In the rush to put an all-important mobile strategy together, many businesses seem to lose sight of one of the most important aspects of mobile: people use mobile internet in a fundamentally different way than they use traditional desktop/laptop based internet. This means that a successful mobile SEO strategy is going to be very different than one that works well in non-mobile contexts. When you’re choosing a Los Angeles SEO company to work with on improving your business’s search rankings, make sure to ask tough questions about what they see as the important differences between mobile SEO and desktop SEO.
Key Differences Between Mobile Search and Desktop Search
So in what ways do people use mobile search differently? A bunch. These are some of the most significant ways that people use mobile internet in a conceptually different way from traditional computer access.
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The Time Factor: When people run a Google search on their mobile device, they are often on the go or in the middle of a conversation. This means they need a quick answer.
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Voice Queries: Many times, a mobile search begins with a voice query to Siri. This means that keywords that work well in mobile SEO contexts are more likely to be consistent with speech patterns than keywords that work well in a desktop search. For example, voice queries are more likely to be phrased as questions.
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Location is Key: Mobile searches are based around finding the nearest solution to a particular problem. Including automatic location-based services, such as a store locator that doesn’t require a location input, can make a big difference.
Crafting and Serving Mobile Pages
The visual experience and technical capabilities of a mobile device are vastly different from a computer, and this means making some important design decisions to optimize the mobile experience. For one thing, you don’t want huge blocks of text on a mobile site, because they look too intimidating on a small smartphone screen. For another, you and your Los Angeles SEO company need to make sure that all of your content works right on a mobile device, so test to ensure that videos play and make sure there are no interstitial ads clogging up the experience. When you design your mobile site, you have to choose between:
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Responsive design: Automatically moving your design into a mobile format when accessed from a mobile device. This is easiest to use from the get-go, but it’s hard to change an existing site into a responsive one.
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Dynamic serving: Determining whether the site is being accessed from a computer or a mobile device and serving different code, as appropriate, to the same URL. This option is expensive, but often ideal for maintaining SEO.
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Separate Mobile/Desktop Sites: Appropriate if you want the features of your mobile and desktop sites to be very different.
When you choose a Los Angeles SEO company to work with, you have to make sure they understand the difference between mobile SEO and desktop SEO and have a plan for helping your business succeed in both contexts. My Los Angeles SEO company, Coalition Technologies, offers savvy strategies for success in mobile and desktop SEO. Call us today at (877) 989 – 7187 for a free quote.