Author: Nate Oulman / Source: Jeffbullas's Blog When any business starts this adventure we call “marketing”, they have to cover the basic
When any business starts this adventure we call “marketing”, they have to cover the basics before doing anything else.
They need to define:
- Who is my target audience?
- What is their pain?
- How do I solve that pain?
But once you’ve established who your audience is and how you can help, you then need to determine how to effectively deliver your messaging to that target audience. And then to optimize that messaging so it’s found in search.
Fast forward to today, and you have a business website that you’re proud of. It does everything you need it to – and more. Your analytics tell you that you’re receiving a healthy dose of visitors daily and that you’re also successfully converting a good portion of them.
But then you dig a little deeper…
Your mobile search results aren’t that great, right? You notice that the people who find your site via mobile search seem to be more interested in your brand (since they spend more time on it), but there’s a whole lot less of them than desktop users. Or it may be that you have a lot of them, but they quickly bounce off your site after a single page view.
What’s going on here?
Despite the fact that the number of mobile searches has surpassed desktop searches these days, it can be difficult to win the mobile search marketing game if it’s not done with the utmost of care.
I’ll tackle some of the obstacles marketers face with mobile search and how you can optimize your website to beat the odds.
Understanding the Mobile User Experience
Do you want to know the secret to increasing your visitor count – and, ultimately, conversions – on mobile? Here it is:
The key to mobile search marketing is landing your website on that first page of Google search results.
While you may think that’s simple enough, think again. The experience of conducting a search on the world wide web from a smartphone is much different than the one you have on desktop. Let me show you.
This is a search for “where to buy winter boots” on a Mac:
There are a lot of paid ads taking up prime real estate in search – and those paid efforts make it even more difficult for marketers to reach their audience through mobile search.
See how it took four scrolls through the smartphone in order to see the top five organic search results? That’s a lot of energy to expend just to find a relevant search result that isn’t a paid post.
It’s evident that the experience of search is much different between desktop and mobile. The differences don’t just stop there.
Think about why someone would use a mobile phone to conduct a search versus on a desktop. Are they on the go? Are they using it as a second screen? Were they referred to your site from a coupon they received via email?
Then think about how mobile users interact with your website versus if they were to visit it on desktop. Are there certain pieces of information they may want to find right away (like a phone number or address)? Do beautiful, high-resolution images that look great when viewed on desktop distract from the content on mobile? Are the calls-to-action big enough to read, find, or click?
Similar to the scenario played out above, brevity and convenience are important considerations to make when planning out a site for mobile. That’s not to say you have to build a separate mobile website or even an app, but it does mean that responsive design is simply not enough anymore.
Tips for mobile search marketing success
While it would be great to consolidate our search marketing efforts between desktop and mobile into a single pipeline, it’s clear that different devices call for different experiences.
As someone looking to successfully market their business, you need to know how to do this for desktop, mobile, and to strike a balance between the two.
The following tips will guide you through the essentials for mobile search marketing optimization.
1. Find the right keywords for mobile
What are…
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