Increase Qualified Traffic with Query Intent

By Bryson Meunier, Product Champion, Natural Search

When I first started teaching myself SEO back in the late nineties, the driving force behind keyword research was search volume. When it came time to select keywords for a page, most keyword research experts as I recall were emphasizing the ability of effective keyword research to drive traffic to a web site. This is true, of course, in the sense that optimizing for more popular, high volume queries could drive more natural search impressions and clicks if the web page gets ranked for these high volume queries. This fundamental truth of search marketing hasn’t changed much since the beginning of the discipline. These days, however, any search marketer who is only looking at search volume when doing keyword research is only getting part of the picture, and missing an opportunity to drive more qualified traffic by considering the user intent of a query.

Since search engines are now using query intent to determine relevance, as we’ve seen in Yahoo!’s recent study of mobile queries and Google’s leaked Quality Rater’s Handbook, one would think that more search marketers would start to include query intent as part of their keyword research. Yet aside from an SEOMoz illustrated search intent overview, and past RM odes to intentionality, the topic isn’t mentioned much outside of academic search papers. If you’ve missed all of it, query intent is defined as the presumed intent behind a search query. Andrei Broder defined the three basic types of search query intent as navigational, informational and transactional in his 2002 paper “A Taxonomy of Web Search”:

Navigational queries are probably the simplest to explain. These are queries that indicate a user’s desire to go to one specific site, such as when “www.google.com”, “united airlines” or “Nabisco web site” is entered into the search box. From a natural search standpoint, these are queries that most brands don’t have to optimize for. Nonetheless, for brands optimizing for awareness or consideration metrics, identifying potential navigational keywords can help drive more targeted traffic in both paid and natural search.

Transactional queries indicate a user intends to interact in some way with the web site. The most obvious transactional queries include “buy” or “sale”, but transactional queries could also include terms related to coupons, videos, images or adult subjects. Anyone familiar with the search funnel will recognize these as the shop and buy keywords that might be considered most valuable to a direct response campaign.

Informational queries represent the bulk of the queries that exist on the web. Some say informational queries make up as high as 80% of all web searches. Informational queries can be defined as everything that’s not navigational or transactional and typically are broken down into directed: closed, directed: open, advice, locate, and list. These queries can be targeted by advertisers looking to increase traffic or engagement, but aren’t the best performers in direct response.

Volume isn’t everything. At Resolution Media we consider query intent as one of several factors to consider in every keyword research deliverable we do. Doing the same can help drive not just the most traffic to your digital content, but the most qualified traffic.

Mobile Social Search and Mobile Analytics Panel Recap

Many thanks to those who came out for the Mobile Monday NY Event on Optimizing for the Mobile User last Monday at the Samsung Experience Center. We were pleased with the turnout and hope that everyone learned something from the discussion. It was a pleasure for me to meet a number of you who work to improve the mobile user experience, including panelists Dean Collins of Amethon, Joe Cuccinelli of Quattro Wireless, Dan Mason of ESPN Mobile Web, Adam Kerr of Bango, Greg Harris of Mobilytics, Stephen Ives of taptu, and Stan Wiechers of TigTags. In retrospect, the size of the panel was probably too large and too diverse to have a focused discussion for two hours on a Monday evening, but here a few takeaways from the event:

Mobile Analytics is Currently Necessary
As I mentioned before in my Mobile SEO’s Guide to Mobile Analytics, there are inherent problems in tracking mobile devices due to the lack of JavaScript and cookie support. Though there was some disagreement among the panelists over what percentage of mobile browsers supported cookies (low end 3%, high end 40%), all of the panelists agreed that desktop analytics have major limitations when it comes to tracking mobile users. Apart from the fact that the data might not be as accurate as it could be, there is a lack of mobile-specific metrics within traditional desktop analytics that make it difficult to track the actions of mobile users and optimize mobile campaigns. This may be news to those who first heard of mobile analytics when AdMob released their own solution this week, but it’s not revelatory to those of us who have been following the issue for a while.

What did come as a bit of a surprise was the desktop analytics providers’ involvement in mobile tracking and analytics. Dan Mason mentioned that he was working with Omniture in order to solve the problem of mobile tracking for ESPN sites, and all of the panelists agreed that mobile analytics was a temporary solution to a larger problem. While none of the major web analytics providers have robust mobile metrics or accurate tracking today, it may only be a matter of time before they do. In the interim, advertisers and site owners who want a better understanding of their mobile investment have no choice but to implement mobile analytics.

Are there any other desktop analytics representatives or marketers who are working with their desktop analytics provider to solve the problem of mobile tracking?

Mobile Search is Different
While much of the discussion on Monday focused on mobile analytics, we were fortunate to have Steve Ives from Taptu on the panel discussing mobile social search. Taptu is a mobile search engine that uses information from a user’s social networking activity in order to improve mobile search results. Because social networking is such a popular activity right now, particularly on mobile devices, Taptu is able to use a lot of that information in order to improve mobile search results. By doing this, and by serving mobile-only results, they end up providing a good result faster, and improving the mobile user experience. According to Steven, Taptu can provide a good result in about 35 seconds; where their nearest competitor provides a good result in over a minute.

As an SEO I’m interested primarily in how marketers can better target users with mobile social search. Steven says links are an unreliable signal in mobile search, as there’s very little cross-linking on the mobile web. As a result, it’s more difficult to index good content. Taptu doesn’t yet offer site submission, but you can currently submit content via email on their blog.

Users Want Mobile Content
In contrast to the recent discussion about the death of the mobile web, all of the panelists agreed that the mobile web is in fact alive and kicking. According to the panelists, Mobile Search traffic accounts for about 1-2% of total search traffic currently, but that’s 27 million searches per day.

Furthermore, of those that are searching, many of them are looking for mobile specific content, including those searching from iPods and smartphones. Because this number is growing, many of the panelists recommended mobile site creation as one thing brands can do now to become more visible in search today. And, of course, in order to understand what’s happening on that site: implementation of mobile analytics is necessary.

Overall it was an enjoyable discussion and I’m happy to have been a part of it. For more details, check out David Berkowitz’s live blog from Inside the Marketer’s Studio. By the way, David, no – I didn’t know you were hungry. I owe you a slice next time I’m in NY.

Posted by: Bryson Meunier, Product Champion, Natural Search

Bryson Meunier at MobileMonday NY

As you know, Bryson Meunier is Resolution Media’s resident expert on all things mobile. As such, he’s been asked by Mobile Monday, an organization that promotes the mobile industry, to come to New York and moderate a panel discussion including panelists from several companies active in mobile analytics and social search. See below for details…

April 28th at MobileMonday NY: Social Search & Mobile Analytics
This month’s event, “Optimizing the Mobile Experience and Increasing Visibility with Social Search and Mobile Analytics” is sponsored by taptu.

Bryson Meunier, Resolution Media: To demonstrate how rapidly the mobile web and mobile search is developing these days, ten months ago David Harper said at the Mobile Monday NY dedicated to Mobile SEO:

“There is a real lack of analytics, as far as traffic or benchmarks. Many analytics tools don’t understand mobile traffic.”

Today, however, there are many analytics packages in place to optimize mobile campaigns, including Amethon, Bango, Mobilytics and Quattro Wireless. The fast-paced world of mobile search has also brought Taptu to the forefront in the last six months with their mobile social search engine, which many have called a serious competitor to Google in mobile search.

Other variations in mobile search and discovery are also emerging in the US, such as QR codes and mobile visual search. For webmasters, search engine marketers and advertisers still thinking of mobile optimization in terms of links, title tags and traditional web analytics, there is much to learn today about the opportunities available in the medium.

Fortunately, Mobile Monday NY is hosting a free event on April 28th to discuss the new opportunities available in mobile search and discovery since that Mobile SEO panel just ten months ago. How can marketers best leverage social search and mobile analytics to bring visibility to their brand today?

Representatives from several companies active in mobile analytics and social search, including Amethon, Bango, ESPN, Quattro Wireless, Mobilytics, Resolution Media, TigTags, and taptu, will be on hand to discuss. RSVP here

Moderator:
Bryson Meunier, Resolution Media

Panelists:
Dean Collins, Amethon
Joe Cuccinelli, Quattro Wireless
Dan Mason, ESPN Mobile Web
Adam Kerr, Bango
Greg Harris, Mobilytics
Stephen Ives, taptu
Stan Wiechers, TigTags

Your Hosts:
Lubna Dajani, Stratemerge
David Harper, Winksite

When:
Monday, April 28 2008 at 7:00 PM (until 9:00 PM)

Where:
Samsung Experience
Time Warner Center - Shops at Columbus Circle
10 Columbus Circle, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10022

Cost:
FREE, please just RSVP here.

About Bryson Meunier
Bryson Meunier is the Product Champion for Natural Search at Resolution Media, an Omnicom Media Group Company. His position gives him the opportunity to drive SEO strategy for some of the world’s top brands, and to share some of his learnings at BrysonMeunier.com. Special interests include linguistics, semantic search, and all types of content syndication strategies, including mobile SEO and video search optimization. He has previously reviewed the major mobile analytics vendors in his Mobile SEO’s Guide to Mobile Analytics.

Posted by: Brooke Nichols, Senior Marketing Manager

Some of Us Have Standards Already

This is a touchy subject for a lot of people in our industry, but it has to be discussed...

First, those of us who think of ourselves as white hat SEOs already have standards. We make sites more accessible to index more unique content, and we pay attention to on-page and off-page search engine ranking factors, but not at the expense of the user experience.

We work within search engine guidelines to ensure our content appears when it’s relevant to a query. There’s an art and a science to relevance, and there are many tactics used to achieve it. This is what white hats do; they enable relevance. This is also what search engines do, but their long-term success depends on the relevance of their results regardless of who provides it.

We focus marketing efforts on the long-term success. Because of this, our clients don’t have to scramble every time there’s a major algorithm update.

There are others in this industry who don’t operate this way. They have another name. White hats may respect their technical skill and their intelligence, but fundamentally disagree with their professional ethics. What separates us is relevance. We both work to create successful campaigns for our client, but white hats use search engines ourselves and understand when a result is helpful and when it’s not.

We appreciate it when SEO is used to help search engines find content that’s exactly what we’re looking for when we’re looking for it, and get upset when our time is wasted by companies who just care about getting traffic to their site and nothing else. We put relevance and community ahead of brute visibility, and we usually achieve long-term visibility because of it.

These are standards that are put into practice at Resolution Media. There are a number of reasons why standards would benefit me, and the industry in general, including:

1) Solving the staffing crisis – You may have heard that our industry is suffering from a lack of qualified people to fix an abundance of inaccessible web sites that weren’t built with the user or search engines in mind. And there are currently no formalized training programs to help people understand what needs to be done and how.

Resolution Media has our own internal training program where we instill white hat values and ensure compliance throughout the optimization process, but it would be nice to have an industry pool to select qualified candidates from. Programs like SEMPO Institute are a start, but they don’t go far enough in emphasizing ethics and relevance, and thus fall short in my book.

2) Evolving the industry - Because white hats focus on long term success, we can start optimizing for the future today. This industry evolves at a breakneck pace and those who are busy moving the location of their servers in order to avoid detection don’t have a lot of time to look far into the future.

We focus on emerging media to keep ahead of the curve in terms of innovation. With Yahoo recently adopting semantic web standards, Google introducing Universal and personalized search, and the engines focusing on making content available to the mobile user, it’s clear this is not the same search marketing landscape that it was in 1998.

When we stop manipulating ranking algorithms, we can stop talking about paid links long enough to keep up with the search engines, and bring SEO into the twenty-first century. As it is, our community hasn’t quite evolved with the search engines. I, for one, think standards could help us catch up.

3) Increasing investment in search – Being involved in mobile SEO means I’m involved in two industries: mobile marketing and search engine marketing. The mobile marketers didn’t wait fifteen years to set standards for their industry because they recognized immediately that abuses by unethical marketers could cause “consumer backlash and additional regulatory scrutiny”.

To combat it they issued a code of conduct, consumer best practice guidelines and mobile advertising guidelines almost immediately. Of course, doing so doesn’t prevent me from getting Russian Viagra spam on my phone once in a while, but it at least lets potential advertisers know that mobile marketing is a legitimate channel in which to engage consumers, provided they do it correctly.

I’m not saying that such a code will be enough to take significant budgets away from broadcast or print media right away, but today mobile advertising is on the rise, and SEM budgets have room to grow. If we’re ever going to get to the point where search is a significant portion of the total advertising budget, let alone overtake all media spend in three short years, we have to do more to convince advertisers that it’s a legitimate medium. SEO is not somehow exempt from this reality.

No, not everyone in the industry is in favor of standards, but I am. I’m a white hat SEO. If you’re with me, stand up. If you’re not, I wish you best of luck in doing whatever it is that you do. It hasn’t stopped us from achieving long-term results doing what’s right in the past, and it’s not going to start today.

Chris Boggs and Lisa Barone, let’s go. Resolution Media operates by SEO standards and we welcome them in the industry. Please let me know how we can help.

Posted by: Bryson Meunier, Product Champion, Natural Search

Mobile in Minutes: the Cautious Company’s Guide to Mobile SEO

As much as I think that relevant, digital, query-driven mobile search marketing is both the wave of the future and an opportunity for today, I hear you Alice Z. Cuneo of AdAge and the eMarketer Report that supports “Why ‘08 isn’t Mobile’s Year—Again”. 2008 may not be mobile’s year.

As David Berkowitz pointed out, mobile may not have a year, per se, but a series of years in which the medium becomes what we all knew it could be. However, if we’re all waiting for others to have that “Hallelujah” moment, without experimenting and receiving success for ourselves, progress in this field will never be made, and mobile marketing will always be hype.

With that in mind, I present five simple ways to enter mobile marketing today that don’t require many resources or much of an understanding of the complexities of the medium. Because I’m pretty sure Mobile SEO for Dummies is taken, this is the cautious company’s guide to mobile SEO…

1) iPhone Optimization
The iPhone is currently only 2% of the handset market, but recent studies indicate that its users are affluent, young and rabid users of the mobile Internet and mobile search. The way to reach this audience properly would be to build an iPhone specific web site, do iPhone specific keyword research and build an iPhone app of your relevant web content; but if you are a cautious company or a time-starved small business owner you can get more iPhone traffic by simply using progressive enhancement if you use Flash or forgoing it altogether. At this point, even the iPhone can’t display Flash, and using it without text alternatives will not help you reach users on mobile devices, visually-impaired users or search engine spiders. Watch your iPhone traffic rise in traditional web analytics. No mess, no fuss.

2) Handheld Style Sheets
No, handheld style sheets do not fully address the mobile user experience, and they can’t be processed by every mobile device. They’re not an ideal solution for mobile marketers or developers, but they are a quick one. They also work for getting mobile content indexed in most search engines.

3) Mobilized Content
There are many things that I don’t like about mobilizers these days, and I wouldn’t recommend them for creating optimized content generally. But they do create fast mobile content. If your options are limited, mobilize a site in minutes with something like Winksite or moFuse Grow. You may have to customize it later in order to make it more accessible, but at least mobile users will have something to find when they’re looking for your brand.

4) Mobile Specific Keyword Research
When doing keyword research for your site, make sure you consider the mobile user. As I mentioned in an earlier post, mobile users search differently, and might be looking for different content in different ways than your desktop users. It’s not necessary to do a great deal of mobile keyword research when optimizing your desktop site, but it doesn’t take long to filter those pages on your site mobile users might be looking for with data from the JumpTap mobile keyword tool, Yahoo! Mobile Search Assist or Google iPhone/iPod Touch Suggest.

5) Mobile Analytics
Track your success. As I mentioned in an earlier post, if you’re using Google Analytics or another popular web analytics package to track your mobile users, you’re probably only seeing part of the picture. Add Mobilytics or another mobile analytics package to your desktop site to get a better sense of your mobile traffic. It may actually be the year of mobile for you, but JavaScript support issues in mobile devices prevent you from seeing your success.

Posted by: Bryson Meunier, Product Champion, Natural Search

Mobile Visibility: Search Optimization for the Mobile User

by Bryson Meunier
Appeared in Visibility Magazine

It’s 2008, and advertisers both large and small are looking for the next big thing. Fortunately, they may not have to look any further than the palm of their hand.

ReadWriteWeb, a leading technology blog, is predicting that the mobile web will finally break into the mainstream in 2008. Innovative devices that have recently come out on the market (like the iPhone in 2007) are increasingly making mobile web browsing addictive. The search engines are also betting on mobile, with Yahoo! going so far as to say that there will be more mobile Internet users than Web users by 2017.

This may surprise you, as most interfaces on mobile phones currently make searching difficult at best. Yet people are conducting mobile searches right now, with 219.2 million mobile search users in 2006, according to eMarketer. This is predicted to grow quickly to 844.9 million by 2011, with mobile ad revenues soaring to $2.4 billion in 2011 from $6.8 million in 2006.
Read the whole column...

Conflicting Trends in Mobile Search

There’s an old joke about a scientist who’s lost in the desert. He has just enough water for three days, and conserves it by drinking just the amount that’s absolutely necessary to survive. Given that the temperature is approximately 110 degrees Fahrenheit, he reasons, he should be able to continue walking north at his brisk walking pace of 4.5 mph for 4 hours before he loses 5% of his normal water volume and starts to feel groggy from significant dehydration, at which point it would become necessary to consume 1 liter from his 3 gallon canteen before being rejuvenated enough to repeat the entire process.

On the morning of the third day he thinks he sees a puddle of water on the horizon and picks up the pace to reach it before the end of the day, when he knows, without question, that he will die of dehydration. He starts running when he hears the rushing water—or as fast as he can manage in his weakened condition—and sees before him the source of the water sounds he had heard a mile before: an enormous lake in the middle of the desert, glistening in the sun.

He crawls to the edge with his last bit of strength and purses his lips to the cool, clear water when suddenly, he stops in mid-air. Realizing that he has no way of quantifying the physical and emotional impact of refreshment on his ravished body, he turns his back to the water, lies down on the beach and dies.

It seems absurd, and it is, that the scientist would rather understand the process and results than reap the benefits of hydration. Nonetheless, listening about it happening is similar to observing the mobile search market in the past few weeks.

On the one hand, mobile web usage and mobile search is growing faster than ever by all accounts. Though the coming of the mobile web has been predicted for years, the AdAge announcement that ESPN’s mobile web site sometimes gets more traffic than their desktop web site made a lot of people wonder if the mobile web usage that had been future perfect for years was finally present tense.

Recently the PEW Internet Mobile Access to Data and Information study reported that “62% of all Americans are part of a wireless, mobile population that participates in digital activities away from home or work.” This week, M: Metrics and Google joined the chorus, with M:Metrics reporting that nearly 85% of iPhone users access news or information via the mobile web, and nearly 60% use mobile search; and Google reporting that they’re seeing a “watershed moment” for mobile usage.

However, in spite of the apparent growth, Business Week and others are reporting that advertisers are actually cutting budgets for mobile because of the lack of reliable tracking and mobile specific metrics. And still some advertisers are reluctant to shift budgets to mobile because they don’t want to alienate users with intrusive messaging on a relatively personal medium.

There are a number of objections to this that one could make, including that mobile, like search, is held to different standard when tracking for broadcast or print media is not required before making large investments in either. One could also point out that the advertisers should be looking to digital, query-driven, non-interruptive methods such as mobile SEO and tracking mobile-specific metrics with mobile analytics to improve the effectiveness of their mobile campaigns.

Both of these are fair, I think, but advertisers should also remember the old joke when thinking about the best way to take advantage of the opportunity inherent in mobile search.

The perceived lack of an understanding of the opportunity in mobile advertising does not mean that the opportunity does not exist. While we’re waiting for the heyday of mobile marketing, when the methods and results are clearly understood and recognized as obvious by all, let’s not let that keep us from enjoying the benefits to be had today.

Posted by: Bryson Meunier, Product Champion, Natural Search

Picture the Future: Mobile Visual Search

I’ve never really been one to ask many questions at search conferences, but during SES Chicago in December of 2006 I asked what I thought was an obvious one to the panel of mobile search optimization experts present: “How do you think voice search will change mobile SEO?” I don’t think the panelists were ready for the question, as the answer that I got was that voice recognition doesn’t really work.

In the next panel on Meet the Mobile Search Engines someone from the audience of the previous session asked a version of my question to the mobile search engines, and the Google rep replied that they did, in fact, have something in the works.

A few months later, Google introduced Goog-411, which allowed users to access Google’s local information through voice search. And yesterday, Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land called Mobile 411 the “mass-market entry point for mobile search”.

I’d have to be a visionary to be vindicated, and I’m making no such claim. It’s just hard to ignore that most people prefer talking in their phones to typing on them, and a mobile search engine that made voice search possible might have an easier time finding an audience.

This is about the same point that Sterling makes in his post on Mobile 411: “The appeal of mobile DA/voice search is its simplicity, familiarity, and convenience for callers.” I couldn’t agree more, and it’s for this reason that I think mobile visual search could be as big as or bigger than voice search.

Mobile visual search is search without keywords—without words at all, in fact. A searcher initiates a query simply by snapping a photo of something with their phone, which the mobile search engine then processes with algorithms and returns relevant digital content based on its interpretation of the user’s visual query.

It may seem like science fiction to some, but mobile visual search is a thing of the present. Vodafone made headlines today by introducing its own mobile visual search engine, Otello; and startups like SnapNow and Mobot have actually been doing this for a few years. Google has their own Mobile Visual Search engine in Neven Vision, which I suspect had something to do with their recent patent filing for reading text in images and video.

Of course, the audience for mobile visual search is currently not so large as to warrant an optimization strategy for most brands just yet, but, as with mobile voice search (and mobile search in general, to some degree), it might be just a matter of time.

The next question becomes, who is best positioned to help marketers leverage mobile visual and voice search? Is it the mobile marketing agencies? Or the search agencies? Or is it a function of the carriers and search engines?

Here at Resolution Media, we define what we do and don’t within the framework of Query Marketingsm. Basically, if a platform is query-based, digital, and non-interruptive, then we consider it part of the Query Marketingsm landscape and, therefore, a service we are well-positioned to deliver based on our experience stimulating consumer response in this environment.

In this case, as opposed to the traditional keyword, the query comes in the form of a picture or voice prompt. But it’s a consumer-initiated query nonetheless. And it’s certainly a digital proposition. So as long as the advertising and content-placement opportunities within mobile visual and voice search remain non-interruptive, then it makes sense for us to incorporate it into our solution set.

Posted by: Bryson Meunier, Product Champion, Natural Search

Happy Holidays, Enterprise SEOs!

And no, I don’t mean Valentine’s Day. Much love to my fellow search enthusiasts on this lovely holiday, of course, but for those of us who work at helping large companies become more visible in search engines, mid-February is also a time to focus on the future. Getting projects in the queue today is the only way for large organizations—especially online retailers—to prepare for big natural search results in Q4.

SEOs for small business have their own problems when it comes to natural search, including the lack of link popularity that led to the paid link controversy of 2007, but there’s no question that small businesses have the advantage when it comes to creating, optimizing and posting content quickly. While SEOs with small to medium-size businesses may be able to create content in a matter of hours, it might take a larger organization several months to get the same content in front of and approved by all the necessary departments (legal, branding, etc), created by marketing, and developed and pushed by IT. So while it might be acceptable for small businesses to wait until Q2 or Q3 for large-scale Q4 content creation, it’s necessary for optimizers of the Fortune 500 to start working today.

Where to start? There are many silos to break down, so start identifying yours now. Who are the decision makers within the organization who need to sign off on your project, and which of them ultimately makes the decision to implement it? Enterprise SEOs, whether in-house or agency, need to understand the influencers within an organization, and communicate to all of them in their terms. Identifying these influencers, getting on their calendars, communicating why the status quo is harmful to search engine visibility, convincing them why your point of view is ultimately best for their department and the company, formulating a plan to implement change within that organization and then implementing that change doesn’t happen overnight. Enterprise SEOs need to take steps to start the conversation today.

With the understanding that it can take a while to implement change within an organization, some SEOs may be tempted to wait until summer to start planning for Q4. Don’t fall into this overly optimistic trap. Even with enterprise SEO it can take six months to show significant gains in the search engine results pages. Give yourself enough time to plan, implement, and achieve the success in Q4 you need. Plan for your happy SEO holidays today.

Posted by: Bryson Meunier, Product Champion, Natural Search

What's Different about Mobile Search (Part 2)

Okay, so after reading yesterday’s post, you’re still interested in learning more about Mobile SEO. That’s a smart decision, in my opinion. So, here are 3 more insights into the mobile space to get you started…

1. Duplicate Content is Good
This is contrary to everything we’ve been taught about increasing visibility in search engines, so it may take a while for most traditional SEOs to warm up to this idea. After all, if you build a mirror version of a page or a site in web search engines, you’re essentially splitting the link popularity for that page and making it twice as difficult to rank on competitive keywords. Nonetheless, as we pointed out last year in the Mobile Search Optimization White Paper, developing multiple versions of sites for different mobile languages can lead to increased visibility in mobile search engines, giving brands several listings in SERPs for relevant keywords. This may not last forever; but since it adds to the user experience by having content in the index that’s accessible to many devices, this phenomenon is not likely to go away any time soon.

2. Traditional Web Analytics Inadequate for Mobile
No doubt there are some who think that SEO is a one-time fix. For those of us who know better, web analytics is an essential part of search engine optimization. Benchmarking, conversion analysis, buzz research and regular reporting are impossible without traditional web analytics, and without these things, moving the SEO campaign forward is nearly an impossible task. Fortunately for desktop SEOs, many robust web analytics offerings exist to help them benchmark, track and optimize.

Unfortunately for Mobile SEOs, traditional web analytics don’t work well in the wireless world. Most web analytics packages get their data by tagging pages with JavaScript code that many mobile devices are unable to process. The mobile data that a traditional web analytics package presents is therefore incomplete by nature. There are several web analytics packages that get their data primarily from log files, which is preferable for mobile data, and there are even a few mobile analytics vendors; but if you’re using your JavaScript-based web analytics program to mine mobile data and optimize your mobile SEO campaign, you’re only getting part of the picture.

3. No Aaron Wall of the Mobile Web
Google does have a few mobile search guidelines in their webmaster guidelines, and there are a few of us out there who regularly give advice about optimizing for mobile devices, but if you’re looking for a Mobile SEOBook to explain to you the ins and outs of Mobile SEO in thirty minutes or less you may be looking for a while. With any emerging discipline it takes time and testing to truly understand what works, and at this point not many people have been optimizing mobile content for very long with much success. For this reason, Mobile SEO has been called the “wild west of SEO” on several occasions. That’s not to say that nothing is known, or that there are no mobile SEO experts. On the contrary, more than three years of optimizing for mobile has taught many of us a lot. It only means that finding good information is not nearly as easy as it is in traditional SEO.

There are others, including the fact that external linking has an entirely different value and there’s a lack of a clear leader in the mobile search space to optimize to, but these five things should be more than enough to convince most people that mobile SEO is not just SEO best practices applied to the mobile space. If you talk to a mobile SEO expert that insists that it is, you’re probably better off talking to someone else.

Posted by: Bryson Meunier, Product Champion, Natural Search

What’s Different about Mobile SEO (Part 1)

With Google CEO Eric Schmidt calling for a mobile revolution at the World Economic Forum late last week, and Google’s Matt Cutts naming mobile as one of four things SEOs should focus on in 2008 late last year, mobile search marketing and optimization have recently been in the spotlight for many in the mainstream SEO press. If you’re looking for more information yourself, you may see a lot of experts telling you that mobile SEO is SEO, and as such traditional SEO best practices apply. While this is true to some extent, there are certain aspects of traditional search optimization that do not apply to mobile optimization and vice versa. For those of you who are new to mobile search optimization, I’m going to take the next two days to post about some aspects of mobile SEO that may throw traditional SEO practitioners for a loop:

1. Mobile Users Search Differently
That 15-18”x7” tray full of numbers and letters in front of you isn’t available to most mobile searchers. If you are trying to search from your phone, you’re probably not doing it from a standard keyboard, and you may not even be indoors. The mobile user experience is altogether different from the experience of the casual web browser, and often results in different queries and different search volumes. In a recent study I did on Characteristics of Mobile Web Queries in AT&T’s Media Net, query intent of mobile queries, search volume and categories of queries were all radically different from their computer-based counterparts. If you’re using traditional keyword tools like WordTracker or KeywordDiscovery to get relative search volume or sample queries you’re at an immediate disadvantage. There are ways to do keyword research for mobile devices, but they’re often dissimilar to methods in basic SEO.

2. Optimizing for Hundreds of Devices
In web search, there are two browsers that have about 95% of the market share, and the most recent versions of them are all able to run rich internet applications like Adobe Flash movies and AJAX. Combine this with the two dominant server types and two dominant operating systems and you have a fairly simple equation when it comes to making content accessible for the desktop web.

The mobile web, on the other hand, is a different equation altogether. As of November 2007 there were 181 commercially available mobile devices in the US market alone, and only one of them is the iPhone. Accessibility is an issue in traditional SEO, and it’s always good to optimize for the simple user that the search engine spider mimics, but the stakes are much higher in mobile search. W3C validation is controversial in the traditional SEO community, as accessibility for web search can be accomplished without validating every page. However, given the high price of inaccessibility on the mobile web, validation is frequently recommended and encouraged, both for W3C accessibility standards and Mobile Web Best Practices.

Check in tomorrow for Part 2, where I’ll give more insights into the vast world that is Mobile SEO…

Posted by: Bryson Meunier, Product Champion, Natural Search

Innovate or Die: the Changing Face of SEO

In a recent article called The Diminishing Value of the SEO Shop, Clickz’s Mike Grehan predicts the end of the SEO firm as we know it. As search engines become increasing complex, Grehan says, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to rank using “textbook SEO”, or the basics of search engine optimization. Yet people are still employing these tactics. Who? Small shops of highly technical professionals with little marketing experience, and small business owners who buy their books for less than $100 US and attempt to do it themselves typically use these practices.

The search engines are innovating, Grehan says, and though the SEO shops are doing their jobs by providing technical consulting, it’s becoming clear to Grehan that is not going to be enough to succeed in an evolving search landscape. In this sense, he’s basically echoing Gord Hotchkiss, who made this point in his Search Insider article Search Engines Innovate, Why Not SEMs? last July.

Grehan’s right about much of his article, including this last point; but his claim about the value of the SEO Shop is only accurate if you believe an SEO company is “doing its job” by providing technical consulting rather than obtaining qualified traffic from search engines. Search engine optimization, by nature, or at least as we see it at Resolution Media, is at its core about optimizing content to maximize profit from search engines. And it’s a constant challenge to achieve that given the tendency of this industry to change. In the past it may have been enough to stuff your meta tags full of irrelevant, high volume keywords or get in thousands of low-quality directories or implement a large scale paid link campaign in order to rank well, for example; but that’s clearly no longer the case. Prior to the launch of Universal Search in May of 2007, it may not have been necessary to optimize different types of content or to think about a user’s query intent in order to optimize content to maximize profit from search engines, but that also has changed. By nature in this industry, the technologies and the signals used to index and rank pages are going to change, and SEO companies that can’t keep up are undoubtedly doomed to fail. But SEO companies that don’t provide value to the client, and look at SEO more as technical than a marketing discipline, or whose only value-add is their intricate knowledge of SEO for Dummies, have probably failed already.

So while I agree with Grehan’s thesis that the old school SEO-only shop that fails to integrate with other forms of marketing and that delivers a highly technical solution while failing to innovate in step with the needs of the clients and the developments of the search engines is ultimately doomed to extinction, I for one think it’s better off dead. Those of us in SEO Shops who live to create value for clients are more than up to the challenge.

Posted by: Bryson Meunier, Product Champion, Natural Search