The penny has dropped. Mobile search marketing is vital for any business, brand or consumer in mobile. The awkward in-between concern of having a great mobile site and it not being found on the mobile web will vanish. What will prevail will be a rich mobile web experience where brands and companies that deserve to be at the top of mobile search results will get there.
Enter mobile search marketing.
Mobile search marketing entertains the mobile web. It is the key way in which mobile sites, brands and services get optimal placement at the top of a mobile search engine results page. Following on from the online space search is expected to be the way in which people discover on the mobile web – just as they do online. This means determining a footprint on Yahoo’s oneSearch, Taptu’s or Veveo’s mobile and video search engines is paramount to any existing mobile marketing campaign.
Mobile search marketing is part three of a mobile marketing strategy. The first stage is to have a mobile concept in your media plan. This usually consists of creating a mobile site. The second stage is to add mobile advertising to your site to give it a revenue stream and also to promote the site by advertising it.
At the moment stage 1 and stage 2 are common. What is missing or at least has been missing is stage 3. Stage 3 has been easy to forget as in the short term mobile advertising campaigns give a mobile site traffic. With the average mobile marketing spend of about EUR 50,000 to 100,000 per month a click through rate with huge promise can be achieved.
This issue however, is that once this super campaign has come to an end – mobile sites, brands and agencies realise that the site looses all of its traffic. But even worse it can’t be found on a mobile search engine result. Therefore, the organic value of the brand or site hasn’t been built.
By adding stage 3 (aka mobile search marketing) mobile brands and agencies can immediately start to reap the benefits of early stage mobile search engine optimisation.
Mobile search engine optimisation can be rocket science. Many brands prefer to use the services of an agency or specialist company. But simple early stage triggers can be used to start the process of mobile SEO.
So how do you start to optimise your mobile business for search?
Mobile optimisation, like online optimisation can come in many forms. Some of it might only be done by professionals but with conviction anyone can start the process to make their mobile site or mobile content ready for the mobile Internet.
Often mobile content providers use services such as the W3C’s Mobile OK and ready.mobi to assess their content’s user interface on mobile. These are excellent and vital tools –but have little impact on SEO. Scoring number 1 (which is very bad) on ready.mobi will mean that the site has a poor user interface but it might not mean that the SEO is bad.
The only way to evaluate your search marketing readiness is to go on to mobile search engines such as Taptu, oneSearch, find.mobi and search for your site.
If the site is there then stage one is complete. If it is not complete what follows is a lengthy and laborious task of registering to mobile search engines. This will force site owners to seriously take a look at the site and in, as few words as possible, describe exactly what the offer is.
This is indeed the hard part as getting it wrong at this early stage can be a costly dilemma. But once nailed, the yellow brick road to early mobile SEO success has been paved.
Stage 2 is about insertion or creation of mobile pages or made for mobile content that can support you site regardless of mobile device or browser. This is critical as mobile search engines love mobile content and in order to rise up the rankings specific mobile areas or pages are vital to attract the right search engine attention.
By the time stage 3 arrives mobile search engines will have started to pick up your site and this is where it gets serious. What will now drive eyeballs to your site is by telling mobile search engines where to go for the best content based on search results. Free standard tools such as metaTXT (metaTXT.org) will help here. But another crucial factor is relevancy. However, tempted you might be; NEVER and I mean NEVER lie or mask your content for search engines. This is a shady move that in the early stage of the mobile web where mobile sites still aren’t indexed can be found and penalised quickly.
Stage 4 will be re-writing the content you spent hours and hours on in Stage 1 as by this time you will see that however hard you worked your offer is often very different to the one written down at that time. What has happened is that you will be found for your company brand or name but for little else. The onus now must change from the brand name to the agenda of the site. Once the title and description of your content has been changed – it’s time for keywords.
Keywords are vital for mobile search engines. They are the trigger for mobile search engines (they can be inserted into metaTXT) if that is being used or placed into the site and page itself.
The tricky bit here is getting the content vs keyword association correct. Overdoing your keywords and creating sentences’ such as “we are the mobile advertising leader, leading in mobile advertising globally. Mobile advertising is our business and we are leading successful mobile advertising business” will not do you any favours. Pick keywords that are out of the box and don’t put more than 10 or 15 keywords on each mobile page.
After that if there is any doubt the world’s first Mobile SEO optimisation wizard is available from www.gomobileseo.com/pro for only EUR 20 per use.
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