As Asking Smarter Questions discussed earlier this week, the summer travel season will provide a captive audience of smartphone users.  Today we want to help you further prepare for mobile search traffic with 3 consideration and data-driven mobile search tips for optimizing your mobile site.

(1) Click to Call functionality.

It is important to optimize a site to allow for your business contact information to be front and center.  Smartphones were not designed to be simply a research tool.  Performing a search for a business on a mobile device presumes that an action to contact that business is imminent – just one click away from the customer contact you are marketing your business to achieve.

DATA-DRIVEN MOBILE SEARCH TIP: Set up tracking on the click-to-call functionality, or implement a special phone number for mobile generated phone traffic, to make it possible to measure the effectiveness of your mobile campaigns.  This data may help you to build upon your marketing strategy and justify ad spend budgeting.

(2) Smart Phone Devices

Test your mobile site on various smart phones devices.  Make sure that the functionality works effectively across all mobile user agents.  Your site needs to load quickly and render well whether your site visitor is using and Samsung, Blackberry, iPhone, etc.

DATA-DRIVEN MOBILE SEARCH TIP: Use analytics data based on mobile devices to identify where the site is not performing and use this information to optimize your site for that device.

(3) Mobile SEO

The algorithms for mobile search are very different than what you may be used to for optimizing your original site.  Google’s Think Mobile data indicates that 1 in 7 searches are performed on a mobile device, but only 20% of Google’s top 800 customers have created optimized mobile sites.  To protect Google’s reputation for delivering search results that are valuable to the user, the issue for mobile ranks becomes increasingly about the usability of a site once the mobile link has been clicked.  The algorithms are engineered to put more weight on how well sites render onto mobile devices when calculating rank results.

DATA-DRIVEN MOBILE SEARCH TIP: We once again highlight the importance of our 2nd tip for analyzing mobile device data.  The search engine mobile algorithms are not simply measuring the speed and functionality of mobile sites.  The mobile site ranks also factor in how the site renders for the specific mobile device the search is performed on.  Something to consider when drilling into your mobile site data.  A discrepancy between Android and iPhone site traffic could be due to your site rendering differently from one device to another.  This variation could be affecting your site’s mobile search rank.

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