Mobile Search Engine Optimization
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If there is one area of certain growth in these troubled economic times, it is the mobile communications sector. And with significant improvements having emerged over the last few years in vital areas such as data transfer speed, screens and content, mobile devices are starting to challenge the PC as an Internet access device of choice. This in turn has raised a key issue in the Mobile Internet space: that of the optimization of sites for mobile devices and search engines.
It's all very well delivering a repackaged version of a standard web site to mobile devices, and most of the presentational challenges this raises have been addressed one way or another. But the fact remains that mobile Internet usage diverges from traditional usage in a number of important ways. The failure of content publishers to understand the implications of these differences for content can only lead to sub-standard mobile sites that run the risk of providing irrelevant material and poor usability. This in turn results in an impoverished mobile Internet experience for users, which impacts take-up and slows down the whole cycle.
It is clearly very much in the interests of content publishers to optimize their sites not just for the mobile user, but also the mobile search engine. This is particularly important when the site contains information of particular relevance to the mobile sector.
Mobile searching is different
The first thing developers need to bear in mind is that there are real differences in the way mobile users tend to search compared with standard desktop-based searching. For example, there are differences in the type of content that mobile users tend to seek out. This content is far more likely to involve an area that fulfills some immediate requirement, such as music or a ringtone, a navigational query, or an entertainment-related question.
In fact, research has suggested that around 50% of search queries from mobile phones tend to fall into just seven key categories: the above three, plus sports, local knowledge, shopping, and reference. Clearly any publisher who deals in one or more of these kinds of data - probably most of them - needs to consider the likelihood that a significant proportion of the site's potential audience could be mobile-based and optimize accordingly.
Another limiting factor that developers should consider is the impact of the form factor of a typical mobile device on how it is used. This can express itself in any number of ways; for example, it is common knowledge that few users navigate beyond the first couple of pages of search results for any given query. If they haven't found what they are looking for by the end of page two they will tend to rephrase the query and start over.
In a standard desktop search environment, which typically returns ten or so results per page, this means that while a front page search ranking is preferable, a top twenty ranking is generally regarded as satisfactory. On a mobile device with its tiny screen, two pages might only include eight search results. This puts an additional premium on search engine ranking for which webmasters need to account.
A third point to consider is that mobile search queries tend to be extremely short, containing fewer keywords on average than their desktop-based counterparts. Data provided by Massachusetts-based mobile search solution provider JumpTap suggests that the average desktop search contains something between two and three keywords, whereas less than 15% of all searches carried out from mobile devices contain more than two keywords. The onus is on publishers to take account of this by ensuring their content is highly focused, relevant, and preferably identifiable by a single keyword.
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