Overview

As the number of consumers owning smartphones has increased exponentially over the years, the volume of searches over mobile internet has grown significantly. It is crucial for businesses to consider SEO in their mobile marketing strategies, to ensure that their web sites are found easily on mobile browsers.

There are a number of Mobile Browsers out there and they differ in their supported features. Different mobile Operating Systems support different browsers and some browsers only display mobile websites that are optimized. Refer to this list of Mobile browsers.

Mobile SEO

Here are some key factors that influence mobile SEO that can get your business maximum exposure in mobile search engines.

1. The first and foremost strategy in Mobile SEO is the mobile-friendly website. If a Mobile website is not easy to navigate, driving traffic from Mobile SEO is not effective. Refer to Google’s blog post for tips on building a mobile-friendly website
2. Stay away from the solution that reformats your main site for mobile phones, by running through a third-party template-based system. This solution does not take care of screen rendering for various devices and hence makes it very hard to navigate your site.
3. Consider a fully optimized mobile site that provides key functionalities that are useful for users on the go. This makes the navigation of the site lot easier and provides a much better user experience. This will help you with search engine rankings as well.
4. Techniques to optimize the mobile websites for search engines are not very different from those you have used for traditional websites. You need to follow basic guidelines of SEO such as, Page Titles, Page descriptions & headings, Keywords in headings and text, Outbound links, Search Engine Compatibility, Optimized images (image resolution optimized to fit devices)
5. Generate Sitemap for the mobile site and submit to search engines. This helps in getting the pages indexed in the search engine database.
6. Prevent using the flash that cannot be displayed on iPhones currently. HTML5 is expected to resolve this issue.

However, due to the limited screen size on smartphones, the length of keywords used in mobile search is shorter. Google’s Mobile Keyword Research Tool allows you to set the mobile filter to list mobile relevant keywords.

Conclusion

Mobile SEO is a very powerful strategy that you can adopt and leverage the power of Mobile Search to drive significant traffic to your website. Once you got the attention of Mobile User by displaying high up in search results, your options are many. You can engage the user with other integrated mobile strategies, such as social media marketing, & location-based marketing. This helps build your brand in the Mobile world and in turn your online reputation.

Do you want to explore optimizing your website for Mobile devices? We will be happy to help. Please make an appointment.

About the Author

Kalpana Murthy, President/CEO at WSI Plano, DBA Kriti Web Solutions, LLC. is a Digital Strategist, Consultant, Speaker/Trainer, & Software Engineer who is passionate about bringing affordable technology solutions to businesses to build online presence. Kalpana Murthy is a certified partner with Google, HubSpot, Sharp Spring, SEMRush and other digital solution providers.