Google Mobile Workshop

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a Google Mobile Workshop and they confirmed what everyone has been saying
“2011 is the year for mobile”

Finlay from Google talked at New Year Search Club in January this year where he mentioned mobile would really take off and it definitely has.

(Image from www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/mobile-search-tips-and-best-practices-8276/)

Mobile search queries have increased considerably from last year. Here are a few interesting stats:

Travel queries on mobile have risen from
4% (2010) to 11% (2011)

Retail queries
4% (2010) to 13% (2011)

Tech queries
5% (2010) to 10% (2011)

Entertainment
7% (2010) to 18% (2011)

Do you use your mobile while out shopping? Apparently 45 % of us do and 15% use it to compare prices.
The study carried out by Google, also found that with mobile, people always have them with them and are searching while at home and on the go. 74% of people use them at the same time as consuming other media.

Read more »

Mobile websites – Making your site mobile friendly

Mobile search is happening.

E consultancy reported last week that Marks and Spencer launched a mobile site.

Unlike the other high street retailers who have launched apps, Marks and Spencer have put all their efforts into the mobile site. I have tried it on the iPhone and it is pretty good. I also tried it on the Samsung Tocco (not a smart phone) and it was easy to navigate and the pictures were very clear. A full review can be found at E consultancy

This news just shows you that more and more companies have mobile as part of their marketing/business strategy. Then yesterday, I read another article about mobile phones . Android phones outsold iPhones in the USA, last month for the first time. The iPhone better watch out, it is not the only smartphone out there. And for those companies that want to have a mobile strategy, do not just tailor it to the iPhone. Make sure the Android, Symbian and the Samsung handsets are involved as well. According to The Times, BlackBerry controls 63% of the market for business phones, so do not exclude these handsets either.

The trend in smartphones is expected to increase. According to Garner, sales increased by 49% to 54.3 million during Q1 2010. Overall, 314.7 million handsets were sold worldwide, with Nokia the number one supplier in both categories. Symbian was the most popular smartphone OS globally, selling 24.1 million units, with a market share of 44.3%.

RIM came second with 10.6 million sales and a 19.4% share, followed by Apple’s iPhone OS with 8.4 million sales and 15.4% share. Sales of Microsoft Windows handsets were flat at 3.7 million units, seeing its market share falling by 3.4 percentage points to 6.8%.

There is no denying it, these smartphones are here to stay, so it is vital to integrate these into your marketing strategy. Next time you are thinking of redesigning your website or adding new pages, think of making it viewable on a mobile phone.

Mobile app or Mobile site?

As the growth of the smartphone market continues, more people are now accessing the web on their mobile phones. This has started people asking the question “Should I make my website mobile friendly? and if so,
“What does this involve?”

Mobile seo is the practice of improving a website’s visibility on the mobile phone. It is search engine optimisation on the mobile client.

There are two schools of thought how to make your site mobile seo friendly.

1. Build a mobile site
Some argue you should have a completely different mobile site with a different domain, eg .mobi instead of .com at the end. However, this can be costly and it is harder for people to remember the different URLs. It also removes the risk of creating duplicate content.
Some mobiles such as the iPhone and Blackberry Storm load images the same way as desktop pcs do and so can handle large images so some argue you do not need to have a mobile site.

Traditional SEO methods are valid for “mobile SEO” as mentioned in my previous post How do I start mobile seo There are a couple more steps to make sure the site is mobile friendly.:

* Submit the site to mobile search engines.
* Create dynamic mobile pages by combining your website’s content database with user agent detection. This will avoid the need to transcode pages on the fly as this is very complicated.
* Search results from your mobile you will see nearly the same search results as from a desktop PC. I have tried this and it was true. What does this mean? Google mobile search doesn’t list mobile sites preferentially.

2. Create a mobile app for the site
The other argument is that there are so many different smart phones in the market place and they all have a different browser experience. Therefore it is very difficult to make a mobile site to fit each of the different browsers. It would mean simply testing against all handsets, a very costly job. The solution is to make a mobile application that users can download. The developers create an app and it is handset agnostic, so every mobile phone will treat the application in the same way and the user gets the same rich experience.

Let me know what you have experienced and what you have found works best for you. Mobile seo is still new and developing so the more information about it, the better.