If the 331 million mobile users in the U.S. alone were not reason enough for you to go mobile with your website and brand this next reason might just be the motivating factor you need to take action. Google has announced their smartphone Googebot-Mobile. What is this, you ask? Googlebot-Mobile is what will crawl the internet acting as a smartphone in order to increase coverage of smartphone related content in order to provide a better search experience for smartphone users.
Yes – Mobile SEO is here. This means that for mobile search, you will rank higher if you are serving content optimized to be browsed on smartphones along with smartphone specific redirects. In addition, if you’re mobile strategy is designed to detect the specific type of device that is accessing your content (feature/non-smartphone) and smartphone and serve a different experience based on the device type, this will also be taken into account by Google when they index your content.
In addition, they are launching their Skip Redirect for Smartphone-optimized Pages. This feature changes the target link shown in the search results to the mobile destination, when a mobile redirect is present, ensuring the user goes directly there which saves them .05 – 1 seconds on average, another great benefit of this new enhancement.
For many of us, Google is the Holy Grail. We want nothing more than to show up at the top of the search result rankings when someone searches for real estate in our market. Simultaneously, SEO remains a constant “work-in-progress” because the criteria are continually changing. One thing that is not changing however is the importance of mobile.
Google wants nothing more than to ensure that they’re search experience is the best it can possible be for their users and they’re pretty good at this to put it lightly. They have taken detailed measures to ensure they now know who is serving mobile and smartphone optimized content to ensure that their mobile users, potentially their largest user demographic, get the information they are looking for in a format that works on their device.
If Google thinks it’s important, you should too. If you haven’t taken action on going mobile and positioning your brand for the mobile user, use this as the reason to do so. There is no better time than the present to go mobile, it’s not going anywhere.
For more information on how to best optimize your site for use on a mobile device, visit www.testmysitenow.com.
Seth Kaplan is president of Mobile Real Estate ID. For more information, please visit www.mobilerealestateid.com.
