Introduction to Mobile SEO

Mobile SEO is quite a confusing term. I’ve been around the SEO industry for years and am involved in mobile application development but still the term is confusing.

The reason it’s confusing it because nobody quite knows what mobile SEO actually involves. In a new series on Blogstorm I will take a look at what mobile SEO actually means.

The definition of SEO to me is helping a website to get as much traffic as possible from search engines so it makes sense to apply this to the mobile arena as well. On this basis the goal of mobile SEO should be to make sure websites get as much traffic from people searching on mobile phones as possible.

However this is where the issue gets complicated because not every mobile web user actually wants to visit a website – some of them just want a phone number. If you can optimise a listing on a directory such as Google Local so that a client receives more phone calls then this is probably going to give a much greater ROI than sending traffic to the website.

So really we can revise the definition to say that mobile SEO is about making sure that a business is as visible as possible on the mobile web. Whether that involves people seeing your phone number, finding your shop on a map or actually visiting the website is irrelevant.

There are of course a number of steps involved in promoting your business to mobile phone users so in a series of posts I will look at the options available and the best practice solutions.

If anybody has experience in this area then guest posts are welcome.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 10:35am ON Friday, 4 July 2008

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+