What You Should Be Doing In Search & Mobile – #SMX London day 2
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What You Should Be Doing In Search & Mobile – #SMX London day 2

26th May 2015

More coverage from SMX London 2015. Alistair Dent starts day 2 with a clear statement: mobile marketing is still not top of mind for most companies. This is strange considering the fact that total clicks and number of searches made on mobile devices have grown above desktop numbers. Desktops are still vectors for conversions, so what is different for specific mobile marketing?

One of the important PPC difference are the bid modifiers like device, location, keyword and time. You can set mobile preferred ads, since users are in a different phase within the customer journey. Think about the specific ads, like including call buttons, ‘call me back’ forms, and make use of all the sitelinks to show different options te user can take as a next step. Watch out for using assisted cross device conversions, they are based on a big dataset but basically Google is guessing about what really happened.

App Store Optimization

Next on stage is Sagi Dekel, giving an introduction about app store optimization. Their are currently over 2 million apps in Google Play and iOS: 53% of the users find apps through search but 83% of the apps are almost invisible in the search results. ASO (App Store Optimization) is leading to quick results, just after implementation of the best practises you will see rankings and so the number of app installs going up.

app-store-optimizationA number of basic you should take care of for both Android and iOS apps:

  • Titles are really important, include the important keywords
  • For iOS use mix and match keyword lists possibility. Use the 100 characters you can, to add as much keywords as possible.
  • Repetitive keywords don’t add value
  • Think about search focused keywords
  • Google Play scans app descriptions, optimize those for ranking purposes by implement longtail keyword combinations
  • Never forget that you optimize for users too: think about that when optimizing the descriptions and the thumbnails
  • Screenshots: they don’t have to be real screenshots, be creative about what you show. Think about an icon that stands out in the results.
  • Always localize your apps: German users can use an English but will search in their native language

ASO is critical but it still is only a part of your marketing strategy.

Mobilegeddon or a mobile let down?

Google has been busy in the past two years in terms of development of mobile focused updates in their algorithms and systems finally resulting in the Mobile Friendly update at the 21st of April this year. In the end, people expected a #mobilegeddon but on the end, looking to the current results not that much happened.

Adam Whittles has seen any real impact for their clients. There are a few results that have been changed, but looking beyond SEO, you need a mobile website for your users. Currently, Google prefers responsive website design but you can also use separate URLs or dynamic serving but there are a few risk with implementation. For some sites the content just doesn’t work on responsive websites.

Consider the budget available and check if there are enough technical resources to implement mobile website correctly. 27% of mobile websites are misconfigured, losing 68% of potential smartphone traffic. Use and monitor Google’s Search Console to check if Google’s mobile robot has problems during crawling your mobile setup.

Adam built a handy Chrome Extension to check if a website is mobile friendly: Mobile-Friendly Checker Chrome Plugin. Also read his post How to Ace the Google Mobile-Friendly Test & Score 100%.

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Jan-Willem Bobbink got addicted with online marketing in 2004, since he build his first international webshop when he was 16. He is currently working as Freelance SEO for global clients and is ambassador for Majestic. His blog can be found at Notprovided.eu. and he shares his cycling adventures at CATW!
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