Want to do better on Google? Do better on smartphones. Emporium Media’s guide to mobile SEO should help your content marketing plans.

Everyone knows that SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation, for people who like these things in full) is a vital part of maintaining a business presence anywhere near the first page of Google’s results.

It used to be a case of just stuffing as many keywords into every page as possible. Then Google wised up to the fact that everyone was doing it and pages were becoming unreadable. So they altered their algorithm to put more onus on pages that actually provide proper content and useful information.

This is a vast improvement and proved a much better user experience. However, as with all things, it continues to evolve.

Nowadays people are searching less and less on computers and more on phones, on the go.

For example, Neil Patel claims that the total number of searches on mobile devices has seen a 43% increase year-over-year. Also, Google’s algorithm update last year gave mobile-friendly websites a search ranking boost on mobile searches.

It was a logical step. As more and more people use mobile to surf the internet, Google knew that they had to make it easier to find relevant, mobile-optimised websites. So, it now uses mobile-friendliness as a factor in ranking search results. This isn’t just random, anecdotal information. There are a tonne of stats to support this shift:

• 4 out of 5 consumers use smartphones to shop.
• 70% of mobile searches lead to online action within an hour.
• Over 1.2 billion people access the web from their mobile devices.
• Global mobile traffic now accounts for 15% of all Internet traffic.
• 95% smartphone users have searched for local info.

That means plenty of additional SEO techniques for mobile need to be brought into play.

The endless forwards movement of technology is a pain when you have a million other things to do with your business… but if you don’t keep up, you’ll get left behind.

So here’s the Emporium Media list to ensuring your mobile offering is improving your SEO:

Use video content

By 2017, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic, according to Cisco. Video-on-demand traffic alone will have almost trebled. At the moment, around a tenth of that video content is consumed on smartphones and tablets, but the figure grows significantly every year. There is also a cultural shift away from reading information and towards watching short explainer videos that explain content in a easier-to-digest way. It doesn’t even need to be especially expensive to create, as we explained in this blog post.

Make your website’s design responsive

Now that websites receive around half of their traffic from mobile devices, you need a site that is designed to work well whether it’s being looked at on a PC screen, phone or tablet. This is called responsive design and should be one of the first things on your to-do list when reworking your site. Google appreciates sites that are designed to work well on mobile and consequently ranks them higher.

Develop your social content

If you’ve got a keen eye for Google’s results, you’ll have noticed that over the last year or so they have started to list more than just websites. Now the first page includes results from social platforms – YouTube videos, tweets, and Facebook listings. It took Google longer to do this than many commentators predicted, but they’ve really committed to it now, so expect the relevance of social activity to grow. It’s another reason why your business needs to think of creative and engaging ways to play online, if you want to maximise your visibility.

Remember deep links in Apps

In addition to indexing social content, Google is making it a priority to index content from apps via deep links. At the moment users spend 89% of their mobile time using apps. So if your business utilises any type of mobile app, making it organised and crawlable is now more important than before.

Think about people talking to their phone

So, for a long time people ignored the Cortana, Google Now and Siri search options. Somehow the idea of actually talking into your phone to get stuff done was alien to us. However, as is often the way, people are becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea, and this is only going to grow. New services, like Amazon Echo, mean that more and more websites will be offering the speech option over the next couple of years. From an SEO perspective, that means you’ll need to really consider the natural way people talk. If your keywords don’t echo the kind of things people actually say, then you’ll fall behind.

Go local

Since Google came out with its ‘Pigeon’ update, local SEO has started to make a massive difference. So, if you’re a Perth company, make sure you talk about your location and your offering, by using location-specific keywords. Then go further and try to personalise your content based on your target audiences’ location. For example, say you sell fishing rods, you could have a site that simply talks about the brands of rods and their prices. However, if you also talked about which rods will help you catch King George Whiting in North Mole or Samsonfish off Rotto you’ll see a bump in your ranking. It’s worth the effort too as local searches lead 50% of mobile visitors to visit stores within a day.