Mobile Search Keyword Tactics

August 5th, 2010

As any good SEO should know getting your keywords right from the start of a project is one of the keys to a successful SEO strategy. The way to extract and use keywords that are going to be great not just now, but in the future as well,  is the lynch pin in your mobile strategy.

What I want to do in this post is to highlight a few different out of the box ways you can get some hot keywords specifically aimed at mobile searchers.

Local

OK so we’ve gone over this time and time again but making use that you’re targeting people who are in the local vicinity is a great way of getting highly relevant traffic. Even if you are an online only specialist you’ll still have a business address which you can potentially use as a spring board. Remember that there are different levels of locality, from a macro level to a micro level:

Macro to Micro Local Search

Investigate the search volumes around these different levels and create pages that are going to pick up the specific traffic. Why not make a landing page which gives information specifically around a macro level such as all your stores in a county or country.

Another aspect of local is leveraging the store finder which we’ve covered before. If you have a small business without the need for store finders always include a detailed page on how customers can get to your shop.

Just to prove the store finders importance, a large retailer I worked with had GA tracking on their mobile site. The number 1 most searched for query was “[retailer] store finder”. Once they had a specific crawlable page created to net the traffic their search volumes doubled (abate it wasn’t massive in the first place).

Vouchers

Voucher Codes are big in the UK ,as coupons are in the US. There is some difference between the two (UK voucher codes offer online reductions while Coupons are more for in store promotions). But for the purposes of search their actual functions are mute. Vouchers are always widely searched for and so by targeting these keywords you can not only generate a nice source of traffic but also cut down your affiliate costs.

Potential

Mobile searches are massively on the rise and so it’s important to remember that search volumes will be changing all the time. One hot keyword identification is to try and see the future potential they certain keywords have.

The main method of locating potential keywords is to use Google keywords tool as it gives a historic 12 month search volumes. To extract the data go in and pull out a table for a selection of keywords your interested in. Don’t forget to turn the mobile search volume on. Add in 12 new columns and use the following function:

=[ search data for the nth month]/[search data for first month]-1

This should leave you with normalised data which you can put into a graph. Add in the data for a few of the keywords and compare them. Are the volumes increasing, staying the same or declining.

A big caveat to this method is that it assumes there is no seasonality, so have your eyes open when you look at the data. If you want to take it to a step further compare the growth rates between the mobile and normal search volumes to see which keyword is growing most compared to the market.

You can even take this to the next level and estimate where traffic will be at for the next few months for traffic estimation purposes.

Current Ranking

Another tactical keyword targeting move you can easily make is to see where you’re currently ranking and with what page, then build on that progress. The main advantage of this is you can get much quicker results; an aggressive link building strategy from #11 can prove deadly.

To find this information you’re going to have to dive into Google webmaster tools. Go to search quires and put the mobile filter on, now look at the data below. You should now be able to see which keywords you’re getting the highest visibility for.

Mobile search traffic results

Click on a keyword to Refine the data and find out what pages are ranking where. From this you can see if you have any low hanging fruit, ripe for the plucking.

Mobile Ranking Results

Caliban

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iAd for developers out in UK

August 4th, 2010

*edit* looks like the slides have been take down by the uploader, sorry guys*/edit*


As a little bonus I’ve uploaded a Google presentation showing some of their strategies in the next year. They’ve got some nice slides on mobile search although they’re clearly heavily PPC related:

Google keynote.

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Indexing and Ranking the Mobile Web

July 19th, 2010

*This is an open letter to Google questioning the future of how the mobile web should be indexed and ranked accordingly*

The mobile web has a problem, users just don’t like accessing normal websites from their phones (see research data here). Mobile users don’t want to zoom in and out or wait ages for a bloated page to load up; they clearly have a need for a web experience tailored for them, a mobile site.

The problem right now is you’re just not indexing and ranking the mobile web so that these dedicated mobile have visibility; if you do a search today most of the high ranking sites will be normal sites even in areas such as news where many key players have mobile versions of their sites.

Most mobile sites only get traffic from redirecting users from static sites and don’t really rank. I want to challenge you on the way you index and rank the mobile web and list some reasons why something has to change.

1. Relying on redirects leads to poor user experience

So what’s wrong with using re-direct script to channel mobile users to a sites mobile platform?

Well in your own Adwords guidelines you make it clear about the importance of the transparency of a website. Anything advertised in the copy should be representative of what’s on the site when you land. Relying on redirects means that snippets in the SERPs will not necessarily correlate with where a mobile user lands. A good example of this is one site which always redirects mobile users to the mobile homepage no matter where you come from. This totally mismatched experience reflects badly on you because people will think that you did it and served them the wrong page.

Lack of natural mobile ranking is forcing webmaster to do this.

2. No-one links to mobile sites

Another key issue that preventing mobile sites from achieving the rankings they deserve is that no-one links to them. There are a number of reasons why this is happening, firstly because the mobile web is still its infancy not many people know about what’s out there; more importantly secondly  because mobile sites area very similar to their static counterparts if someone is going to link to your site they’ll nearly always choose the normal site (obviously unless there is some unique mobile content).

Truly unique, rich content is hard to get links too on mobile sites because as these sites aren’t currently ranking, no-one is seeing them or linking to them meaning they don’t rank; it’s catch 22.

There aren’t that many people who link in the mobile sphere too. In the normal web you’ll have a small % of users who will be producing the vast majority of links. Because most of these linkers key focus will be on normal site, mobile sites are missing out. Again we’re stuck in a vicious circle until there is more mobile site visibility there won’t be people around who will comment and highlight really good mobile content.

3. People don’t want to waste resources

Why as a company should I invest time and money into mobile orientated sites over my normal site?

The best ways of getting people to naturally link to you is of course to create unique and original content that’s going to capture the imagination of your audience. The problem companies have is that their asked to invest in content what will cost the same for their mobile and normal sites but will appeal to an audience a 1/10th of the size.

This is leaving many mobile sites dull and lacking originality. Most are a carbon copy of their original site.

4. Mobile sites are deep

If you look at more popular mobile sites, there are only a few navigational links from the homepage due to screen size.

M+S Mobile Website

This is causing a lot of large mobile sites to have a very deep structure. In Marks and Spencers case there’s about 5 clicks till you can get to the item you want on their mobile rather than the 3 for the main site.

Mobile Sites are Deep Sites

The problem with this is that link juice will flow very badly in these sites meaning that many bottom level pages won’t be indexed and long tail traffic will be non existent.

5. Normal sites will always win in a link race

Let’s think about a scenario a second. Imagine two sites, A – a normal website and B – a mobile site, they both want to rank for the term “Green Widgets” and have created highly original relevant pages to target this traffic. Relevancy wise they’re both at the max, the only way they are going to beat each other is to attract more links naturally.

Normal sites will nearly always outrank mobile sites because the rate that they will be linked to will be faster due to larger audiences. Normal websites also have a massive advantage in that they will have already accrued large amounts of links. In cases like “news” where the major papers have an unbeatable amount of links what can a mobile site do?

6. It’s harder to be relevant on mobile

Small screen sizes mean that written content is going to be harder to fit on the page so ultimately mobile sites are going to be more visual and interactive with use of images, video’s (network speed permitting) and undoubtedly flash or HTML5 dynamic content. This leaves mobile sites with a strange position, for usability they want to have rich media websites but this may further exacerbate low search engine visibility for their sites.

What can you do?

Now I’m not here to teach you how to suck eggs but I thought I would offer a few suggestions of how you can tweak your mobile search algorithm to make sure the mobile web continues to grow.

Mobile needs a stronger weighting

The first simple step you can do is to give a much stronger weighting to mobile sites. I would argue that this should be done to such an extent that mobile will always trump normal sites. Firstly I think this would give some real value for creating a mobile site and adding excellent content to it, this could potentially cause the kick-start in mobile site creation that we need to get things going. This would in turn draw users in, and hopefully create the mobile linkers that I talked about before.

Mobile links are worth more in the mobile world

Links should obviously be a key authority indicator still, but I would argue as mobile users have different habits and different needs to normal users mobile links should add much more value. As they are from one mobile user to another you know that this “editorial vote” will be relevant for the mobile experience and a more accurate reflection of what’s good mobile content.

Websites should be able to pass link equity to their mobile sites

Making sure that we don’t just get spammy mobile sites is also vital, so why not add a tag passing on link value from a normal site to its mobile equivalent (similar to how the canonical tag is implemented). While it shouldn’t be the key ranking indicator (as I mentioned above a mobile link is more important than a normal link) it should show that the mobile site creator is already highly trusted and authoritative in the normal web and should be respected in mobile. This would also help pass on some of the link value that been accrued over years on the normal site to the brand new link virginal mobile version.

Relevancy should be more visual

Google Goggles is amazing, you can clearly now identify what’s in a picture and know what it’s about. As mobile sites get less text centerd and more visual elements such as images and video play a much stronger part in the make up of mobile sites, relevancy should be based more around them than text.

Internal mobile links should pass more juice

To counter the poor navigation issues I think that you need to be a bit more forgiving on how link juice flows around the site, letting the deeper mobile sites bottom level pages have the same amount of juice as their normal equivalent would have.

Why should you bother?

Google makes their money from Adwords. You always have and probably always will. With 10% of all queries now being performed on a mobile (source) you need to make companies wake up to the mobile web because you’re missing a massive opportunity to profit. Out of that 10% of users how much money from adwords are you making out of them? Not half as much from the normal web.

Give ranking incentives to mobile site builders to encourage uptake. This will put mobile more on the map within companies and ultimately lead to PPC budget created around these mobile users.

You can have all that for free…

Caliban

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Mcommerce isn’t working – what’s the problem?

July 13th, 2010

Samsung Galaxy S

Brandbank recently issued some research into mobile commerce in the UK market. They polled over 2000 peopleabout mobile commerce and their experiences. I want to go over some of the main point’s I noted and give a bit of analysis and insight into the research as there’s several very interesting points that are raised.

Smartphone Usage

The first nice piece of information was the level of smartphone penetration in the survey group.

“Consumers that own spartphones 21%  …. those that don’t 79%”

So unsurprisingly there hasn’t been a massive take up of smartphones in the UK, I would even argue that 21% is a bit optimistic as not all smartphones have the same use patterns (early Android smartphones have roughly half the internet browsing usage of their contempories). The smartphones I would care about and focus on are the ones that will grow mobile web use i.e. iPhone and Desire types. There’s still a long way to go but as soon as the first pay as you go desire style smartphone hits the market we’re going to see a much larger increase in the market.

“Of all non-smartphone owners, 85% claim they have never used their phone to help them shop compared to 19% of smartphone users”

I’ve talked about this before but smartphone users have totally different habits to non-smartphone users. One thing I’ve seen recently is people arguing that there’s a missed opportunity focusing purely on smartphone users. This stat will hopeful de-bunk this myth, spending resource on people who don’t use their phone to shop is a poor strategic decision.

“While very few non-smartphone owners use their phones at all in their shopping behaviour, the most common way smartphone owners use their devices is in purchasing products directly online, via their mobile browser (47%). The next most common smartphone usage are reading product ratings or reviews online (40%, finding out additional information from a retailers website (36%), comparing prices online (34%) and searching for nearby high street stores (28%). 26% percent said they make purchases using specially downloaded apps.”

There’s a lot to learn from that paragraph, but from the sample it seems that twice as many people use mobile sites over apps to purchase. Whether this is reality or a customer perception has yet to be seen but in my eyes App stores main role are there to convert sales and bolster an already strong brand; mobile sites will always pick up the customer who isn’t too sure about what to buy and is searching for the deal that’s right for them.

Reviews and information also play a large part of a consumers habits, making sure you have dedicated pages listing all reviews of your products is vital, and shouldn’t be too hard to pull through if you use a large review contractor like Bazaar Voice.

Local also has a part to play in a mobile users shopping habit, make sure you have a content rich page for each of your stores, giving directions, pictures and general advice to users wanting to find you.

Current Mobile Experience is Poor

“Just 15% of (smartphone) owners say that they find the process (of purchasing) hassle free with 18% saying that they find it positively difficult and time consuming”

This is where the research really starts to get interesting, only 15% of smartphone users found their mobile experience satisfactory (with their 20% penetration that makes around 3% of all users were happy). To be honest I would have expected this figure for all mobile users not smartphones! We’ve clearly got a long way to go before people are happy with their mobile experience.

“When asked which aspects of their … experience they found to be irritating, the most frequent response was being forced to zoom in and out to view all the information on a web page (47%)”

I think that figure is a God-send for those who are trying to sell mobile to their company. If you don’t have a site specifically tailored to the mobile experience you’re going to annoy over half your user base. Don’t be lazy and make a high value mobile site.

Continuing down this line, it’s pure conjecture but I’d image of the 50% of people who are left, some would be neutral (30%?) and some would like traditional sites (20%?). That potentially means 8 out of 10 people would prefer a mobile site to a static site.

“This was followed by having to wait for images to load on a page (43%) and being unable to see images, video’s or hear audio (39%)”

There are some great insights here too, even though 2 in 10 like normal sites, everyone gets annoyed by slow loading times. This is particularly true for image heavy static sites that haven’t streamlined for mobile. I’m going to put together a post at some point giving you some pointers to making your mobile site lighting fast.

The second point is also really interesting, at first I assumed this is partly from all the iPhone users unable to see flash on mobile but reading through it again I think theirs a bigger problem.

Most mobile sites are text heavy to say the least; a necessity of improving load times and fitting content in. As web users have come to expect rich media websites as standard, their bound to be let down to the high un-visual offering they’re given. Ironically the text centric nature of the mobile web was done to help improve mobile user experience but as generations of users have been brought up on broadband they want the best of both worlds.

This is a disturbing conclusion to me in some ways as network speeds won’t change for the better for at least 1 year in the UK and won’t have mass take up for several years after that.

Could we have a backlash from mobile users who have the hardware and impetus to use mobile web but get frustrated when they try and use it. Inconsistent experiences lead to user annoyance which may in turn lead to rejection of the mobile web. Never before has someone been so envious of Sprint’s 4G US network….

One idea that came to me from this point was the place of audio on mobile sites. Space is a big issue for mobile sites so why not make better use of audio steams to fulfil the user while keeping you page lean. While not idea for SEO (all your lovely text is lost) the user experience is improved, why not have both?

Usability left by the wayside

“Usability issues also appear to be a concern with 38% of people being irritated by the amount of information … they have to enter. 25% were put off by the number of different pages they have to click through to make a payment”

So site usability is another massive factor on mobile sites. I’ve seen some beautiful sites fails after they were created purely because purchase forms were unnecessarily long and deep in the site. Usually this is because they weren’t expecting mobile users to buy, so no-one did….

There are some great guides on Get Elastic blog covering sliming your checkout process, have a red through and implement some tips.

In summary I think there’re some glaring issues to why mobile commerce isn’t working yet. Poor quality sites accessed from slow networks lacking usability lead to a weak user experience, general un-satisfaction and a minute conversion. Start off your mobile expansion looking to get users to buy and create an original site that overcomes these issues.

Caliban

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Posted in mobile seo future | 1 Comment »

6 Custom Google Analytics Reports You Can’t Live Without

July 7th, 2010

Getting your website set up, optimised and growing is only half the battle. Making sure you’ve got great reporting set up is important as it will allow you to find any weakness in your strategy and make tactical decisions based on this. This post aims to help you set up 6 custom Google analytics reports that you can use to monitor your mobile performance.

The first step you need to take is to create a separate profile based on your mobile site’s sub-domain/domain. This will differentiate the data allowing you to filter out static users. If you don’t have the privileges to do this you can still set everything up by using custom segments.

1. Hourly Trending

This is a great graph for showing when your mobile users are hitting your site. Simply go to the visitor tab, then visitor trending and click on the hour’s display on the top right hand side whilst in the mobile segment. You’ll need to select a decent date range to get some reliable information, 2 months worth will typically do it. Another idea would be to filter out any non-mobile phone device traffic through a customer segment as devices that I wouldn’t consider to be truly “mobile” such as the iPod touch or even the iPad get counted in the “mobile” segment.

Once you’ve got your data you should get something like this:

Hourly Trending of Mobile Site

On this example there are some obvious lunch time and evening peaks, maybe you could offer an exclusive promotion at these time or even customise your mobile PPC to get the largest click through rates. Another effective option is to leverage your Social Media activity which is highly popular on mobile to drag customers in (Tweet a special deal at the peak time for instance).

2. Organic Non-Branded Mobile Total Visitors

OK so that’s a bit of a mouthful but I consider that to be the underlying KPI for you mobile SEO campaign. Here’s a break down of why I’ve put individual elements into this KPI:

Organic – Of-course as SEO’s we want to grow natural traffic. While I would expect an uplift in direct traffic because of our efforts it’s really hard to quantify and so looking purely at organic is the most honest metric.

Non-brand – Any good mobile SEO will be chasing non-branded keywords. That’s where the new visitors are, the prospects who wouldn’t have normally thought about using you. An increase in Branded search could be down to your efforts; however again I think it’s too hard to quantify and so should be left out.

Mobile -This is mobile SEO after all…..

Visitors – Make sure you look at visitors rather than visits as this is a much stronger metric. A visitor is someone who’s visited your site they will not be counted again unless they shut their browser for 30 mins. This eliminates users who like to use Google at every stage of their purchase funnel.

Here’s an example:

Mobile SEO Traffic Sources

Making sure you’re growing this KPI is vital for long term success as nearly every person who is in this segment over the usual number of people who visit have been driven to your site direct by you. Combined with a well implemented eCommerce tracking you can put a £ (or $) value on every single visitor, ultimately giving your client a fair ROI.

This graph is easy to set up, create a custom filter based on the metrics above and look at the search engine traffic report.

3. Top Organic Mobile Keywords

It’s worth having the top 10 organic mobile keywords accessible from the dashboard. Here i’s important not to filter out brand searches as it will allow you to see what rough Brand/Non-brand keyword ratio is. If it’s looking too Brand heavy you need to drive more head terms.

4. Site Search

Site search can give you some amazing insights into what people want from your site. I highly recommend placing a search bar in a prominent place on your Mobile homepage and build up lots of lovely data to see what your mobile users are searching for. Investigate what they can’t find and create some high quality content around it. This should not only help lower bounce rates but also improve your organic traffic.

5. Top Converting Mobile PPC Keywords

Not sure what keywords to chase? Spend a bit of budget on some mobile PPC and find out what keywords are getting the best click through rates and conversions. This is really important to do before you invest large budgets in content creation and linkbuilding. You can do this by joining you Adwords account to Google Analytics

6. Top Mobile Landing Pages

The final custom report that’s well worth setting up is the top mobile landing pages. This report will tell you what your top performing mobile pages are, how many people are going to them and if your link building is being effective. Look and see if any of your pages just aren’t working, use the filter function and regex to group similar pages together for comparison (i.e. if you want to compare your on site articles).

Caliban

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UK Overtakes US Mobile Usage (Vs Desktop) as a Percentage

July 3rd, 2010

Just a quick update with some eye-brow rising information. I’ve been keeping track of mobile use via Stat Counter and have noted that due to a dip in mobile internet use in America the UK has overtaken them. The big caveat to this is that the information is as a percentage and is against desktop usage, the US will easily eclipse the UK’s mobile use in numbers alone. This was quite interesting to see as there has been quite a few more Android smartphones exclusively released in the US (HTC EVO and Incredible for instance). The UK has however had a large uptake of HTC desires with all the major phone operators being reasonably aggressive on price which may explain their continual rise. I’ll be interested to see how the iPhone 4 affects mobile usage in the coming months. Anyway here are the two graphs showing the UK overtaking the US:

Mobile Search stats for UK UK Overtakes US Mobile Usage (Vs Desktop) as a Percentage

Mobile Search stats for USA UK Overtakes US Mobile Usage (Vs Desktop) as a Percentage

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3 Steps Towards Getting Your Mobile SEO Keywords Right

July 2nd, 2010

One of the major tenants of Mobile SEO in my opinion is that you want to serve a customised experience to a relevant searcher. Translating that tenant into reality is all about connecting a searcher through a highly pertinent mobile keyword; so selecting/targeting the right keywords is vital to give the mobile user the quality of service they expect. This post aims to give you a step by step guide to selecting these keywords and gaining the keyword coverage you need.

Step 1. Think about the different types of mobile SEO keywords.

Mobile keywords can roughly be placed into 6 different buckets:

Mobile SEO keyword types

Unique’s: These are keywords that are unique to mobile searchers. From experience these are relatively low volume keywords but one’s which are well worth targeting as there will be little competition. As mobile search inevitably increases in volume, so will these specific keywords may have good potential in the future.

Semi’s: Semi’s are keywords that are well searched for by both mobile and static users. Typically these will be head terms and chunky mid terms, high volume and with lots of competition. Again choosing the right semi is key as there may be variations between patterns in mobile and static searches.

Static’s: these are search for only by static users, their volumes can vary but typically avoid them (unless you’re trying to gain share of voice for a certain keyword and want to bump your competitors off).

Locations: Simply keywords with locations in. These will have low specific volumes but potentially lots of long tail searches. When selecting these keywords don’t rely on Google Adwords keywords tool but think about all the different ways people would search for your local area. With these keywords it’s very much a case of “if you build it, they will come”.

Tools: these are searches that want to find certain tools. This could be particularly useful if you have a utility app or a niche app that people might search for. Any activity around these keywords would have to be done in conjunction with your app offering as Google now picks up if you’re searching for an app and lets the user download it.

Long Tails: Currently there aren’t as many long tail searches for mobile; however one could argue that rather than disappearing the long tail has just gotten shorter. Focus on potential 4 word phases and make sure you have plenty of relevant content that’s going to capture these searches. Things like Voice search and Swype are going to bring back the long tail in the next few years so future proof yourself.

Step 2: Use Your Mobile SEO Plan

Now that you can see what’s out there you can be more granular in your decisions and choose a selection of keywords you want to target, but have you really thought about what are you doing?

If I asked you “What’s the point of your Mobile Site?” could you come back with an answer, quickly and concisely. More important than the question I asked is “Where does mobile SEO figure into your vision?”

Most mobile site owners don’t have a mobile SEO plan to fulfil this vision and from this make poor decisions over what keywords to target. Take some time to think what keywords you’re going to need to target to achieve your mobile goals.

Here’s an example:

Karen is a baker, offering a selection of freshly baked upmarket Panini’s and baguettes. Her mobile site vision is:

“To attract City workers searching for lunch on their phone and guide them to the bakery”

Clearly her Mobile SEO plan will revolve heavily around the “Locations” bucket as well as potentially some “Uniques” and long tail. Traditional SEO approaches may suggest chasing large generic words like “restaurant”, or “lunch” that wouldn’t work as well for mobile. N.B. if you are targeting local keywords it’s well worth learning local ranking factors and building citations to your business.

By knowing what keywords are most viable to your business you’ll get the most bang for your buck in your link investment down the line.

Step 3: Find the right pages to target.

One area I see people fail to think through carefully is around matching up keywords to pages. There is usually a lot of emphasis around stuffing as many keywords into the homepage as possible; believing that as the homepage has the largest amount of link juice pouring in it will rank well. Sadly this isn’t the case; make sure you create highly relevant, keyword orientated pages to not only be highly relevant to Google but to hopefully attract links of their own. The kinds of pages will also tend to attract a lot of long tail searches as well, due to the high quality in depth content of the pages.

In the example above as location related keywords are needed I would recommend that either a specific location page is create, or the majority of the homepage is devoted to offering information and advice on the bakery whereabouts.

Another thing to consider when choosing your potential page for keyword targeting is how well it’s going to complete your site aims and make the searchers convert. If you’re sending everyone to your homepage rather than directly into relevant, converting pages you’re missing a trick.

Using the example again, after thinking about conversion maybe the homepage wouldn’t be the most ideal choice. Ideally we would have a dedicated page which gave information about the bakery, directions how to get there, phone numbers to ring for directions, and even possibly a coupon to get the sale.

Caliban

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Linking Effectively for Mobile Search

June 25th, 2010

We’ve talked about the hazards of redirect script before, how it can miss out on a swathe of potential Mobile traffic but that isn’t the end of the story. Building up mobile specific search volumes requires an active effort on your part. SEOMoz and any other SEO worth their salt states that links are the most important ranking factor and its links that mobile sites often don’t have.

Internal links are a great resource you can leverage to rank better and using them to link effectively for mobile search is going to be key for an effective long term mobile SEO strategy. We’re going to look at this in detail in today’s post.

*Aside*

SEOMoz provides a Firefox Add-on which is great for checking out link metrics on the fly so I highly recommend downloading it. It’s called The SEOMoz Toolbar for Firefox and provided you have a pro account it can allow you to quickly find out how well linked a certain page is. This is perfect for auditing a mobile site as you will want to quickly look at a variety of different key pages.

*/Aside*

Your Mobile Site Hierarchy

We should begin building up a physical interpretation of your mobile site by drawing up a hierarchy. This will give us some really nice visual clues as to what content is working on site, and what isn’t. Annotate it with SEOMoz link metrics such as Page Authority, Linking Root Domains, External Links Total, Internal Links Total, # Links with Phrase Anchor Text and Trust rank.

That’s a long list but it will give you everything you need to understand what’s happening on your site on a granular level. I’m going to draw up an example below based on the Telegraph’s mobile site. Note that for an enterprise sized site you probably wouldn’t want to label every page, as the bottom level pages (or BLP’s) will pretty much all have the same link metrics; just take a single one to get an idea of what they’re like.

Mobile Site Hierarchy Linking Effectively for Mobile Search

So what does this all mean?

Well, links don’t just give value to one page, as that page will have internal links you’ll pass on some of the juice internally. Making sure you’ve got a good linking structure means that you will have a good flow which will in turn make the most of every single link on your site.

Another important thing that you can do is to identify “hotspots” on site and make sure you’ve got contextual links between these “hot” pages and pages that desperately need some help.

In the above example the interlinking is OK but the important thing to note is that the TeleMobile site is very weak in terms of external links. How can they improve their mobile site? Well one massively powerful tool that you will have at your side (typically) will be a static website. On your static website you’ll have already spent years building up highly relevant links to deep pages so why not make use of that?

Leveraging your existing site for link juice

In the Telegraph example, there are so many links pointing to deep pages across the site we can inject some of this relevant juice into our mobile site example.

The Three most important factors for internal linking is, Linking Page Authority (i.e. how juicy is a particular page), the link’s anchor text (what are you telling Google about the page it’s linking to?), and the page target (Is the linked-to page the correct recipient of the juice for the keywords we want?).

Here’s what I would do in the TeleMob example above:

Using-your-static-site-to-link-effectivly

So there’s some simple, logical links we could put in place, firstly from one homepage to another, from a Cat. page to another, etc.

The difficulties with using your existing site

The problem that I always find is dealing with the BLP’s; when you’re linking from one large hub to another you can choose the anchor text quite easily but when you’re trying to match up one small page it’s hard to find relevant text to link with. The way to get around this is to link from all the BLP’s to the relevant mobile category hubs. This allows you to still use relevant anchor text but also key the link juice flowing; by targeting their own hubs hopefully some link juice will filter down to the equivalent mobile BLP’s.

The next issue is how to create a link on every page of your static site?

In times of yore, mobile site links were placed at the bottom of pages in the footer; however I think Google is going to (or has) be weakening these links.  The answer is to have a link on the header of the page, meaning if you have a dynamically generated site the header (and therefore the link) will be on every page. Quite a few sites have given mobile the prominence it deserves, placing it clearly at the top of the page like I suggest. If you’re a mobile user, as the link is in the top left hand side you can click through to use the mobile site easily without detection and redirection.

Here are two examples, the former from The Guardian, the later from W3C

With the W3C image I’m cheating a little as it’s a CSS/Javascript change for mobile users which is fine for a site with no unique mobile content. It does however give us an idea of how some of these big players are starting to prioritise mobile.

One area The Guardian does fail in is the lack of dynamism in its link as well as the anchor text. As you can see in the example all the links simply use “Mobile Site” rather than highly relevant keywords. The difficulty you have in matching the anchor text is that you have to fit in the anchor text in, this can be a problem with sub-hubs that have long or unattractive names.

One possibility would be to use a link that’s dynamically generated in Javascript to link to the appropriate mobile page. By targeting highly relevant keywords and injecting them directly into our mobile hubs we should potentially have a much needed increase in link juice and traffic.

Caliban

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Leveraging Store Finders for Local/Mobile SEO

June 12th, 2010

One of predicted themes of “SEO in 2010” that’s come up time and time again has been the place of geo-local SEO, the optimisation of a site for searches with a local spin. I personally agree with this sentiment with the advent of location based social media sites like Foursquare and Gowalla. The mobile web also has a part to play with 1/3rd of all mobile searches having local intent meaning that local is going to be on the minds of potential searchers.

Making sure your site is optimised for local is going to important this year so making the most of the content you already have on your site will save you a lot of effort and money. One resource that many businesses with a local presence have is a store finder; a section of a site that allows users to (funnily enough) find a store. They usually consist of a store finder “homepage” allowing a user to search then a collection of pages with information on the company’s stores.

This post is all about leveraging this criminally under used resource to improve your rankings in a Google web search with a local spin. My approach to turning your existing pages into local content rich pages comes in three steps:

Site Architecture

One of the big problems I see with some company’s presentation of their store pages is their architecture. If you’ve heard Matt Cutt’s talk recently he’s all about getting your architecture right at the start. There’re two reasons why this is justified, firstly having your pages buried deep within your site means that not much link juice filters down to individual store pages. Secondly as Google uses PageRank as a measure of how many pages to index, deep content may not even get indexed.

Let’s take a look at some common examples of sites that have bad architecture which will have indexing issues:

Fail 1 – The buried store finder. This store finder is buried deep down in the site. Not only is this highly customer unfriendly but it will also prevent link juice flow. Try your best to get a link from the homepage to these pages.

Fail 2 – The solo search form store finder. This store finder has all the store pages behind a search form, there are no other ways of navigating to the store pages. Google won’t bother trying to go through the search form and will simply pass by, not indexing your pages. Make sure you have a way of navigating to each store page without using the search form.

Fail 3 – The outsourced store finder. Here the store finder is on another site. This is the worst possibility as you’re giving content and link juice to another site when you could easily keep it all for yourself. If pages do rank, users will be going to another site which isn’t ideal. Don’t outsource your store finder.

Fail 4 – The multi stepped store finder. This is when websites group stores into regions and put another step in getting the products. This isn’t a huge problem but every extra unnecessary step you add in is costing you link juice and ultimately, ranking. Keep your store architecture flat.

Fail 5 – The multipage store finder. Here the website has various pages for the same store, i.e. one page has the “how to get there” guide on it while another shows news. This is simply spreading out your content and link juice unnecessarily, are you really adding value by doing this?

These five check points should give you all the guidance you need architecture wise.

On Page Optimisation

The next step is the unsurprising task of making sure you’ve got the correct optimisation on your store pages. The key to a well optimised local page isn’t just having the address of the venue and a picture, but lots of local relevant content so you can capture long tail searches. Begin by taking your normal sets of keywords for use throughout the page and add to them by brainstorming local keywords.

This, obviously, will have to be done for each store, but begin with very close locations to the venue then zoom out to a larger level. One recommendation is to think about local landmarks that people may be searching for; for example try to add in things like rivers, parks, or even tube stations for searches like “Cafe by the river”. You’ll be surprised how many landmark queries come up.

Another way of generating excellent keywords is to think of words that are “actions”. For example you run a restaurant, if people are searching locally they have an intent of going there so may use action keywords such as “lunch” or “dinner”.

Start by optimising the title tag using your keywords, I’ve got a template for a typical example:

{Brand/keyword} in {closest place name}. Near {further out place name}, {City or town} | {Long tail keywords + Brand in here}

“Sandra’s Cafe in Pinner. Near Harrow, London| Food and drink by the river at Sandra’s Cafe “

Lead with an optimised header with the usual <h1> tag and a quality meta description for each store don’t just make a generic one then copy + paste.  Build a bit of local rich content by adding a small paragraph about the store (no matter how boring it is) which will be packed with keywords you’ve researched. Here’s an example:

“Barry’s Fans in Colchester is the ideal location for fans or fan related products. Our highly trained staff will help you through your purchase, whether it’s a small beside fan or large ceiling fan. Situated only 5 minutes away from the train station in the centre of Colchester town and with parking nearby it’s never been easier to drop by. It’s the ultimate fan experience in Essex, fan-tastic.”

Another key element to this page is images. Firstly make sure you have professional quality photos on your website, this strictly isn’t SEO but this page is your shop window. Optimise the image file name and alt tag with the local keywords so you get some image search coverage.

Add in directions to the store from public transport or by car and offer advice on local parking. Use Google maps to let a customer see where your store is in a familiar way. All of this is going to build up your long tail offering as it will be packed with locations.

I highly recommend linking to your Foursquare page. Not only will it drum up a little more interest in your venue page (and a bit more competition over mayorships), it will pass on some much needed link juice. Getting your Foursquare page to rank highly will potentially allow you to take the top two SERP positions, maximising traffic. Put a widget on your store pages to give users real-time Foursquare data.

Link to other nearby shops with local anchor text, i.e.:

“Not found what you’re looking for?

Barry’s Fans near Norwich

Barry’s Fans near Cornwall “

The last step I recommend setting up is allowing user generated content. Either have some kind of moderated customer comments or try and bring in a Foursquare/Twitter feed of relevant tips to add even more content to your page.

Build Links

Link building is one of the most important steps to make sure you rank highly but it’s particularly hard to do with these static pages. The only recommendations I can give are to search for when a specific store is mentioned in the news and ask for a link to the page; this can often happen in the local press with store openings and charity work.

Another tactic is to create a bit of buzz around a particular store using Foursquare or other Social Media. One example is organising a swarm badge in a particular store, in that particular example tonnes of links were going round in Twitter, the news and blogosphere.

Try running an in-store promotion for the local area, leak information out to local bloggers/forums and post details of the promotion on the store page. My final suggestion is to create local themed linkbait and heavily link to your store pages to pass on as much link juice as you can.

Caliban

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ComScore Reports New Mobile Search Stats

June 10th, 2010

Yesterday I attended a webinar that ComScore hosted. Entitled “The State of Mobile: A Fragmented Reality” it looked at ComScores collected Mobile information from the last year.

There were a number of key learning’s from the presentation, here’re a few of my favourites:

Mobile User Typical Use ComScore Reports New Mobile Search Stats

This slide highlighted how mobile users typically accessed content. They were quick to point out that search was down to 44% (from a 88% domination on desktops); however I would be quick to point out that this data is drawn from active users, i.e. it includes App users and SMS users who may not search as much. Mobiles have multiple uses so I’m no wonder everyone isn’t searching…

Top-genres-for-mobile-browsers

This graph shows what the main types of content that are consumed by mobile users. I was interested to see how well news did, and unsurprised that Social Media is going to be big on phones.

Smartphone-Service-Penetration

I liked this graph as it showed just how much more browser use smartphones have. Mobiles take up 5% of Internet usage, and smartphones are 20% of the mobile share. When we reach 100% smartphone usage we could be potentially up to 20-25% of internet usage from mobiles.

I’ve found the slides on slide share and you can view them below, note that this data is for the UK/EU and that the American figures are much more advanced:

*Update* US slides are now available in PDF form here

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