The Mobile Generation of SEO

I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all lived through that defining moment when we realized that the old flip phone doesn’t hold its’ ground when compared to the rapidly growing smart phones that have come to dominate the market.  Despite its excellent texting capabilities and durability when thrown against a wall, the traditional cell phone’s lack of mobile web capabilities and ease of information transformation have left it bound for extinction.  So as the devices evolve, so do the methods utilized by users to retrieve information.

What does this mean for the future of SEO?  Of course keywords are still critical, search engines have to operate based on what’s fed to them, but it’s a matter of new dimensions to those keywords that are being fed into the search engines that create new optimization opportunities.  Mobile searches more often than desktop web searches include locations in the keyword phrase, indicating a more specific realm where optimization will become even more crucial on a local level.  When you have that craving for a good pizza on your way home from work, you are likely to pull out your iPhone and search for a pizza joint that’s on your route from work to home.  This is in comparison to a home search that would most likely search the name of the particular restaurant you’re looking for and you would then let the delivery driver worry about location.  The intentions of consumers are different when at home versus in a mobile situation – something to which SEO’s must gradually adapt. 

Another challenge associated with the development of the mobile web is the lack of standardization in terms of devices.  On a desktop screen, a Google search presents basically the same screen whether you’re using a Mac or PC, laptop or standard monitor.  However, what appears on the screen of a mobile device is different than this desktop model and even varies greatly between brands.  What you see on a Blackberry is different than what you see on a Droid.  The question here is, does this impact what users are more likely to click?  Time will reveal how mobile consumers’ behavior diverges from their behavior when performing a stationary search and what new key phrases companies must target to get the mobile searchers clicks.

Along with variations in devices also comes content variation.  The challenge for mobile search engines is  finding the proper way to use device information to help improve results by serving relevant content formats, such as a consumer entering the keyword phrase “ringtones for an iphone” as opposed to entering “ringtones for a samsung instinct”.  And what if the user chooses to perform searches on an app instead of a search engine?  The traditional search engine has been broken down through mobile devices into pieces that we call apps but use as our means to search for information (check out Search Engine Land for more app knowledge).  More specific searches are performed and different apps are used for different search categories so the task of optimization from this standpoint is new and will take time and experience to perfect.  However, once SEO has sufficiently adapted to any or all of these challenges, the times will have changed again and who knows what generation will come after the mobile one.