From January 2010 to December 2011 page views grew 700%! Most of this growth happened in 2011. The peak in July is probably related to the tragic events in Oslo at that time. Still, showing that mobile is an important channel for keeping up to date on the latest developments in the world.
Further, the mobile coverage is steadily increasing according to TNS Gallup (Forburker og Media). The weekly coverage is now 34% and daily is 27%.
A while back, I blogged about mobile search and the impact on mobile commerce. There we covered why it is important to be visible in mobile search results. Now we will cover how: Mobile SEO. (You might find that the examples below are all Google, here is why)
To warm up, let us see how Google them selves defines a mobile device:
Traditional mobile phones: Phones with browsers that cannot render normal desktop webpages. This includes browsers for cHTML (iMode), WML, WAP, and the like.
Smartphones: Phones with browsers that render normal desktop pages, at least to some extent. This category includes a diversity of devices, such Windows Phone 7, Blackberry devices, iPhones, and Android phones, and also tablets and eBook readers.
We can further break down this category by support for HTML5:
Devices with browsers that do not support HTML5
Devices with browsers that support HTML5
First, lets look at some of the differences between mobile search an “the other kind of search” (One of the things that IS similar is actually the general rules of common SEO, so I will not cover that in this post).
Different use cases
According to Google, this is a common use case on mobile search:
Further, it goes without saying that mobile users are, well, mobile. This reflects the things they are searching for. Mobile is not the typical tool when googling research for your PhD thesis, to put it that way.
Eric Schmidt illustrates the other differences between mobile- and desktop search well here:
The number of mobile searches for Chrysler, for instance, jumped 102 times during the game, compared with only 48 times for desktop searches. And the number of mobile searches for GoDaddy jumped 315 times, compared with 38 times on desktops.
This shows how powerful mobile SEO is in relation to other advertising. Mobile is where the customers take action.
So given the different use cases, a different user interface is needed.
If we look at the screenshot of Google below, we se that two dimensions are added to the search: 1) verticals 2) location.
Vertical search meaning business sectors, or categories, such as Restaurants, Coffee, Bars, Shops, ATM’s etc. Combining this with location makes sense when you are looking for bars in your neighborhood. Currently, Google search is actually made for moving searchers from the streets and in to your store! One very good reason to get a mobile optimized web site, and continue reading this post :)
Another use case worth mentioning is searching from Google Maps on your smartphone. That is my favorite when traveling.
This is another great example of how important location is in mobile search.
Different ranking
Even if you have a top ranked desktop web site and done your SEO homework, this does not mean that you are ranked high for mobile search too. But it helps, though.
As Bryson Meunier demonstrates below, there are differences in ranking (This research is a few years old…).
What I discovered is that while 13.42% of the queries have the same ranking in desktop results that they do in smartphone results, the great majority of the queries do vary slightly. Nearly a quarter of the listings vary by two positions or more, which in the limited real estate of smartphone screens might as well be page ten. And for a small percentage of the listings, the difference in ranking can be as much as ten positions or more
As noted earlier, location and verticals also have more to say on mobile than on desktop when ranking the results. And there is also mobile search results blending in. Google obviously want to present the users with the most relevant content, so a mix of desktop designed sites and sites for mobile devices are sometimes shown. Provided that the mobile site has implemented the “general rules of SEO”, like using the semantics of HTML, friendly URLs etc., of course.
So what can be done to be more visible in mobile search results? Here are a few tricks.
1. Mobile friendly site
This goes without saying… Make sure your site makes sense to your mobile users.
2. Add your business to Google Places
Get listed on Google maps, and appear in search results when someone is near by is looking for your services.
Adding your self is pretty easy, just go to Google Places to add, or claim your business. Follow the steps required, add some info and you are good to go. Don’t forget; the info you put in, should be carefully edited with SEO and keywords in mind. Further, It would not hurt to get recommendations and reviews on your profile either… Mobile is a social device, so using social networks and interact with your end users is generally important, but might prove more important on mobile.
Another trick to help search engines detect your vital information, such as store location and contact information is to use micro-formats in your HTML markup.
This will help Google and other search engines to put your business on the map. Micro-formats is can also be used for reviews, people, products, events etc.
3. Make sure you site is fast
Rendering speed that is. So if you use heavy images, tons of JavaScript and CSS and generally making the user experience poor by providing a slow site, Google will degrade the site. And speed is actually money:
Bing found that a 2 second slowdown changed queries/user by -1.8% and revenue/user by -4.3%.
Shopzilla reduced load time from 7 to 2 seconds, this resulted in a 25% increase in page views, a 7-12% increase in revenue, and a 50% reduction in hardware
On mobile it is good reason to believe that speed is even more important than on desktop web due to the “burst like” use cases we see on mobile; short but frequent tasks.
Google is listing a few tools to monitor your site speed on their webmaster central. Also, it worth mentioning the HTML5 features local storage and application cache, which will help to make your site even faster.
4. Don’t forget images and videos
YouTube has more than 200 mill playbacks per day from mobile devices and is growing faster than all internal predictions. According to Google, search for images is also a popular task on mobile devices. Therefore it is important to consider how you name the images, use alt attribute on image tags with a relevant description, use captions and maybe even the title attribute. However, the most important thing is what’s around the image on the page it self.
5. Tell Google about your mobile site
The Google-bot is the crawler that collects all the data for Google. Google has many different bots, but for simplicity, we can say they have one for mobile and one for none-mobile.
And, it is worth noticing that the Google Mobile crawler is only used for traditional mobile phone (feature phones) content. So in the search result, feature phones will get nice little green phones next to the urls on the result page indicating that it is safe for a none-smartphone user to click through:
Smartphones gets content crawled with Googles regular desktop crawler assuming that Smartphones can handle desktop versions of websites OK.
Do not exclude any Google bot from your sites, even if it means more load on your servers. A complete list of Google bots you must allow can be found here.
Moreover, if you have separate a mobile site url, remember to redirect both your users and the Google Mobile bot with a 301 permanent redirect.
Submit sitemaps of your mobile site too. So now you need two sitemaps; one for feature phones, and another for “other devices that should support a site made for desktops”. Make sure to link to the sitemap from your robots.txt file.
On your site made for desktop browsing, remember to include this line of HTML in your <head> section:
And while you are at it, use the HTTP header “Vary” to announce that the contents of this page is depending on what User-Agent is accessing the page.
This will tell the Google Mobile bot that there is a mobile version of the site that should be indexed. The Google Transcoder will also honor this.
If your site is not showing up in the Google index, Google highlights a couple of potential reasons why not.
6. Keywords and search suggestions
You should continue to do general keyword optimization just like for desktop web sites. On mobile, however, the “as you type suggestions”, both on the Google mobile search site and in apps, provide useful phrases that should also be included in your keywords. The search suggestions are more widely used on mobile because it is more convenient than typing the full phrase.
A few closing words
I briefly mentioned the Google Transcoder earlier. The purpose of the transcoder is basically to make a site made for desktop devices readable on feature phones. In this process, the site structure, layout and design is completely destroyed. I is highly recommended to take measures to avoid that pages are transcoded. The transcoded page will probably not do any good for your end users anyway.
Those of you who have some experience with SEO, are probably thinking about the “cloaking issue” by now. Cloaking means that different content are served from the same url depending on user-agent. Google takes this very seriously, and if cloaking is detected, the site can be removed from the Google Index.
Even if mobile optimizing is similar to cloaking, Google does not consider this cloaking as long as the Google Mobile bot gets the same content as mobile devices. This is explained in this video from Google.
The same goes for the “duplication of content” issue. Even if similar content is served from two different URLs, i.e. cnn.com and m.cnn.com, this will not negatively affect the ranking.
Read more on mobile search:
Google Webmaster Tools, Mobile
Search Engine OptimizationStarter Guide (pdf)
Google: Making Websites Mobile Friendly
Search Engine Land: The New Mobile SEO: What You Need To Know
Discoverability is a hot potato these days. Number of apps in the various appstores are growing, number of mobile web sites is growing too and more and more people are using search engines, like Google Mobile, to find the stuff they are looking for. I think web search performed from mobile devices is not getting all the buzz it deserves. Here is why.
Google is investing much time and efforts into mobile search these days. Putting “Mobile First” they try to make the search on mobile as relevant as possible to the end user. Yes, this means googling on your mobile will give different search results than googling from a PC. Different rules apply. That means that “your regular SEO tricks” you use on your desktop web site won’t necessarily work on mobile.
In a mini-series of two posts I will cover what mobile search means for your business (part 1) and how to optimize your web site for mobile search, Mobile SEO (part 2).
But first:
How big is mobile web search?
There are no good studies with real numbers describing how big mobile search is. Google won’t tell us anything else than “Mobile search is growing fast”. There are however, a few bits and pieces we can put together to give an estimate to illustrate the impact of search on mobile and the importance of mobile SEO.
First, it is quite safe to assume that Google has 100% of search on mobile (same for payed search) for this experiment.
Next, comScore reported in January 2010 that Google accounted for close to 90 billion searches per month in December 2009. This was a growth of 58% year over year. Let us assume mobile searches is included in these numbers. Even if Google says that mobile searches grew 130% during 2009, lets simplify and say that all of Googles search traffic grew by 58% also during 2010. Then the number of searches is 138 billion. So, how many of these searches comes from a mobile device? Searchengineland.com quotes Google and says that mobile accounts for 15% of all search volume.
Then the number of web searches performed from mobile devices per month is a whopping 20,7 billion. 690 million searches per day, 29 million pr hour. These numbers are probably way too conservative, knowing that Mobile search is growing faster than search form desktop computers!
It goes without saying that being visible in search results on a mobile device is important.
Why is it important to be visible in mobile search results?
However, equally important, or even more important, actually; have a mobile optimized web site ready! More and more end users reaching out to you online, are doing it using a mobile phone.
Google: The mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users
According to Google, and their recent study “The mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users” (*), 81% browse the Internet, 77% search, 68% use an app, and 48% watch videos on their smartphone.
Further, Google also says that every third search from a mobile device, has an intent of finding something locally.
So, the users context is key; location. Users are searching for flower shops and restaurants, not long wikipedia articles about or stock prices. They need to buy flowers for their date, and find a restaurant to take her/him. You know what I mean. But wait! This is commerce! This is actually driving people to spend money in your store!
Here is what Google found in their study:
Nine out of 10 smartphone searches result in an action (purchasing, visiting a business, calling etc.).
24 percent recommended a brand or product to others as a result of a smartphone search.
95 percent of smartphone users have looked for local information.
88 percent of these users take action within a day.
77 percent have contacted a business, with 61 percent calling and 59 percent visiting the local business.44% is shopping
This tells us that Mobile phone users are ready to shop. Jwire found that
79 percent of mobile users are comfortable making purchases on their mobile devices and 50 percent …are confident spending more than $100 on a purchase from their device – nearly 20 percent are even comfortable
Marks & Spencer’s mobile site has even taken single purchase orders exceeding £3,000!
Gartner also believe that mobile commerce will become a hit too:
Gartner expects richer mobile commerce capabilities to expand from native apps to the mobile browser as HTML5 starts to be deployed
Local mobile users are ready to buy
How to take part in this growth of m-commerce? Well first you need a web site that goes well with you mobile users device, whether it is a mobile phone or some kind or a tablet.
Google found that only 21% of Google’s largest advertisers have a website that is optimized for mobile. That’s 79% serving up a less than ideal experience for their mobile customers.
It is no use presenting your users with a huge site with lots of flash on it.
But to get to the finish of this blog, let’s assume that you already have a mobile web site (made by Mobiletech, of course;) )
Key take-aways
21,7 bill searches from mobile phones. Mobile will continue to increase its piece in the search pie chart. And it will happen faster than most think.
Users want and are capable of using their mobile phone to purchase or to do research before purchase.
Most advertisers on Google does not have a mobile optimized user experience and are missing out on this huge opportunity.
As local is so important in mobile search, it makes sense for smaller, local “shops on the corner” to take on mobile too.
The mobile web traffic is increasing very fast! 2009 gave us a 110% increase in Norway. 2010 gave us 150% increase in terms of page views. Unique users increased 73%. For Sweden, number of mobile page views grew by 156% and unique users by 72%.
The above graph shows the increase in unique users in Norway compared to Sweden. (The bump in the Norwegian line is because nrk.no did some wired stuff, so ignore that. You’ll see the reason in the detailed graph below). The numbers are not including all Norwegian and Swedish sites, but only those listed here and here.
Click below to take a closer look at each country.
Norway: Sweden:
These numbers are based on what Mobiletech does together with TNS-Gallup and TNS-Sifo with mobile web statistics in Norway and Sweden. The numbers are freely available. The calculation I have made is not 100% correct down to every single page view, but gives a representative view of the market.
Further, Mobiletech does stuff on our own as well so I have compiled some device statistics:
iOS (iPhone, iPod and iPad) was in the last month of 2010 accounting for 74% of all page views in Norway and Sweden together. Android 24% and Symbian 2%. These numbers are extracted from the top 10 devices which are:
iPhone (all versions) now used for 72% of all page views in Norway and Sweden. Nokia E71 is the only Symbian device on this top 10 list. Another observation is that no feature phones are present on the list.
The Globe and Mail announce it’s successful online and mobile web strategy!
At this year’s IFRA in Hamburg (4-6th October), Angus Frame, the Vice President, Digital Media at The Globe and Mail and Product Director of Mobiletech, Jon Arne Saeteraas, will share the story on how to create and implement working business models for mobile.
The traffic on m.theglobeandmail.com increased 12 times after they installed the Vizrt’s Viz Mobile Expansion (Mobiletech and Vizrt software).
When: Tuesday, 5 October, 15.30
Where: “Trends in Mobile”, Media Port in Hall A.1
The bewildering array of new devices, each with their specific capabilities of screen size, format capabilities and user interfaces, makes it bluntly impossible to deploy a one-size-fits-all content approach to mobile publishing. The sensible method is not to build elements that are specific to a device, but instead create a template based environment that contains policy information indicating how content should be displayed on any device – not just on any one specific device. It is a logical architecture which provides both scalability and flexibility.
The key benefits of the solution is:
Publish once – present content as several publications: web, mobile, iPad
Support for all types of mobile content
Advanced functions for increased usability
Always up to date device database
Use same URL for mobile and desktop site
Enhanced support for Google Android and Apple iPhone platforms
Flexible template system for optimised presentation
Multiple dimension adaptation and segmentation: Device, operator and market
Do you want to know more?
Mobiletech will be at IFRA on booth 1.501, right beside the Media Port, Hall 1.
You can also get a demo of the complete Vizrt Online and Mobile Suite at the Vizrt Booth, 1.410 Hall 1.
Mobiletech has the pleasure giving you the opportunity to try out our mobile web development framework; Mobiletech Frame.
Simply, go to the demo license ordering page, submit the form and you will get an email with further instructions.
This is an offer to all developers out there who want to explore the possibilities on mobile web. Only requirements to get the demo up and running is a servlet container and your favorite IDE. All features are enabled, including tablet support.
A short video from the NAB 2010 show in Las Vegas. The video gives an overview of how Escenic can publish content to hand-held devices as well as desktop devices, all from the same workflow.
Mobiletech has the pleasure of announcing iPad support in our mobile web development framework!
We have discussed the iPad, and whether it is a mobile device or not earlier, and now we have concluded. The user experience is so much better when you handle the iPad (and other tablets) as a mobile device and honoring and utilizing the unique capabilities available. The iPad has, as the iPhone, a touch based interaction model. Hence, a web page made for mouse and keyboard will not work well.
We did a proof of concept together with Escenic for the NAB show in Las Vegas a few weeks back. This proved to be a huge sucess! So now, we have concluded on our discussion; Mobiletech will support the iPad and other tablets out there in our product offering.
The iPad support is avalable in the current release of Mobiletech Frame. Watch the video and the screen shots below.
We published the video from the Mobile Pyramid event last week, but 98 minutes of video is probably more than most of you can chew. So, here is an edited version with the highlights from what The Washington Post have experienced on mobile web so far.
Our friends at PointAbout.com hosted the event “The Mobile Pyramid” in Washington last week. The main speaker was Guy Vidra, head of new media and mobile at WP. Guy talked about the learnings of mobile, mobiletech, iPhone, apps, iPad and much more. Our own Jon Arne Sæterås and PointAbouts Daniel R. Odio also spoke about mobile web and mobile apps.