With mobile sites now becoming such an important part of your SEO, it’s now becoming more crucial to ensure your mobile sites are designed for web traffic specific to a smartphone.
As Monte Huebsch points out, users accessing your mobile site will be searching for different reasons than on a desktop. You need to be ready for that and ensure they can find what they’re looking for.
“If somebody is looking for a restaurant on a mobile device, what I really want to know is if there’s parking, if I can look at the menu. I don’t really want chef reviews, or any of the other crap.”
“It’s time sensitive stuff. If I’m going to a mobile site, it needs to be tied into a resultant service.”
The way your mobile site is designed affects your SEO, these experts say. Make sure you create a mobile-tailored service for your customers, and you’ll start to see your rankings improve.
For a while now, web designers have been recommending companies to set up a mobile site, so smartphone users have access to all of your services.
But now, the industry is changing its tune. Both web and SEO experts say responsive design is the way to go. This is essentially a design for a website that shrinks or expands based on the viewing device – so you only ever need to make one website.
But SEO experts say there are more benefits than just looking good. Making a responsively designed site means your SEO techniques stay intact across all platforms – increasing your chance of being found by people on both desktops and mobiles.
“Google’s recommended design is the responsive layout,” says Mike Hudson of FirstClick consulting. “But it also depends on the situation your business is in and your constraints.”
Of course, not having responsive design doesn’t mean your business is at a disadvantage – it just means you aren’t necessarily getting the best mobile search results possible. But in the age where mobile traffic is beginning to overtake desktop connections, making sure your mobile SEO is in order is a top priority.
“In terms of search – their focus should be on ensuring they have a conversion orientated website that’s working on all devices.”
Monte Huebsch says he was recently speaking with his employees when they all came to the same conclusion: “SEO is dead.”
Of course, SEO isn’t really dead. But what Huebsch means is because Google has done so much work cracking down on dodgy operators, there are very few techniques which you can use to trick Google into arriving at the top of a search results page.
“Google has pretty much shut down all the black hat stuff that did work, all the link farms and doorway stuff,” he says.
“Everything people did to drive shonky traffic, Google has done a good job of shutting that down.”
There have been plenty of updates in the past 18 months about this. Just last year one of the leaders of Google’s search team said Google would start punishing companies which use too many SEO-type tactics.
SEO and search consultant Jim Stewart of StewArt Media says he’s spent a huge amount of time working with new clients who’ve bought dodgy SEO tactics. Since these don’t work anymore, “we’ve spent a whole lot of time trying to clean up that mess”.
Chris Thomas says given Google will emphasise more social sharing instead of the amount of links heading to your site, the more work you do on those sites, such as Twitter and Google+, the better.
“Stuff like paid linking is just obviously not going to work anymore,” he says.
“The best endorsement you can get now is someone giving you a +1 in Google+, and sharing your content with their friends. This is going to be built into the algorithm a lot more.”
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
