Part II: What You Need to Know about Mobile SEO…and Why It’s Not the Opportunity to Focus On
There is no better place to be than at the top of Google’s search rankings; for marketers and businesses alike, it’s the Holy Grail. The key component in reaching that milestone is SEO (Search Engine Optimization), a process by which your site and content is ranked based on relevance. Now, with so much search traffic coming through Google from mobile devices, they are taking a firm stance on mobile SEO and what is required to ensure consumers have the proper experience. While following these guidelines is important so your sites are not demoted, the real opportunity lies elsewhere in mobile.
The underlying premise of Google’s mobile SEO guidelines is the user; they want the user to “experience the full richness of the web” under all circumstances–especially smartphones–according to their Webmaster Central Blog. The two biggest components to their SEO rankings from what’s been published thus far are 1) the formatting of content and 2) the way in which users are redirected.
When it comes to content, there are two recommended solutions for ensuring smartphone users have the proper access to content on their mobile devices. The first is Responsive Web Design, which we examined last week, where the same content is resized based on the device type. The alternative, which we recommend for real estate, is having separate desktop and mobile configurations, where the purpose of the pages is the same, respectively, but the experience is different based on the user.
