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mobile

Make Your Mobile UX Better

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How to Make Your Content Work On Mobile

The mobile experience (mobile UX) of your website is crucial to its success. This is because of the increasingly device agnostic approach of most technology users. They want to have the same experience, get the same information, and achieve the same tasks, whatever device they are on. Understanding mobile user behavior is crucial in a solid mobile SEO strategy.

Making your content on mobile as good as possible starts with design. The tips for mobile UX here are mostly about content creation, but there is a crossover between the design of your mobile website and the creation of content. This is unavoidable, so you will have to consider and work on both. This means making sure your mobile design, functionality, and navigation are as good as they can be.

Functionality, in particular mobile UX, is essential. Ideally, you shouldn’t have any functions on your website that only work on desktop devices. You also have to test the typography settings of your website, making sure it is easy to ready on mobile.

In addition, make sure the links and navigation work well on mobile. Remember that text links are harder to use on mobile than on desktop, simply because fingers are clumsier than mouse pointers.

mobileCreating Content That Works On Mobile

You should think specifically about mobile users when creating content. This might sound obvious, but it is a principle that is not always acted on. An example is a blog post that looks great and is easy to read when on a computer but doesn’t work very well on mobile. You should always think about the mobile experience.

To do that you have to understand who your mobile users are, and what they want to do. This includes identifying how they will find or access your site (for example; through a Google search), and what pages they will enter from. Will they make a purchase on your mobile website? Do they want to find information, or do they want to contact you?

Getting Content Right On Mobile

In many cases, you will have to adjust your style of writing for mobile. Most advice for writing on the web includes breaking up the text with paragraphs, headings, and lists. This applies on mobile too, but paragraphs should be even shorter. A good guide is to keep your paragraphs to 50-100 words.

Finally, think about how you will position the call to action on mobile. Does this meet the same requirements you have on desktop devices? This includes being high on the page and visible with zero or minimal amounts of scrolling.

Mobile devices are here to stay, so every website owner and content creator has to think mobile first or at least as much as they think desktop.

google analytics

6 Free Tools For Grassroots SEO

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SEO Today Includes Mobile Optimization

In the modern era, simply creating a visually stunning website is not enough. With modifications to the Google search algorithm like Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird, attention to detail has become crucial. For business owners that want to forego hiring an SEO professional for over $100 per hour, there are few options outside of learning it themselves. Fortunately, recent changes have put pressure on the market to come up with easy-to-understand software solutions, which can make doing and learning SEO possible at the same time. Below are six free SEO tools you should be using to do your on-site optimization will be enumerated and described for your convenience.

Free SEO Tools For Mobile SEO

google-mobile-testAs mobile SEO continues to grow, the importance of knowing how your website appears to your mobile audience is a priority for success. Adopting a mobile first mentality is key to long term business growth and one recently upgraded mobile SEO tool is from Google. The Google Mobile testing tool  offers an excellent overview of three key areas that impact mobile performance, mobile friendliness, mobile speed and desktop speed. This free SEO tool also makes recommendations for improvements.

Structured data testing tool
In tandem with the mobile testing tool above, Google’s structured data testing tool highlights structured data on your website that can help promote both your mobile and desktop grassroots SEO efforts. Check out this free SEO structured data testing tool here: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool.

Screaming Frog SEO Tool
Screaming Frog is a tool that is basically free to grassroots marketers as well as professsionals in the SEO game. The software is only “basically” free because it allows for 500 scans before you have to begin subscribing. For a person only handling optimization on a single business website, this is equivalent to free software. The program itself scans your website and allows you to see things you are missing or elements you have duplicates of. Areas of analysis include such elements as:

  • Titles
  • H1/H2 Headings
  • Meta Descriptions
  • Meta Keywords
  • Images/Alt Text
  • Internal/External Links

Google Webmaster Tools

Webmaster tools are another free SEO tool offering from some of the major search engines. There is no separation between pro and amateur, though, so using them really is free. Because their algorithm changes have had the most drastic effect on SEO in recent years, most people tend to focus on Google specifically. However, Bing has a webmaster tool that is far more exhaustive and informative and even includes file size, load time, and compression analysis that Google lacks. This is not to say that one is better than the other, just that both should be used for their unique strengths.

Google Analytics

free-seo-toolsGoogle provides analytical tools meant to provide tracking data for visitors to your website. While proprietary tracking systems are available, Google is the industry leader and provides their service for free. The data provided allows you to take an in depth look at just what people are doing when they reach your website. Using Google Analytics can allow you to pinpoint weaknesses and exploit strengths with little more than the addition of a single line of tracking code to your website’s HTML. Analytics allow you to track:

  • Demographics
  • Behavior
  • Browsing Platform
  • Conversions
  • Mobile

On Page Content Analysis
The days of targeting misspelled keywords to gain an edge are gone. Obvious spelling and grammar errors are ranking metrics, and remarks by Google’s Matt Cutts as well as Bing’s Duane Forrester confirm it. You should be making an effort to spell and grammar check every piece of web copy you place on your site with your word processor’s built in tool. There is also a plethora of websites out there that provide textual analysis for word repetition, and SEOQuake is an add on available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera that shows the highest frequency words for pages you already have published. Checking for repetition can help you weed out accidental keywords and highlight overuse of keywords you really are targeting.

Use Free SEO Tools To Help You Optimize Efficiently

Getting SEO right on your website is no easy feat, even once you have been doing it awhile. However, using a few free SEO tools that are at everyone’s disposal can yield much more insight into what you need to do than you might expect. There are tools out there that charge large sums per month for use, but until you can internalize and use the tools listed here there is not much reason to switch. Most of the advanced tools tend to employ more complicated ways of looking at the same data and are often designed for SEO professionals. Get your grassroots SEO marketing started with the free SEO tools listed above.

mobile optimization

Create Mobile Friendly Content

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Is Your Content Mobile Friendly?

Does your content mirror mobile user behavior? Do you develop generic all encompassing content for your website or do you create mobile friendly content as well? There are industry benchmarks indicating mobile users searching with a high volume of branded terms that include location or activity based keyword modifiers. This search query behavior does vary from common desktop search that leaves out many of the branded terms. Sources below. This is yet another compelling reason to consider creating mobile friendly content specifically for your mobile audience.

mobile optimizationThe theme for mobile optimization success is to keep it simple. Keep the code simple, keep the design simple, and keep the content simple. To counter the difference in mobile search, it is imperative that your mobile SEO strategy accounts for these differences with tactics and techniques that include location and or activity optimization. Most importantly, make your mobile friendly content easy to find.

Think Fast and Short For Winning Mobile Content

Make sure that your mobile content is not blocked by robots.txt.    If you are all good there, then audit your mobile search critical content to verify that it supports location or activity optimization. Let’s use the example, “Bike Shop, Portland”. If you are targeting a mobile audience for this phrase, begin with a focus on speed and shortness. When possible, deploy short form  factors to the URL of the landing page, the page title, and the meta data. Think about the mobile platform that will display the results, does your page provide concise relevant content to the query and will it render in a readable format on a mobile sized screen?

Microformat Your Mobile Content

A great way to promote your location, category or time sensitive information, is to apply microformatting standards to your content. Terms may vary but, microformat and semantic markup use strict standards to enable your online content to be parsed and repurposed by search engines, browsers and apps. Depending upon the search crawler in use, these bots can recognize the micro-formatted code and provide your encoded mobile content in ways making it easy for your mobile audience to engage and utilize on their mobile device. The application of micro-formatted mobile content helps promote your site as mobile friendly and mobile focused. Additional microformat information can be found in the sources listed below.

Silo Mobile Content

Now that you have made sure that your mobile code is clear, take the next step and make fast and easy to understand. Similar to the way humans process and read mobile web pages, search engine crawlers tend to read the same pages rapidly and value the way the information is presented at least as much as the mobile content on the page. Site architecture is mission critical for mobile success, simple navigational hierarchy is the optimum way to proceed. Don’t forget that your mobile users usually have a different agenda when they are on your mobile site, they don’t need to be bogged down with to many links to click to get to the information they are after. Remember that your mobile visitors want to complete tasks quickly and easily, so your navigational structure for mobile must make this possible. This is commonly referred to as task oriented responsive design. So keep it simple, page titles, headers, micro-content and images should be short, concise and aligned to both your business objectives and visitor goals. This is an excellent way to promote mobile friendly content and a positive mobile experience. #mobilefriendly #mobileSEO

Sources:

  • http://www.accuracast.com/search- daily-news/mobile-7471/uk-local-mobile-search-rankings/
  • http://www.google.com/intl/ en/press/zeitgeist2007/index.html
  • Microformat information: http://microformats.org
  • Mobile compliance guideline information: http://www.w3.org/TR/mobileOK-basic10-tests/

Mobile Optimization – Location Factors

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Mobile optimization: Location Variables That Influence Mobile SEO

Mobile optimization location variables are one set of factors that make the mobile experience different. The vast majority of searches performed on mobile devices are task completion driven or location specific; and Bing, Yahoo and Google continue to refine their mobile search results to generate a more positive mobile experience that accounts for this time sensitive search behavior. Understanding that these mobile queries have constraints from device screen size, OS platforms, predictive search, and the browser search bar limits, it’s not a bad idea at all to make results more readily accessible to your mobile audience.

Some of the top performing searches on mobile include the phrase “near me” such as; “restaurants near me,” “pizza near me,” “auto repair near me,” and “lawyer near me.” Google has even recently suggested including “near me” in active Adwords campaigns with a click to call extension because these types of mobile searches deliver excellent ROI. Learn more here

Important Mobile Optimization Variables

mobile-seo-tacticsMobile users are driven to task resolution as quickly as possible, and speedy results leave less time for a deeper dive into browser results. This means second page results suffer and are rarely viewed. The enhancements to mobile predictive search functionality as mentioned above, strive to deliver quick accurate results using *location* and *category* biased search parameters in the algorithm. These mobile location variables are only one way that mobile search differs from desktop search. Account for these variables in your mobile SEO.

Screen Size Drives Design Layouts

Mobile devices have smaller screen sizes than their desktop counter parts and this directly impacts the size of the browser search bar and the returned search engine results page. The major search engines compensate for these challenges by altering the results page layouts into new location-based and category-based designs. This criteria bolsters the need to correctly deploy micro-formatting to all location content and whenever possible to schema.org category content as well. Learn to use micro-formatted content to your advantage and represent your brand in the best light possible to your mobile customers and clients. Embrace and use structured data to push your site up the mobile ranks.

The Many vs The Few

Yet another unique mobile seo variable includes the mobile browsers themselves. Laptop browsers have standardized themselves over time and consolidated into a few major platforms like Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Mobile search browsers are numerous, and they remain a “Wild West” of offerings, with multiple features and options with little standardization. Add in the many apps that incorporate “in-app” search functions, and it becomes clear that new search parameters are needed to provide the best search engine results.

Ranking For Mobile SEO
What mobile SEO conversation doesn’t have a reference to rank? Add up mobile browsers, mobile user behavior, predictive search,  results page mobile designed layouts, page speed and location and category algorithm bias, and it becomes evident that mobile page rank is different from desktop / laptop search. These new mobile search dimensions “urgency,” “nearness,” and “category”  are key elements in mobile search relevance.

Awesome mobile optimization begins after “normal” search engine optimization ends. Mobile search engine optimization starts with the assumptions that your site has an established baseline of clean code, architecture that invites craw-ability, search guideline compliant and your content is high quality. Only then can you factor in the mobile variables that take advantage of the current algorithm biases that help your brand be competitive in the mobile space. Continue developing your mobile SEO strategy, with a standards compliant site featuring markup for location and category. All of your mobile users will love you for it!

#mobileoptimization #mobileSEO

social media

10 Mobile SEO Tactics

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10 Mobile SEO Tactics To Add To Your Mobile Strategy

Today’s explosive mobile growth, especially with the abundance of smartphones, mobile OS and apps, makes mobile SEO a very big deal. Knowing that most mobile users use their mobile devices for communications with others (1 to 1 and 1 to many), consumption of media (videos, texts, images, games), and location based searches, here are a few mobile SEO tactics to help keep your business mobile strategy on track for success.mobile seo

  1. Know your mobile traffic Use your analytic data to monitor the size of your mobile audience and learn how they engage with your brand on mobile platforms and mobile devices.
  2. Become friends with bots Google implemented a mobile specific user agent to diagnose mobile site structure and technical issues that may impede a quality mobile user experience. Use this data to refine your mobile SEO strategy. Do not block Googlebot from your mobile site, allow access for all crawlers to both standard and mobile websites to fully index site architecture and to consolidate popularity signals. Check your robots.txt file!
  3. Be responsive For most small businesses, responsive design provides a cost effective way to deliver your brand massage to your mobile audience. Task oriented responsive design further improves the visitor experience.
  4. Hurl a single URL For most businesses, a single URL strategy, deployed via responsive design, is the best approach to deliver your brand message online. Other options are available, dynamic serving or parallel subdomain or subdirectory work as well, but they may require additional technical expertise for implementation and can increase long term costs to maintain.
  5. Mobile canonical A nice to have idea, on regular URLs, add rel=alternate pointing to corresponding mobile URLs. Correspondingly for mobile URLs, add rel=canonical pointing to corresponding regular URLs.
  6. Make indexation crayon clear Do you have a mobile XML site map if your mobile site is considerably different from you regular site? Make it simple, mirror your URLS, make mobile URLs the same as regular URLs.
  7. Be fast, be clean To best prevent crawlability obstacles, keep your code, avoid “code bloat”, don’t use Flash, excessive JavaScript or too much heavy tracking and analytics packages. Search for speed improvements with lighter code, mobile specific content, compressed imagery, smaller slide shows, and improved video platforms. Remember that most mobile visitors are frequently restricted by slower connections and have little patience for slow loading pages.
  8. Understand Referral Sources This is similar to know your mobile audience. If many of your mobile visitors are heavily engaged on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, knowing this fact matters. Some social platforms are geared towards mobile more than any other platforms. Email falls into this category too, as more than 2/3 of emails are viewed on a mobile device.
  9. Concise Content Optimize your mobile content to support mobile visitor intent. Make it easy and simple to complete tasks in as few actions as possible. Make sure your most important page elements and content is identified with short mobile friendly keywords.
  10. Mobile visitors are different Many mobile interactions happen at home or work as a second screen engagement, often while using a laptop or watching TV. When mobile sessions do occur on the go, consider how you have positioned your brand locally. Hyper-location rules in the mobile world, semantic markup using schema.org can improve your visibility for business category identification, business location, positive reviews and special events or promotions.

Mobile SEO is ever changing and rapidly evolving. The dynamic nature of mobile platform change requires some effort of monitoring and willingness to embrace change rapidly. Be on the lookout for emerging social networks or hot apps, they often power a tremendous amount of mobile user engagement. Your mobile SEO strategy needs to account for the high degree of volatility in the mobile space, be every ready to apply new mobile SEO tactics and techniques to succeed by offering the best mobile user experience to your audience. #mobileseo

related: Mobile SEO Strategy

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Understand Mobile User Behavior

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Mobile Users: Your Most Valuable Customers

“It’s easier for a rich man to ride that camel through the eye of a needle directly into the Kingdom of Heaven, than for some of us to give up our cell phone.”
― Vera Nazarian

Each year, industry experts and analysts make a prediction that this year or the  following year will be “The Year Of Mobile”.  As often as you hear the phrases  “links for rank” or  “content is king” which are more or less true to some degree, the real value of keeping these phrases in all conversions helps to create awareness that these ideas are important and you need to pay attention to them. So pay attention now, “The Year Of Mobile” is here!

Mobile User Behavior: Why Is It Different?

The two key distinctions about mobile are #1-the device and #2 — mobile behavior. In early 2015, the landscape in which businesses operate changed forever when Internet usage on mobile devices exceeded PC usage. Mobile visitor requirements are different simply by the nature of the device, smartphones are not laptops. Other mobile differences are that smartphones are always at hand, always on the move. 67% of people have used their smartphones EVERY day in the past 7 days.  More than 83% of smartphone users don’t even leave home without their mobile device. While 96% of smartphone are used at home, 84% are used while the run; the most common places include in a store (83%), in a restaurant (82%) and at work (82%). Smartphones are so ingrained into peoples daily lives that a recent poll showed that 36% of people would rather give up their TV than their smartphone, queue the loud roar from the cord-cutter crowd.

Why The Mobile Platform Is Different

#mobileSEO

Smartphones are everywhere, various styles are available for sale, most are more than capable of browsing the web. Screen sizes, like people’s fashion sense, vary widely, but the vast majority of today’s  smartphones are able to keep us connected to each other and the cloud. Most smartphones have limits due to processor speed, storage restraints, and screen size. They make up for these limits by offering touch screens, instant on features, quick apps, and of course mobility. Many laptop computers are fighting back by offering similar feature sets to mobile devices (instant-on, app stores, even touch screens) and our mobile devices continue to pressure traditional laptop boundaries with speedier processors, high resolution screens, and keyboard flexibility.

Smartphones Rely On Universal Seamless Connections

Broadband connectivity, WiFi hotspots, improved cellular towers, all of these Internet access points help our connections to our cloud based data and point to point communications. Mobile combines many features into an integrated omnipresent user experience. Mobile allows us access to applications, data, websites and communications that improve our daily lives both at work as well as at home. What further powers mobile growth includes:

  • Omnipresent Device – you can use the same device everywhere. A rapidly growing trend with the millennial generation is the ability to bring your own device to work.
  • It Gets Personal –  your device is a reflection of you (small screen vs big screen, iOS vs Android) and you have control over privacy settings and the apps you use.
  • Mobile Is Always On – always on and always nearby, people rarely turn their mobile phone completely off.
  • Instant On Touch Screens – fast access to data, sites, and communications with features designed for rapid interactions.

Mobile User Behavior Is Different

The real major difference between mobile smartphone usage and desktops or laptops can be seen in mobile user behavior. Mobility offers a device that allows people to communicate, consume and query all from the same device. There’s no such thing as “mobile” as far as most users are concerned. Basically mobile user behavior is reflected by these actions; communications, one on one or one to many, consumption of data, media, or entertainment, and finally search queries looking for fast answers.

3 Ways Mobile User Behavior Is Unique

What are the common characteristics of mobile users? They often share these mobile behaviors:

  1. Location Based – this only makes sense that the internal GPS will influence search outcomes. Searches that answer “find a business type near me” will drive very local results. 50% of all local search are search done on mobile devices.  94% of smartphone users have searched for local information.
  2. Task Oriented – with a bias towards action, 84% have taken action as a result of that search. 64% connect with a business — 48% called the business 47% looked up business on map or got directions stressing the importance that location plays in the results as well.
  3. Time Sensitive – action happens more than 90% of local users take action within 24 hours. 70% of mobile searches lead to action within one hour. It takes one month for the same percentage of desktop users to take the same actions.

Now that you know that mobile users are task oriented, location based and biased towards action with time sensitivity, you can see why mobile users are your most valuable customers! They are ready to engage with your brand’s  products or services. So your mobile presence will need to grab their attention quickly and offer an awesome user experience that makes it fast and easy to focus on completing tasks. If this sounds like speed is a virtue for mobile, that’s because it is. Get speedy with concise and short text, compressed images and content delivery that mirrors user behaviors.

Mobile Search Results Differ

KEY POINT: because mobile user search behavior is different, mobile search results are different too. In a recent independent analysis by SEO Clarity, 67% of mobile search results were different from desktop search results. Post Google “Mobilegeddon” algorithm changes on April 21, those search results changed even more. Now some mobile search results are up to 73% different that their desktop counterpart search following this recent mobile update. Mobile continues to deviate from traditional desktop search results when it comes to rankings. Make sure that you take this into account when building your mobile seo strategy.

Beyond the Second Screen
The mobile world continues to blur the lines and behaviors people use to connect to the internet. Seamless integration with all internet devices creates a user experience the moves easily between interest and actions, research and purchase, engagement and sharing. So what are people doing on mobile?
10 Facts About Mobile User Behavior:

  1. 86% of mobile internet users use devices while watching TV
  2. 63% access the Internet
  3. 62% check their email
  4. 61% play games
  5. 55% check the weather
  6. 50% use maps for directions
  7. 49% use social media and 70% access social networks with an app
  8. 42% listen to music
  9. 36% get their News
  10. 21% watch streaming video — 200+ million YouTube views on mobile per day

Know Your Mobile Site Behavior

With a better understanding of the goals of a mobile user and their current behaviors on a mobile device, you can now begin to develop a mobile focused strategy that aligns your business goals with mobile user actions. Start by verifying and measuring the organic mobile traffic and the top mobile queries and mobile pages of your website. Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics provides more than enough data to get most businesses started down the mobile SEO path. Continue to optimize your mobile site and focus on these 3 things;

  1. Design – is it crayon clear what actions you want people to take when they are on your website? Can these actions be completed easily?
  2. Relevant Mobile Content — is your mobile content short and concise? Does it contain mobile friendly keywords?
  3. Define Location — use schema.org markup to specify your location, business type, reviews, and special events. Make it easy for mobile search bots to present your website.

Embrace A Mobile Mindset

Mobile search will continue to grow in the near future, so keep that at the top of mind in your SEO and marketing strategies. Remember the mobile user profile outlined above and try the make their experience incredible and rewarding. Don’t let your mobile website be the target of the frustration because it performs poorly, slowly or has too many steps involved to complete their tasks. Don’t be the “idiot who built this damn website”; be the business that built “a great mobile website” that gets shared with many others because it is so mobile friendly.

Resources:
IDC Forecast January 2014,
KPCB Mobile Search Actions 2013
Google: Our Mobile Planet: United States of America – Understanding the Mobile Consumer, May 2013
Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2013–2018, February 2014
IDC Forecast: Tablet Shipments Forecast to Top Total PC Shipments in the Fourth Quarter of 2013 and Annually by 2015, September 11, 2014
KPCB Internet Trends 2014