Mobile SEO By Anne Ahola Ward

William Sears Group Product Manager, LinkedIn

SPONSORED BY

About me!

➔ O’Reilly Author

➔ CEO of CircleClick

➔ IBM Futurist

➔ SEO SUPER FAN GEEK

➔ Secret Canadian

➔ Avid Tweeter

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Mobile SEO Matters!

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Search is the most common starting point for mobile

product-based searches.

100 billion monthly searches occur on mobile devices.

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Mobile Search = not the same.

 62% of organic searches display different results on desktop vs. smartphone.

 This trend is only expected to increase.

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Local Search Behavior

  50% of Consumers who do a local search on their smartphone visited a store within one day.   30% of Consumers would rather buy in-store instead of online knowing they are close to a store.

  61% use the address or phone number in the ad. 67% of Consumers want ads customized via city and ZIP code.

  68% use the “Get Directions” or “Call” buttons. 7

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What is it?

Nth Screen Technology is the merging of devices, people, and places to create a shared interactive experience.

The search ecosystem expands to everywhere and is part of everything we do.

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Mobile Tenets Don’t develop for a platform; think “Nth.”

Be fast or go home.

Empathize with the user

Test frequently, not just the homepage!

The fold is …?

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About the fold...

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What is visible on the page without action is what gets us

to scroll.

Most people start scrolling before the entire page loads.

Be worth the trouble of scrolling.

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The concept is older than we think.

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Turning pages have always been effort. We stopped making scrolls and switched to making books when Buddhist monks

took the idea from India through Afghanistan to China,

first century BC.

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Ok, cool. So what do I do?

Mobile Considerations

1.  Do I build an App or do I not build an App?

2.  Site configurations. Do I go with dynamic or parallel URLs?

3.  Responsive or bust.

4.  HTTP/2

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How to Optimize Mobile

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 Hosting matters - Check your CDN / Choose packages wisely

 Redirecting? Then do canonicalization right.

  Facebook Instant Articles (4/12)

 Project AMP

Help the robots help you.

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Spend the time and resources on mobile optimization.

  Site structure and navigation matters.

  Take out the trash.

  No pop-ups, no flash! Ewwww.

Rich Snippets

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Add structured data of the appropriate type to your site, then simply test to verify!

Examples:

  Product Snippets contain information about a product. For example: a photo, price,

availability and reviews / ratings.

  Video -- An online video, including a

description and thumbnail.

About Snippets   Using them doesn’t guarantee they will be displayed.   Headlines should not exceed 110 characters (AMP guidelines).   Always, always test before deploying.

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Onto the future, now!

Emerging technologies and platforms...

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Mobile Voice Growing in popularity with text to speech

ZenithOptimedia found that 23% of survey respondents have used voice search services, including Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana. Of those surveyed, 50% are using voice search more frequently now than they did a year ago.

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Voice Search Musings

•  Queries are conversational

•  Optimize for ‘direct answers / rich answers’

•  Assume mobile or wearable / connected home devices

•  H/T Rich snippets, they will also help you out with voice!

•  We can assume that search engines will want to use direct answers for voice search. Accuracy improves continuously and exponentially with processing power and machine learning advancements. 22

Virtual Reality

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  Futurists like me envision a world where digital technology flows as water into space taking shape around our non-virtual existence.

  VR monetization revenues are

expected to reach $4.4 billion dollars by 2019

  The Landscape is expanding...

Augmented Reality

  Input comes in the form of text, video, images and audio.

  ARISE - the first Augmented Reality

search engine (University of Illinois research project).

  Location is the strongest application

for AR search. 24

Emerging Search Devices

Smart TVs; Smart Watches, Smart Wristbands

  By 2018, smartwatches alone will move nearly 100 million units.

  Beacons are delivering real-time product and service messaging through Apple’s iBeacon, Google Eddystone, and Facebook Beacons.

  Users will want more concise content such as discounts, coupons and live concerts or events.

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3 Takeaways  Speed is king, do the work and reap rewards.  Don’t build an app just for the sake of it.  There is no dominant platform, always consider Nth possibilities.

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Thank you!!! Follow me: @annebot @circleclick Bibliography:

www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/

www.cmocouncil.org/facts-stats-categories.php?view=all&category=mobile-marketing

techcrunch.com/2015/10/08/mobile-searches-surpass-desktop-searches-at-google-for-the-first-time/

www.mediative.com/mobile-stats-for-2015/

https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2343577/google-local-searches-lead-50-of-mobile-users-to-visit-stores-study

Edward Kundahl 2016 Digital Marketing Forecast: 7 Trends to watch for BusinessCreatorPlus.com

Ramon Llamas of IDC

Josh Schwartz, Scroll Depth

Amy Schade, Nielsen Norman Group

Google Developer documentation, blog

Wikipedia article on book binding

The internet as a whole, thank you!

P.S. Thanks to future robot overlords

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