Why Mobile SEO Is Mobile-Friendly

Hi Everyone,
Mobile-friendly” and “mobile seo” are distinct activities, outcomes, and objectives. Launching a “mobile-friendly” site does not ensure that it is “mobile search optimized.” It should. The strongest mobile sites feature both as requirements from the start – most do not.

The main reasons I see, are complexity and money :

Mobile search is just one of many smartphone channels that brands are realizing a need to optimize for. Not to mention mobile-social, mobile-apps, mobile-instore, and mobile-offline channels (each of which also feature variations of “earned” and “paid” media-types to optimize). It’s quickly evolving into a really complicated matrix to navigate (see my illustration).

Despite its growth, mobile search query volume has appeared too small to warrant significant investment (by comparison to desktop search volume). That will change with Google’s mobile keyword tool.

In search of positive ROI, brands target the low hanging fruit (like home-page brand traffic), with mobile content optimized for that segment first.
This is where I think marketers get the scope of optimization wrong. Mobile search is such a dominant mobile use case, it can act as a high-margin supercharger to maximize the number of users satisfied by the mobile content, in the least amount of time. It’s a tactic to accelerate ROI on the “mobile-friendly” investment.

By coupling them together (instead of treating them as separate), your mobile site can more quickly reach escape velocity, attract further investment, and minimize execution risks. In a sense, you’re optimizing the optimization process. Whether we call that “mobile friendly” or “mobile optimization” – it’s something bigger than just mobile SEO, but it includes mobile SEO.