Mobile search ranking factors
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Presentation I gave in Seattle at SMX Advanced Local University Advanced workshop on 6/7/2012 on mobile search ranking factors.
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Mobile search ranking factors
- 2. MOBILE SEARCH RANKING FACTORS Data-driven Mobile SEO for 2012 Bryson Meunier Director, Content Solutions Resolution Media @brysonmeunier +Bryson Meunier
- 3. MOBILE SEARCH OPTIMIZATION CRITICAL • Differences in smartphone ranking • Differences in mobile search engagement: “A drop from first to fourth position on mobile phone can mean a CTR drop off of more than 90%.” Google, Winning the Zero Moment of Truth • Mobile Search Traffic to eclipse desktop search traffic in years, not decades 2
- 4. MANY PATHS TO MOBILE OPTIMIZATION Smartphone Tablet One optimized? optimized? URL Mobile Content and Keywords? Mobile Site? Feature phone optimized? Mobile URL Site that works Same well on all Content and devices? Keywords? 3
- 5. APPARENT DISAGREEMENTS WITHIN GOOGLE Matt Cutts recommends mobile URLs and says mobile sites don’t cause canonicalization issues in Februray 2011 Google Webmaster Team selects responsive design for “maintainability” in May 2012 blog post 4
- 6. GOOGLE GIVES OFFICIAL RECOMMENDATION! • “Google recommends webmasters follow the industry best practice of using responsive web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices and using only CSS media queries to decide the rendering on each device.” • “If responsive design is not the best option to serve your users, Google supports serving your content using different HTML. The different HTML can be on the same URL (a setup called dynamic serving) or on different URLs, and Googlebot can handle both setups appropriately if you follow our setup recommendations.” Full details at 5
- 7. DATA TO THE RESCUE Mobile Mobile Smartphone Search Search Search Strategies of Queries Results Top Sites Download the white paper at 6
- 8. TRUE OR FALSE?: VALIDATION IS KEY “Use100% valid XHTML 1.0 code. […] Many optimizers on the traditional WWW do not consider using valid code as a best practice. Mobile search engines however may have more trouble digesting invalid code.” -Andy Hagans, (circa 2005) MobileSearchMarketing.com (#4 in Google for “mobile SEO”) FALSE Download the white paper at 7
- 9. TRUE OR FALSE?: MOBILE USABILITY/PAGE SPEED IS HELPFUL “MOBILE SEO RULE NUMBER ONE: if you're trying to attract a mobile audience, then you'd better be good at it and you'd better give them an elegant user experience! -DotMobi (circa 2008), Mobithinking.com (#1 in Google for “mobile SEO”) “Getting from needs to actions lightning fast is especially important on smaller devices like mobile phones, where screen size is limited and context really matters.” Larry Page, Google CEO in 2012 Letter to Investors FALSE Download the white paper at 8
- 10. TRUE OR FALSE?: LINKBUILDING IS UNNECESSARY “But right now, partly because of the relative lack of competition and partly because as I explained above, the link graph makes less sense for mobile sites and users, links are not needed for (at least some) mobile rankings. -Will Critchlow (circa 2008), SEOMoz.org FALSE Download the white paper at 9
- 11. TRUE OR FALSE?: DOTMOBI HELPS “The best way to build your mobile web site for SEO is by using the dotMobi domain” -DotMobi (circa 2008), Mobithinking.com (#1 in Google for “mobile SEO”) FALSE Download the white paper at 10
- 12. TRUE OR FALSE?: MOBILE SITES HELP RANKING “The best Mobile SEO strategy is to not have a mobile SEO strategy.” -Ryan Jones (circa 2011), SearchEngineJournal.com (#3 in Google for “mobile SEO”) “Having a mobile site is strongly correlated with top three rankings in Google smartphone search” -Bryson Meunier (circa 2012), SearchEngineLand.com TRUE Download the white paper at 11
- 13. 30 MOBILE SEARCH RANKING FACTORS 12
- 14. 1 – VERY IMPORTANT • Presence of content that matches mobile searcher's query Internet & Telecom Finance Dining and Nightlife • 77% of total • 88% of • 69% of [apps search searches for for android] volume for [restaurants], and 73% of [atm] and 97% of [download 99% of searches for ringtones] volume from [bars] and searches [atm 80% of come from locations] searches for mobile comes from [restaurants devices mobile near me] devices come from mobile devices 13
- 15. 1 – VERY IMPORTANT • Proximity of business location to searcher device location • Presence of Google+ Local listing • 10 Web listings on desktop for [restaurants] • 3 Web listings from Restaurant icon on mobile browser homepage 14
- 16. 1 – VERY IMPORTANT • Listing properly redirected to or reformatted for Googlebot mobile or smartphone Googlebot 15
- 17. 2 – IMPORTANT • Mobile site blocked by robots.txt (negative) 16
- 18. 2 – IMPORTANT • Presence of mobile site (responsive or dedicated) • Presence of mobile site in feature phone index 17
- 19. 3 – MODERATELY IMPORTANT • Mobile sitemap exists (primarily important for feature phone users) 18
- 20. 4 – OF LIMITED IMPORTANCE FOR MOBILE SEARCH • Logo indexed and appearing first for Google image search • Product label indexed and appearing first for Google image search product query 19
- 21. 4 – OF LIMITED IMPORTANCE FOR MOBILE SEARCH • Presence of mobile app(s) in 1 1 Google Play 2 2 • Presence of mobile app(s) in 3 3 iTunes 4 • Use of keyword in 5 A app name 6 4 7 5 8 6 9 7 8 9 Incognito laptop Signed out iPhone 4 results for [chat app] results for [chat app] 20
- 22. 4 – OF LIMITED IMPORTANCE FOR MOBILE SEARCH • Use of "mobile" somewhere in title tag 21
- 23. 5 – UNPROVEN RANKING FACTORS • Aggregate data from Google reader indicating which content is viewed most often from mobile devices • Presence of keyword rich content in carrier store • Use of "mobile" somewhere on page • Use of m. subdomain for listed site • Use of same domain for desktop and mobile sites • Use of Metatxt standard 22
- 24. 6 – HELPFUL FOR MOBILE MARKETING, NOT MOBILE SEARCH • Accessibility of site to multiple devices • Percent of navigational search volume with word "mobile" following • Percentage of navigational searches from mobile devices relative to whole • Presence of link to desktop site in footer • Use of mobile TLD (dotMobi) • Valid code 23
- 25. 7 – EMERGING TRENDS BUT NOT CURRENTLY A FACTOR • Links from mobile social networks • Mobile Link Popularity: Quantity of quality links from mobile sites • Percentage of links that are from mobile sites • Visits from QR code scans 24
- 26. DATA-DRIVEN MOBILE SEO BEST PRACTICES 1. Understand the differences between what your mobile user expects and what your desktop user expects and build your mobile site accordingly 2. Build a mobile home page at m.domain.com that addresses the mobile user’s goals with link to full site and responsive duplicate pages OR build a mobile first responsive design driven site if goals are same. 3. Do not block your mobile URLs with robots.txt. Use canonical tags for duplicate URLs and redirect smartphone URLs to smartphone Googlebot but make mobile homepage unique to appear for mobile navigational searches (i.e. [brand + “mobile site”]) 4. Market your mobile site externally in print and broadcast advertising and online. Links, authority and social shares still matter in mobile. 5. Don’t believe everything you read. Many consultants are applying traditional SEO best practices to mobile, which doesn’t always translate. Trust but verify. For 25 more visit 25
- 27. THANK YOU! Bryson Meunier Director, Content Solutions Resolution Media bmeunier@resolutionmedia.com http://www.brysonmeunier.com http://www.resolutionmedia.com @brysonmeunier Scan to visit m.brysonmeunier.com
Editor's Notes
- Thank you, David. And thanks to everyone here for coming. How many of you saw my presentation yesterday on mobile SEO? Today I’m going to go into detail on the second study I mentioned yesterday to help you get a better sense of what characteristics of sites Google seems to reward in mobile search.
- My assumption is that all of you understand the opportunity, but since some of you may be here for the local aspect and don’t quite get why mobile should also be a priority, know that there are many good reasons to pay attention to mobile search. This is a Mary Meeker slide from AllThingsD that shows mobile internet vs desktop internet in India today, and given the growth of the space, it’s likely that this phenomenon will occur in the United States in a few short years. There are also differences with ranking and engagement in mobile search that SEOs need to be aware of, because just paying attention to core search is not enough. Hopefully this local audience understands that better than most, so I’ll move on.
- If you’ve done any reading about mobile search, you know the issues that arise and how difficult it is to get a consensus, even among experts in the space. Some of the issues you see: one URL or mobile URLs for your mobile site? Do you need a mobile site at all, or one that just works well on multiple devices? If a mobile site, should you have three mobile sites optimized for all types of devices? Or more? And is it enough to just reformat your desktop site with the same content, or is it better to use mobile keywords and concepts on your mobile site? Is there really any difference between the two?
- And unfortunately Google hasn’t been all that helpful, as they’ve taken different positions at different times and muddied the waters. For example, Matt Cutts said in February 2011 that mobile URLs are better, and the Google Mobile Playbook from May 2012 says “Your #1 priority is to build a mobile web site”. But just last month the Google Webmaster Team wrote about how they prefer responsive design (one URL) for maintanability purposes. So is it better to use one or the other? Honestly sometimes it depends on who you ask.
- Yesterday Google gave us their official recommendation for mobile SEO, which is use responsive web design if it is the best option to serve your users. If not, they support other configurations. This is good general advice but if, like me, you’re concerned with details, it leaves a lot of open questions.
- In order to get a more accurate picture of what’s helpful for mobile SEO today, we looked examined three separate data sources. First we looked at mobile search queries and compared them with desktop search queries to see if mobile search behavior is in fact different from desktop search behavior, and how. Then we looked at characteristices of the smartphone search results to gauge which ranking factors were most important, and that’s the study I’ll be looking at most today. Finally we crawled the top 100 SEMRush sites as smartphone Googlebot to see what the leaders are up to when it comes to mobile SEO. What we found is much different generally than what you may have read.
- For example, the #4 result in Google currently for [mobile SEO] doesn’t say much, but lists validation and code type as important for mobile SEO. However, only one of the sites in our sample was valid code, and it was actually HTML4, not XHTML 1.0. When we looked at the most common code types in Google smartphone search, we found that they closely resemble code types across the web in general.
- The number one result for [mobile seo] says that you need to give a mobile searcher an elegant user experience, or else you won’t get traffic from mobile search. Similarly, Larry Page said page speed and context are especially important for mobile search. It would seem, then, that mobile usability is critical when doing mobile SEO.However, the fact of the matter is that by mobile usability standards, Google smartphone results are basically unusable. 65% of our sample failed the W3C’s mobile OK test, which includes page speed, and 78% of the listings failed the dotMobi Ready.mobi mobile usability test. It may help in general to have an elegant user experience for mobile searchers, but Google isn’t there yet according to our sample.
- In the past it’s been mentioned on SEOMoz that links aren’t a ranking factor for mobile search. That may have been the case then, but based on our sample, it’s not the case now. All listings had some links pointing to them, and most of them had more than 100 links and linking root domains. If you want to compete in mobile search today, you have to think about link equity to your mobile and your desktop site.
- This one has been out there since 2005 when dotMobi introduced their mobile top level domains. If you’re still on the fence about whether you should use a mobile domain or a subdomain option, there’s really no SEO reason to use dotMobi over any other domain or subdomain combination. DotMobi claims that their domain helps with indexing, but our sample showed that no dotMobis were ranking for our sample of competitive terms, and when we looked at indexing a year ago, m.*.com had 11.5 million pages indexed to dotMobi’s 226k, making the zone files indexing explanation pretty weak.
- Finally, this is something that you might not have heard, as there are plenty of people in our industry who believe that having a mobile web site is a waste of time and resources. Ryan Jones wrote in SearchEngineJournal.com that the best mobile SEO strategy is not to have a mobile SEO strategy. Our sample showed, however, that the number of sites that offered mobile content was much higher at 64% than Google’s largest advertiser sample at 29%. However, some sites are still missing out, as 65% of the sample did not redirect or reformat for mobile users, even though 65% of the sample had mobile content.
- Diving in deep to other mobile search ranking factors, we examined 30 different ranking factors and based on our data categorized them according to importance. It’s important to note that mobile search ranking factors are usually additive, and that core search ranking still applies to mobile search ranking in Google. The ranking factors that I’m going to talk about today are part of the puzzle that is specific to mobile search, but traditional SEO best practices often apply as well.
- Starting with high priority items, one of the things that we found from looking at smartphone search queries is that mobile searchers often put different keywords and concepts in Google than desktop searchers. If a webmaster doesn’t have content that matches the query, the site won’t rank for those terms. For example, 97% of searches for [bars] comes from mobile devices, but if you operate a bar and you don’t have a web site with content that’s accessible and relevant to mobile searchers, or a Google+ Local listing, you won’t rank for that term.
- 2 other very important ranking factors are the proximity of business location to searcher device location, and presence of a Google+ listing. If you’re only optimizing your web site for mobile search, and you’re not in the first three listings, you won’t appear on the first page for Google mobile search for many queries, including Restaurants as shown here. Google has said that local listings are shown more often for mobile search results, and if you’re not optimizing your local presence you have less of a chance of appearing for mobile searches.
- Redirecting or reformatting is important for mobile search ranking, as it can either rank your mobile site instead of your desktop site in Google smartphone search or could put you in Google’s feature phone index. When we crawled the top 100 sites with the most organic traffic from Google, we found that 83% of them either redirected or reformatted content when smartphone Googlebot came to visit.
- One negative factor that I’ve seen many SEOs and even search engines recommend is blocking your mobile site with robots.txt so as to properly distribute link equity to the desktop site. This is a bad idea for many reasons, but mostly because if someone is looking for your mobile site and they put in navigational queries like “home depot mobile site”, your mobile site that is blocked by robots.txt will not show up. Not sure why search engines would recommend a tactic that makes for a poor user experience in search, but webmasters should aim for better search quality if they don’t want to frustrate their users who search for them on mobile devices.
- There’s some debate in the industry about whether having a mobile site is necessary. What we found is that even though 29% of Google’s top advertisers had a mobile site in 2011, 83% of our sample of sites that get the most traffic from Google offer mobile content of some kind. This is in addition to the fact that, as mentioned previously, 64% of our sample sites offered mobile content.
- Thanks. I hope this was interesting and educational. If you have any questions, you can contact me here, and I look forward to more discussion at the end of the presentations. Thanks!