A recent survey revealed that mobile search volume has finally crossed the desktop search volume globally, and the two leading search engines, Google and Bing, have made it clear that they love mobile friendly sites. Both the search engines display mobile friendly sites in the mobile SERP to help the customers find what they are looking for. All the SEO experts have expected this change in search volume, but when it is finally happening even some of the big brands are feeling the heat as they neglected their mobile SEO strategy.
How important is mobile local search?
Online retailers admit that more than 70% of their traffic comes from mobile and the conversion rate of mobile traffic is twice more than desktop traffic. It is the time to take mobile seriously. You must optimize the web pages carefully to help search engines find your site easily, as well as to offer a pleasant experience to the smartphone and tablet users.
What’s the mantra for success?
- Separate Meta tags must be added to the mobile web pages to inform the users that your page is mobile friendly.
- Try to write brief desccriptions and titles for mobile pages. Use the words that mobile users will type to search something.
- Think about the elements that will help mobile users become a customer. For example, you can give your cell phone number, driving directions and coupons to influnce their buying decisions. Optimize the images on your web pages to load them faster even for low bandwidth users.
- You must embed schema markup to identify the web page and its content as local business.
- Ask your web programmers to make the site mobile detectable. If somone searches for your site from mobile, then he or she should be given links to the mobile pages, not the desktop version of your site.
User Experince is a part of SEO
Don’t only concentrate on bringing the mobile site among top search results for the targeted keywords. You have to understand what customers expect when they see the results and click on your web page links. Is your page designed properly to answer the query of the customers? Can it help them get what they want? For example, if somone is searching for “flower delivery New York” and lands on your page, it should feature the list of bouquets, price, your telephone number as well as online payment facility. Customers should be able to place an order by paying online or call you to book their order and pay COD.
Invest in mobile local search optimization
When you know that most people visit your site from mobile devices, you must realign your online marketing budget to get the best ROI. Track the clicks and conversion rate to know where you must invest most. It can be organic search optimization or PPC, only data can reveal. However, in case of mobile search, PPC is a better avenue to bring maximum number of customers as average data shows that PPC ads conversion rate is quite high. On the other hand, in case you invest in paid ads, make sure that your ad gets number one or two rank on SERP because CTR on mobile drops drastically depnding on the position of the ad.
Follow the suggestions mentioned above and utilize your skills to optimize your site for mobile local search and gradually you will see a positive change in your yearly revenue.
