companies like Dell, Delta Air, Walgreens […]
In mobile SEO I straddle two industries: mobile marketing and search marketing, both of which contain smart people with good questions about mobile search. I think there’s a widespread desire in both camps these days to handle mobile SEO in a way that is not only going to be beneficial to brands today, but will […]
One of the great things about SEO is the almost scientific way the community approaches the unknown to discover something true that they can apply to their sites. This applied to desktop SEO more than ever in the early 2000s, prior to SEOMoz’s first ranking factors study, when pioneers in the field experimented with their […]
If you still think mobile SEO is only about WAP pages and the mobile Web, you may have been living under a rock since July 10, 2008, when Apple launched their App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch. This week they announced their 1 billionth App download, and many out of work programmers are wondering how to become the next App Store millionaire. In the new world of digital content optimization (also called digital asset optimization by some) content can and should be optimized to make it more visible on many popular platforms, including the App Store. The few articles that I’ve seen on App Store SEO seem to focus on more black hat techniques like keyword stuffing with unrelated keywords, but there are white hat ways to get your content to the top of Apple’s App Store search engine as well
Recently there’s been a lot of ‘mobile web is dead’ talk due to several ‘full HTML web’ announcements at Mobile World Congress (MWC), and response to a pragmatic Sitepoint article aimed at casual webmasters with limited budgets, so I thought it would be a good time to address this question that people have been asking […]