Anyone seen some good info/opinion on SEO for mobile? We're building a mobile site as specced by a Mobile Expert agency. The agency tell me that to rank well in mobile search you basically have to rank well in normal search and then serve your mobile site. That's fine, and true so far as it goes, but we all know local results get delivered more frequently on mobile search, and I suspect sometime soon sites with a mobile version may well get preferential treatment (is there markup I should add to the main site for this?) and I also suspect that there may be ways to tag up product on the mobile site or in product feeds which may benefit the site (like google product local, for example, but ones I don't know about).

So I need a crash course in what I should be thinking about, and I need it from someone who has reasonable/practical speculation of the short to mid term search landscape, rather than all the crap articles I keep finding which say they're about 'seo for mobile' but then talk about paid ads, appear to believe no one will have a desktop in 2012, or spout mindless bollocks a monkey with a hangover could blog better (or all 3)

Recommendations?

Great question; I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for the answer:)

But just to be clear, the mobile site they want you to rank is not really a local site, it's just a mobile site, right?  At the beginning you seemed to talk mobile, but then threw local in there as well... and while there is obviously many times an overlap between the two, there doesn't necessarily have to be.  As I'm sure you know, local search on your mobile is a very different thing than delivering a mobile friendly site, and I think it might be worth noting now, before someone starts spouting off info about proximity search.

yeah this is a mobile site, for a company which already have a website.

However, in my experience, searches from mobiles for products (as in, things you can buy from a store) more frequently return more localised results than if you do the same search from a desktop - hence I'm thinking local is an obvious angle to ensure we pick up. The client has physical stores so local is applicable for them.

I'm also thinking all sorts of other stuff though - barcodes? (having a mobile enabled site means it should be easier to convert - should I tag EAN's in there to deal with potential future mobile scanned search traffic?)

So far I have found page 24+ of the attached which isn't rocket science but is obviously worth a read.

W3c has basic mobile coding stuff but really nothing particularily useful.

>searches from mobiles for products more frequently return more localised results than if you do the same search from a desktop
That is not the case for me... at least searching Google.  If I use my iphone, and it knows where I am, it shows me exactly the same results as my desktop does (again, assuming I am logged in and it knows my location.)

What *IS* different though, is the nature of my SERPS if I look for a virtual service on my iphone (say, 'domain name registration') versus if I search for 'widgets' on my iphone.  The difference is that 'Local Results' are not returned when I search for virtual services, and they are when I search for local products. And having a mobile friendly site really doesn't have anything to do with ranking in the local serps because they are ranking the Google Places pages (which are ranked based on 'proximity' to a large extent).  

Where a mobile friendly website does comes into play is the click off of the Google Places page for the store (unless of course  the SERP we are talking about is actually a 'Shopping' results page.) In other words, if you want to show up in local results, you better have their website connected to a 'Google Place' page.  And then if you need extra juice, then you need Adwords Express.

>I'm also thinking all sorts of other stuff though
This is where I started losing you. Where is the conversion happening? in store or on web? Where are the QR codes and what do they do?

If they have physical stores then the mobile site needs good maps and "how to find us" directions. Don't make the visitor dig too deep for these.

Phone numbers play in here - the person searching has, literally a phone in hand, encourage the visitor to call and ask questions and find out if blue widgets are in stock.  The call is another opportunity to land the sale.

If they are doing dirt world adverts, then yes bar codes sure won't hurt.

iPhones are great for ways to email website URL's to your inbox for later ordering at home. But, last night after a couple of beers, how to send a URL to myself from my Android phone could not be found by me.    If the stock Android browser does not have that ability, then provide some way for visitor to email page URL to themself.

>The call is another opportunity to land the sale.
extremely good point. Remember not to put it in the image at the top of the page;D

>the mobile site needs good maps
I'd argue the physical address (written out in formatted/static text) might be sufficient in many cases to trigger a link to my phone's own maps and GPS (which I'd prefer most of the time) but a static map makes sense too. It really depends on the phones you are targeting, I guess.  If the majority of your traffic is on a smartphone, then maybe you can just start from there, technology-wise?

well, they're paid a lot of money to have an agency that specialises in mobile websites come up with the design. I'm not paid to critique that. The only reason I'll say anything is if I feel it won't work for search, which the agency have confirmed they do not consider.

When I say barcodes I'm thinking actual EAN numbers, not QR codes. QR codes are only really useful if *you* specifically do something with them. EAN codes are used in things like scan and search apps which return products in response to a scan - stick something like 3000000060353 into Google and you'll get products back. The way Google does it is based on if a page has the number on it, the way Google Shopping does it is based on the product feed.  At present, I have no plans to put the EAN code on the main website, although it will be in the database for the product feed. So I have questions like; is there any advantage to tagging up the EAN code on the mobile site (because not every mobile search uses Google product feed including Google main results, and how about Windows based phones?)

 

man, this is a tough thing to discuss because of the terminology, so I'm going to try another stab at it...

'Mobile search' just means a person is using their phone to search.  The SERPs I see are the same exact ones I do on a desktop (assuming I am logged in to Google and my location is known.)  In other words, there is no such thing as 'Mobile SERPS', meaning Google is not searching and giving preferential treatment to mobile sites. They ARE, however, searching and giving preferential treatment to local sites.

'Local search' is a type/section of results that are seen when Google knows where you are physically located. It does not matter if you are on a Desktop or a phone. And the search doesn't *have* to be for a product.... 'oil change' also pulls up local results.

So if you want to rank in this section of the SERPs... and you sell PRODUCTS... first you need to 'associate' your product feed with a .com, by setting that up... then associate that .com with a Places page.... which will in turn associate both the .com and the Place, with the physical address of your brick and mortar store. That way, when people close to your physical store search for your product online, Google will filter it's results based on the surfers' proximity to the stores which could possibly service him/her, and their product feed... and hopefully you will show up:)

yup, I get it

But, if I were Google, I would begin to give preference to sites which worked on mobile, when people searched on mobile. Thats why I want to look at some stuff by people who spend their lives thinking about it!

Its not just about Google either, in my view.

yeah, I see what you mean ...and if the results are not locally oriented (like a virtual service) I would agree even more.  But when it comes to local, I think it's really about the PLACE and not so much about the SITE.  Why penalize a gas station for not having a mobile site, if all you want is gas?

But right now I don't think mobile sites even get crawled.  Can any one confirm either way? The urls I see are always for the main domain. If they crawled the .com and the mobile version, plus all the link architectures, they would end up with dup content, and a lot more work, and only slight incremental improvement in overall UE, imo.

But maybe someone else can add some value here, because I'm afraid that's about as much as I know on the subject...

the google doc I attached up there somewhere does say that they crawl mobile sites and how they want you to treat it so its not dupe. I don't do a load of mobile searching to be honest, so I dom't have a hell of a lot of experience on what sites show up when you're standing in the middle of the high street, but I have found over the years a lot of the 'if I were Google I would....' stuff tends to happene eventually, and since this is a client site; we build, they pay, they expect not to pay again because we didn't think clever enough. I've got to try and future proof this as far as I can because otherwise its my arse will be on the line somewhere down the line

I'll get back to researching this in a few days, right now I'm stuck on some other random crud that crawled out of some orifice or other......

I hear you.  I just finished everything I was working on and FB just changed something that broke what we did... blah.

ah, they still do that do they?  I thought they'd promised not to any more.

Well, last week our app had the ability to post on the wall of a friend of user in the future (a scheduled post) ... we didn't think we would have the correct permissions, but we tested it and it worked.  This week it now throws an exception. And it's a pretty major user flow. So once again we re-paint our canvas...

But all this local search stuff we're talking about here I know about because I've been brushing up for a new client I picked up with several brick and mortar restaurant supply stores and a 10 year old MIVA website with 40k products that looks like Mr Mackin designed:)