How useful is a mobile version of your site (for SEO sake)?
-
We're investigating a mobile version of our e-commerce site. Is it worth the investment regarding search engine optimization, or is this something that wouldn't have a big effect?
-
I doubt if phone users are serious buyers. I would make sure you have a lot of other things in place before worring too much about making money from phone users. If you have the 98% under conrol, then you can spend time and effort chacing the remaining 2%
-
Hi. I posted an answer a few days back that might help:
Google serves up the same results to smart phones and desktop computers. What they recommend is use the same site and use the style sheet to control the mobile display. In other words, not making a separate site for mobile. Here is a snippet from a Google & A.
John Mueller - @Paul If you have "smartphone" content (which we see as normal web-content, as it's generally a normal HTML page, just tweaked in layout for smaller displays) you can use the rel=canonical to point to your desktop version. This helps us to focus on the desktop version for web-search. When users visit that desktop version with a smartphone, you can redirect them to the mobile version. This works regardless of the URL structure, so you don't need to use subdomains / subdirectories for smartphone-mobile sites. Even better however is to use the same URLs and to show the appropriate version of the content without a redirect :). Here is the entire article where I found the snippet.
The other option would be to make the mobile pages and canonical those back to the corresponding main site pages. This way you don't have duplicate content and you have more SEO juice flow to the main site.
In my opinion, I wouldn't even worry too much about "traditional" cell phones. I found since the beginning of the year, on STP, we've only had 1 or 2 sales via dumb phones and only a fraction of traffic compared with smart phones.
-
Mobile browsing and shopping is on the increase, so this will probably be worth doing at some point. It may be easier to judge if now is the time if you go into Analytics and see how many of your visitors are already using mobile devices and whether you are seeing growth in this area. If you haven't already read it, this post is worth a look http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-for-the-ipad
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
-
SEO - Google Local Listing & Same Day Delivery
Hi We are looking to offer same day delivery if you're in a 20 mile radius to us. I'm trying to do some research on how to optimise this for Google organic listings. Would this be the same as optimising for a local business listing? I'm not sure where to start. Thanks! Becky
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Do we take a SEO hit for having multiple URLs on an infinite scroll page vs a site with many pages/URLs. If we do take a hit, quantify the hit we would suffer.
We are redesigning a preschool website which has over 100 pages. We are looking at 2 options and want to make sure we meet the best user experience and SEO. Option 1 is to condense the site into perhaps 10 pages and window shade the content. For instance, on the curriculum page there would be an overview and each age group program would open via window shade. Option 2 is to have an overview and then each age program links to its own page. Do we lose out on SEO if there are not unique URLS? Or is there a way using metatags or other programming to have the same effect?
Algorithm Updates | | jgodwin0 -
Why does my site dissappeare from the top 50?
Hellow I am having some problems with my site www.kondomanija.si. It was ranked on the first page for my main KW kondomi (in www.google.si, Slovenia) but now it is not in the top 10 pages. And this has happened before, it drops out of the top 10 pages and in a cople of moths it is back for a short time (till it drops out again). It think the site has a week link profile... Could this be the reason? Does anybody know what is going on?
Algorithm Updates | | Spletnafuzija0 -
Large number of thin content pages indexed, affect overall site performance?
Hello Community, Question on negative impact of many virtually identical calendar pages indexed. We have a site that is a b2b software product. There are about 150 product-related pages, and another 1,200 or so short articles on industry related topics. In addition, we recently (~4 months ago) had Google index a large number of calendar pages used for webinar schedules. This boosted the indexed pages number shown in Webmaster tools to about 54,000. Since then, we "no-followed" the links on the calendar pages that allow you to view future months, and added "no-index" meta tags to all future month pages (beyond 6 months out). Our number of pages indexed value seems to be dropping, and is now down to 26,000. When you look at Google's report showing pages appearing in response to search queries, a more normal 890 pages appear. Very few calendar pages show up in this report. So, the question that has been raised is: Does a large number of pages in a search index with very thin content (basically blank calendar months) hurt the overall site? One person at the company said that because Panda/Penguin targeted thin-content sites that these pages would cause the performance of this site to drop as well. Thanks for your feedback. Chris
Algorithm Updates | | cogbox0 -
SEO Budgets, the million dollar question???
Hi All, I am currently looking to revamp my SEO strategy inline with Google's latest Panda and Penguin updates, and looking to appoint a new agency. With SEO changing so much over the years and so many players in the marketplace quoting all sorts, I simply need to determine the kind of money I need to be spending on my SEO, 2) what i should be getting for the money, or different budget levels what I need to be focusing on in priority order, a top ten in sorts Should i be looking to increase or decrease my spend over the long term. I am only a small business with a turnover of about 50 - 80k and need to really cement my strategy so it work long term but also shows a steady return. I have one guy quoting $99 a month, one £250 and one £750, you can probably see my problem. Thanks in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | etsgroup0 -
Bing SEO?
I've put in a lot of time on my site to make sure it is full of good relevent content and has a healthy back link profile. I rank well on google but not on Bing. How do I go about optimizing my site for Bing and what does Bing look for that makes them rank sites differnetly than google? Also what other search engines should I be looking to optimize for? As a note I am a Realtor with a Real Estate website.
Algorithm Updates | | bronxpad0 -
Youtube, Video SEO, & my site
For our business we are building a collection of videos ranging including product info, how-to's, and some funny content. My understanding is that if you embed these onto my site from youtube you don't get any credit for these videos on the web site even if submitting a video sitemap. My thinking is to post these videos to youtube and to host them on our own site and submit a video sitemap including the videos on our site. We would change the name, description, etc. on youtube vs. what's o our web site. Question is - is this the best strategy? Do I get penalized for duplicate content? They are important for both the social aspects of youtube and the content vaue of our web site.
Algorithm Updates | | uwaim20120 -
Localised Hosting is Good for SEO - But How Local?
Hi SEOmoz community, A UK based client will soon be opening an office in the USA. We have advised them to create a new website specifically aimed at the US market, primarily because the way you talk to your potential customers is slightly different than here in the UK. However, this has also raised the question of hosting. Of course we'll be advising them to host their new US site in the States, however does it matter where? For example, if their office is in NYC, would it matter if their hosting was based in Dallas? I.e. does Google rank sites hosted in a US city / state higher for localised searches? Interested to hear your thoughts - thanks for your time! Mark
Algorithm Updates | | RiceMedia0