Your Search Advisor, LLC » Mobile Search

You’ve Optimized Your Site. Now What?

Andrew Miller — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:58:26 +0000

Are you running out of ideas to further optimize your site and online presence for search engines? Did a recent redesign or SEO campaign address ALL of the accessibility, relevance and credibility issues your site faced? Do your internal processes include SEO input and are all your customer-facing teams active contributing to your SEO success?

Congrats, my friend. You’ve reached SEO Nirvana. You should write a book!

In reality, SEO is never done. But for the sake of argument let’s assume you’ve maxed out your SEO potential and need something else to justify your salary and follow up on your “big win”. What do you do next to continue to improve your business?

Focus on Mobile

Mobile web usage grew 110% last year according to Quantcast. While it’s still only accounting for a small percentage of overall web use, some sites are seeing 15-20% of their visits from mobile devices (iPhone, Android, iPad, iPod Touch, Blackberries, etc.)

Click to enlarge

Most of these devices have fully-functioning web browsers built in and will display your website as it was intended. However, due to limited screen size your calls to action or conversion elements may be below the fold or not apparent.

Additionally, people that search the web on mobile devices search differently. They are more likely to be looking for information “on the go” and adjust their keyword queries accordingly. They don’t want to wade through a dense website to find what they need.

Mobile search results are ranked differently than desktop searches with a higher priority on geographic proximity and “mobile-friendly” site architecture.

Check your website from a variety of mobile devices. Better yet, watch other people who aren’t familiar with the site try to use it. Can they find the right content and take the desired actions? Create custom segments in Google Analytics to identify site usage and conversion trends and anomalies for mobile browsers.

You may not need a full mobile website, but it’s in your best interest to keep tabs on this rapidly-expanding segment of your market. A mobile landing page with all your vital info may be enough, but you won’t know unless you look.

Convert More Visitors to Customers

This sounds easy, but there’s an entire industry building up around Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). In layman’s terms, CRO aims to squeeze more conversions from the same amount of traffic. Instead of spending more money to drive more traffic to your site, optimize the elements on your site to convert a greater percent of visitors to customers.

It starts with gathering the right data. Web analytics tools like Google Analytics, Piwik, and Omniture can provide conversion funnel analysis. Integrating phone call tracking closes the loop on transactions or conversions that take place over the phone instead of online.

Once the key metrics are identified and being recorded, semi-automated tools like Unbounce.com and Google Website Optimizer can simplify A/B and multivariate testing to identify combinations of landing page elements (images, text, buttons, layout) that result in higher conversion rates.

Build Email Relationships

Using email marketing solely to push marketing messages on customers is still effective, but increasingly marketers are using email campaigns to nurture a relationship with a customer by supplying helpful content rather than a salesy message.

People’s inboxes are crowded and a major source of frustration and stress at work and at home. Lighten the burden by giving people something to look forward to and a reason to open and share. Plus, past customers are easier to “convert” than new prospects. Reward your loyal customers with special offers and content that makes their lives or jobs easier.

Finally, use a full-featured email marketing program to measure response and hone in on the messages that your recipients value. I use and recommend MailChimp although there are dozens out there to choose from.

Solicit Feedback

Customer feedback can help you identify gaps in your marketing plans or product or service offerings. There are many, many ways to gather feedback, but I’ll focus on the two most important here:

1. Use survey tools on your site to get feedback on your performance. Similar to a Suggestion Box in your office, online survey tools like KISSinsights or Kampyle can aggregate the data into useful analytics with simple additions to your site’s code.

2. Encourage your customers to create honest reviews on your business listings on local search engines, social networks and reviews sites. Some good starting points are Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Maps and Yelp. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of these sites so make it a point to target the most important ones for your industry and spread your customers’ love around by periodically mixing up the sites you send them to.

Once you have some positive feedback, highlight testimonials in appropriate places on your site and other marketing materials to provide social proof and 3rd party validation to prospective customers.

Test Bold PPC Changes

Go big or go home. Small changes to PPC campaigns can result in small improvements, but big changes can help get you on the path to better ROI faster. Don’t be afraid to test a new bidding strategy, ad text or targeting method to see what works. If you can fail, “fail quickly” and go back to what works briefly before testing something new. When you find something that works better, stick with it and test yet another bold change.

Use AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) to test large-scale or bold changes to bids, ad text, landing pages or keyword lists without sacrificing your current performance.

Create Compelling Content

Do something unique. Provide value. “Value” is an intentionally vague (and over-used) term, but by value I mean something that is educational, newsworthy, humorous or insightful. People value their time, so keep it short and easily digestible.

Look outside your industry for content ideas that your competitors haven’t used yet. Then, promote your content across your social media and email platforms for even greater reach. Don’t overdo it on social media or email. Remember what your grandmother said, “Everything in moderation.”

Get Fast(er)

Users demand and reward faster websites. Google now factors site load times into their constantly-changing ranking algorithms.

Load times can even affect your site’s ability to convert visitors into buyers. Tests at Amazon.com revealed that every 100 ms increase in load time on their site decreased sales by 1%. Imagine the negative impact of a page that takes 5-10 seconds to load!

Take advantage of caching, Content Delivery Networks (CDN) or private servers to speed up your site and improve user experience. If you don’t know how to do this yourself, ask your nearest friendly web geek to assist. The payoff will be well worth the effort required.

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Siri: Mobile Search, Apple Style

Andrew Miller — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:24:18 +0000

This looks cool. Is Siri a Google-killer? Probably not, but if you step back to read my review of 4 other voice-activated mobile search engines, it’s pretty clear to see that Siri is a great leap forward.

What does this mean for your business?

Underneath the slick iPhone UI and the powerful voice recognition programs, Siri is just another search engine for proactive search marketers.

It means you need to make sure your business, products and services are listed in the right places. Got a restaurant or local shop? Tidy up your Yelp listing. Have you claimed your business listing on Google and other engines?

Look for more API integrations from other mobile and web search engines to make task completion easier for mobile users. People search differently on mobile devices so many of the web SEO best practices need to be retooled for the new platforms and results page listings.

Now, more than ever, 3rd party apps are starting to grab a foothold in the search industry. Just when you thought you had SEO all figured out…

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Blog From Anywhere

Andrew Miller — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:25:49 +0000

It’s been a long time coming, but the WordPress app for Blackberry devices (version 1.0) was just launched this week. I have had my Blackberry for about a year and it becomes a bigger part of my life each day (sadly).

The short video below explains all the mobile blogging goodness:

The iPhone WordPress app has been out for a while, but the Android version is new this month as well.

My Humble Opinion

By adding smart phone accessibility to a traditional web app, the amount of content created should increase dramatically. This will help fuel the “real time web” as more people share more thoughts, feelings, pictures and videos from typically “unwired” moments in their lives.

Twitter and Facebook apps have contributed to huge growth in the mobile arena but they are still relatively closed systems. It will be interesting to see if bloggers take some of their social media conversations back to their own sites.

For search marketers, it means that creating content on the fly is easier than ever. This should help capture more traffic from trending topics on the social web or breaking news and events that happen offline.

Update: This is just a test to see if I can edit this post in the app. If you can read this, it worked!

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4 Voice Activated Mobile Search Options

Andrew Miller — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:51:15 +0000

After posting about Google’s mobile search query study earlier today, I started thinking about voice-activated mobile web search.

Imagine yourself driving to a meeting but lacking some critical information about a person, place, or company. Typing, texting, or reading while driving is dangerous and potentially deadly, but voice-activated search frees up your hands and eyes for more important things like keeping your car between the lines.

My original “want” was a mobile solution for a voice-activated Wikipedia search that reads information back to you over the phone. Unlike a mobile 411 service (such at GOOG-411), this would return more than just an address and phone number. It could read back details about any topic in Wikipedia and allow for skipping around within articles.

I found a few solutions that fit one criteria or another, although there are no perfect solutions yet.

Yahoo! oneSearch with voice

I Yahoo’d a few things and found Yahoo! oneSearch with voice. It looks promising, but it is not compatible with my Blackberry Storm. In fact, it is limited only to the following Blackberry models:

BlackBerry Pearl (8100 series)
BlackBerry Curve (8300 series)
BlackBerry 8800 series

All you iPhone, Treo, and conventional phone users are out of luck!

Additionally, it only returns search results in text format in your phone’s browser. This doesn’t satisfy the completely hands-free solution that I am thinking about.

Has anybody used oneSearch with voice? Please leave a comment and let me know if/how well it works.

Phonepedia

Another promising solution is Phonepedia . In the developer’s own words,

This simply combines two cool things: Wikipedia’s vast encyclopedic content and Jott’s voice recognition service. All I’ve done is make enough glue to put them together and allow us all to call up and get answers. It’s not perfect, but it’s worth playing with.

It requires creating an account with Jott, which I don’t have time to do right now. Similar to the Yahoo! oneSearch product, the results are returned via SMS and email so it’s not completely hands-free either.

Any Phonepedia users out there? Do you have any feedback?

Google Mobile Search App

The Google Mobile Search App supposedly works with my Blackberry and several other types of smart phones but I could not get the download to work, either by requesting the SMS message or visiting m.google.com. Either way, it is still only a voice-in, text-out solution. I’ll have to hold off on the review for another day when it decides to work.

TellMe from Microsoft Windows Mobile

TellMe is an upcoming voice-activated search interface for Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5+ users. I haven’t been able to sample this service yet either because the BlackBerry beta version doesn’t include the Storm 9530, but based on the examples on their site it does seem to satisfy some of the voice-in, voice-out search capabilities that I am looking for.

So far it seems to be the most promising entrant yet and I’m looking forward to trying it out. If you’ve used TellMe, please tell me! Leave a comment with your feedback.

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Mobile Phone Users Search Differently

Andrew Miller — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:38:55 +0000

An article in Mediapost quotes a Google study finding that smart phone users are entering longer queries into mobile search engines than their non-smart (dumb?) phone counterparts.

The results suggest that iPhone searches mimic computer-based search behavior in terms of query length — about three words per query for computer and iPhone queries, as opposed to 2.5 words per query for conventional cell phones.

I am a Blackberry Storm user, so I can relate to the iPhone crowd’s enthusiasm for mobile searching. However, my newest fascination is 1-800-GOOG-411, a free 411 service offered by Google. It is much safer while driving and the results have been accurate and reliable.

As a 411 service, it only powers business searches. It’s great for finding a pizza place or a nearby hotel while traveling, but I would like to see a general web search equivalent so that I can request search results for a person, place, or company without having to take my eyes off the road while driving.

Tips for Advertisers and Businesses

Do your customers or prospective customers fit the profile for smart phone users? If so, you should consider the following ways to improve your mobile visibility:

Create a mobile version of your website (or at least your company/product/service info and contact details) for mobile web users.
Claim and update your listings in the search engines’ local search properties: Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, MSN/Live Search Maps.
Include your business address in your website template. Include a local phone number and a zip code to maximize your site’s relevance to a particular location.

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BlackBerry Storm Review

Andrew Miller — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 23:37:21 +0000

I’ve had my BlackBerry Storm for 72 hours now and I think I’ve gotten familiar enough to write up my thoughts to share with some Twitter friends that wanted to know what I think of it, especially in comparison to an Apple iPhone.

First off, I’m not here to say whether or not the BlackBerry is better or worse than the iPhone. I don’t care about technical specs. Oh, and Apple fanboys, don’t bother. I work on a Mac all day long and love it. I just can’t justify the added expense and diminished cell coverage inherent in the iPhone to get a little extra emotional satisfaction from a device. My judgement criteria are purely selfish and apply to my personal situation and needs for a cellular device.

I was skeptical when I walked in to the Verizon store. But the 30-day return policy convinced me to try it, knowing I could always cancel and switch to AT&T to get an iPhone. Here, in descending order of importance, are the reasons I decided to keep my BlackBerry Storm and not trade it in for an iPhone at the end of my contract this coming May:

Service & Reliability

Advantage: Verizon. I have been 99% happy with Verizon since I got my first cell phone in 2003 after graduating college. I’m a consultant with two offices and no landline at either. So my cell phone is my one and only phone line. It just has to work. I can’t risk dropping calls with clients or not having sufficient service to send and receive emails at critical times. While I’ve never had AT&T service, my family does and several friends in Richmond do, most with iPhones. They complain about the lack of cell coverage in various parts of town and actually described dropping that many calls as “embarrassing”. This would be unacceptable.

Email / Calendar

Advantage: Tie. iPhone and BlackBerry have sufficient native email and calendar apps that sync with my Google Apps service very well. Again, these just have to work.

Mobile Internet

Advantage: iPhone This is an important feature for any internet marketer. I frequently have to search for something or look at a client site from a mobile browser while out of the office. The iPhone’s Safari browser is superior to the Storm’s, hands down. But, the Storm’s browser is surprisingly strong (much improved over previous BB’s) and performs all the basic functions I need, although without as much “sizzle”.

Cost

Advantage: Storm As any self-employed person can tell you, every incremental dollar spent comes straight out of your take-home pay. As a long-time Verizon subscriber, I got a $100 credit towards a new phone because my “New Every Two” discount kicked in. Add the $50 main in rebate and I got the Storm for about $100, compared to the $199 iPhone.

Keyboard/Typing/Input

Advantage: Tie Despite some negative press about the Storm’s clickable touch screen, I actually find that I can type more accurately and just as fast as I can on my wife’s iPod Touch (the keyboard of which gets some negative reviews as well). It takes a little practice, but I don’t see a compelling reason why either phone is superior. It just depends on your taste.

Apps

Advantage:iPhone The iPhone wins this hands-down, based purely on variety. But even iPhone users will agree that most of the available apps are crap and not worth it. I have found all the basic apps for a BlackBerry that will keep me connected and entertained while on the go, so I’m only really missing out on a few games and time wasters. Currently I have installed: Flickr, Facebook, Google Maps, Google Sync, YouTube, TwitterBerry, WeatherBug and there are plenty more out there that I haven’t installed yet. Plus, the BB AppCenter is going to keep expanding and will offer a lot more variety in the coming months/years.

What do you think? Did I miss anything?

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Current State of the Mobile Web

Andrew Miller — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:42:12 +0000

One thing that becomes readily apparent to those of us that follow the mobile search engine marketing industry is that there is a significant lack of usage information as compared to the “traditional” web. Given the fact that the mobile phone manufacturers, service providers, and mobile browser developers are still battling it out over their proprietary technologies and systems, it’s no wonder that companies like Quantcast, Hitwise, and Compete.com haven’t sprung up to service the mobile advertising industry.

However, the folks at Opera Software publish an annual report entitled “State of the Mobile Web” based on the quantity and types of pages transcoded by their mobile browser. Not surprisingly, mobile web usage is increasing dramatically as measured by the number of unique users, page views, and data transferred.

This chart shows the rate of growth in pageviews is increasing almost exponentially.

Monthly Mobile Web Pageviews

Additionally, the most visited mobile web destinations continue to be major search and information properties. The most popular mobile websites in July 2008 as measured by unique users are:

google.com
myspace.com
facebook.com
wikipedia.org
yahoo.com
nytimes.com
gamejump.com
youtube.com
accuweather.com
my.opera.com

Does your company have a mobile web presence? Just because you have a website doesn’t mean it is optimized for mobile search engines which rank results differently than their web counterparts. Not to mention that mobile usability standards are much different than the traditional web. Smaller screens and limited input capabilities require a streamlined, organized mobile website.

If you are the type of person that sits around after a major marketing trend passes you by and thinks, “Man, if only I had been out in front of this Internet thing…” Well, now is the time to start thinking about the mobile web.

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