Mobile SEO? Do we need it or not?
-
Hi Guys,
I am about to start to redesigning a new mobile website and am curious if mobile SEO is actually having an affect or not.
The site I am doing the redesign for, already has a very well optimized desktop site and has an existing mobile website with no optimization.
The mobile website is ranking well in Mobile search so I am curious why I I would need to optimize the new mobile website properly, especially when the mobile website has a canonical tag for its desktop counter part?
Love to get everyone's thoughts on this & where they see mobile SEO going in the next 12 months.
-
Is your mobile site ranking as well / at all when searching from a mobile device?
-
Thanks Billy,
That was my thought exactly.
I wasn't sure if it was worth the effort at this stage to vigorously optimize the our new mobile website or to at least put in the basic optimization best practices to be prepared for the mobile optimization and search to really take off.
-
In the market I work (strictly hospitality) I would have to say that our mobile success, of which we have a good amount, is actually based on the desktop websites ranking very well and the sniffer delivering the mobile website to mobile devices. Whether or not this will go on forever, I just do not know.
We expected strictly mobile search to take off in 2012 and optimized our mobile sites accordingly but alas, it is still the ranking of the desktop sites that is delivering the vast majority of mobile visits.... maybe 2013 ?
-
Thanks for your response.
As i mentioned the site I am working on already has an existing mobile website but it only has the basic SEO on it to assist with Search Engines (eg meta data).
I can definitely see the value in having a mobile website to be able to deliver a excellent experience for users on a mobile device (and tablets) and leveraging the wealth of analytic's that come from the mobile traffic.
Currently I feel like this site I am working on is ranking in Mobile search based on the good optimization of the desktop website & our desktop site being mobile friendly!
I am curious if you guys feel that optimizing your mobile website for mobile search is actually having an impact on your rankings in mobile search or if your mobile sites are ranking based on the desktop website?
-
IMO the most important thing is to put yourself in the mobile searcher's shoes. When someone is searching on a mobile device rather than a computer they tend to be in a different mind set - meaning, they are not at their desk at work, they are not relaxing at home; they are waiting for their food to arrive, or standing in an elevator or, god forbid, driving. They want what they are looking for immediately, without any distractions or funneling to other things they 'might' be interested in etc... keep it as simple as you can and get them directly to what they want. As far as optimizing for search, sure and Sankel and Thee design have both given good advice (thumbs up to both of you guys) but optimizing for the users intent can not be overlooked.
-
Depending on your business I would think less of mobile SEO and more of building your local citations. Remember that most people who are using tablets are using it for simple things such as finding a perfect restaurant or finding things to do. Even Yelp is tied to Apple's new Maps system.
Make sure that you're on every review site possible such as Yelp, Urbanspoon, Google local, G+, and all the social networks that are relevant to your niche. -
Hi,
Ya, i think mobile SEO improve your traffic and ranking in mobile search pages. You can make your webpages look better than desktop devices. You can track mobile users by Google analytics. This strategy becomes more popular because many of people accessing our site form their smart phones so if we optimize our site for mobile SEO we can get maximum users and it is best for local business. so i believe it is good for us to optimize mobile website for more read this link it is bets note about the mobile SEO.
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/beginners-guide-to-mobile-seo-11793
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Multi Store SEO Drop
I have two stores (thespacecollective.com and thespacecollective.com/us) and over the past month the keyword rank for the US store had dropped by half, while the UK store is relatively the same. The content is mostly the same, except the US site uses US spelling. I assumed that this would not be flagged as duplicate content because it is the same site, just serving two locations. I'd be interested to hear some thoughts on the reason for this drop and how I might fix it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
301 redirection help needed!
Hi all, So if we used to have a domain (let's say olddomain.com) and we had a new site created at newdomain.com how do we properly setup redirects page to page. Caveat, the urls have changed so for instance the old page oldomain.com/service is now newdomain.com/our-services on the new site. Do we need to have hosting on the old site? Do we need to setup individual 301s for each page corresponding to the new page? Just looking for the easiest way to do this CORRECTLY. Thanks, Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley3 -
SEO - is it site or page
Hi When we're talking about SEO does the search engine only look at the whole site in general or do they look at the individual page when we're talking about SERP? So if you have a keyword "my search term" Does the search engine look at the site first or the page with the term on then rank you or is it the page then the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Business Listing sites SEO
How websites like justdial, askme, indiamart, tradeindia do their search engine optimization? Is it different from normal seo? please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
How do you Hire someone for SEO?
What questions do you ask when hiring an SEO person? What is the most important thing in selecting a company for SEO? Should they be able to make recommendations on changes in your website for seo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Realtor1010 -
SEO from links in frames?
A site was considering linking to us. Their web page is delivered entirely via frames. Humans can see the links on the page, but it's not visible in source. I'm guessing it means Google can't detect the links, and there is no SEO effect, but I wanted to confirm. Here's the site: http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Example links are the Princeton Review and Kaplan on the right sidebar. Here's the source code: view-source:http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Do those links have any SEO impact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
International SEO and server hosting
I'd appreciate feedback on a situation. We're going through a major overhaul in how we globally manage our websites. Regional servers were part of our original plan (one in Chicago, UK, and APAC) but we've identified a number of issues with this approach. Although it's considered a best practice among many, the challenges we'd face doing it are considerable (added complexity, added steps and delays to updating sites, among others). So, we shifted our plan and how are looking at hosting here in the US but to use Akami to deliver images and other heavier data pieces from their local servers (in the UK, etc.). This is how many of the larger companies like Amazon, etc. delivery their global websites. We hope that using Akami will allow us to have good performance while simplifying our process. Any warning signs we should be aware of? Anyone doing it this way and has a good experience/bad experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh-riley0 -
Need some help with a tricky 301
I can't find anything online that deals with this issue. I have a page getting indexed by Google at mydomain.com/widgets and I don't know why. No links to it anywhere. The page it is closest to is mydomain.com/reviews/widgets and so I tried to set up a 301 to point one to the other. The problem is each individual widget review is at mydomain.com/widgets/reviews/products/widget-name and so when I redirect /widgets to mydomain.com/reviews/widgets it also redirects each individual product to mydomain.com/reviews/widgets/reviews/products/widget-name. Is there some way to just redirect /widgets without having it affect each product review? I cannot change URL structure either, nature of the site. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0