Monday, August 15, 2011

SEO Work | How To Use Mobile To Broaden Your SEO Campaign

Admittedly, I've been a little negative about "mobile SEO" in my last few posts, but that's only because I believe "mobile SEO" really shouldn't be seen as a separate product, just another channel to assist your SEO strategy.

Let's look at a market that really isn't suited to mobile conversions and look at ways to make it work with your current SEO campaign.

As I mentioned in my last post , industries such as insurance can struggle to find an angle to offer their products through small mobile devices such as smartphones, but that really shouldn't mean that you give up on mobile. After all, you need to keep in mind your SEO campaign as a whole and not just direct conversions from mobile.

At the end of the day, every business that has an SEO campaign has it to increase their website's visibility and ultimately increase conversions and this is where mobile can assist, not with direct conversions but by lead generation as a means of "link bait"; one of the key factors of SEO.

If you're an insurance company and you have an SEO campaign on car insurance, you'll not doubt have these keywords in your list of terms:

Car insurance

Cheap car insurance

Car insurance quotes

These are great for traffic, but aren't going to have the best conversion rate and too many links that have keyword specific anchor text using these terms will only harm your campaign.

Let's look at how mobile can help, since your mobile site is going to struggle to get conversions for people looking for car insurance due the amount of data you have to enter and the user may have to refer to other documentation that they probably don't carry on them.

Combine this with the fact that a smartphone user searching for car insurance is probably doing so on the spur of the moment, but isn't 100% ready to commit.

This is where you should take advantage of the users psychology and think about lead generation.

As mentioned above, you may choose to omit the "get a quote" or "buy now" parts of your mobile site, as they probably will not convert as anyone visiting your site from their phone is probably doing so on the spur of the moment and probably isn't ready to convert.

So what to show them?

Well, you need to catch the visitors' information in the simplest way and that could be either an email registration form or a phone number call back form. You'll want to make your offers as prominent and simple around these form fields.

This is a very simple form of lead generation, but should give you an idea of how to manipulate your mobile site to make it pay its way instead of existing because you think you should just have a mobile site.

Let's get this back SEO and those keywords, as the other part of your mobile site could be used for "link bait".

Creating a linkworthy Web app with the sole purpose being to attract links and broaden your website's back link profile will give it longevity as the links will be 100% natural and will dilute all those keyword specific links you "acquired".

In other words, Google is helping us make the Web a better place by making us create quality content people want to link to. Remember, Google first looked at links as votes for a site / page, but when the waters became too muddy, things had to change.

So now, in order to have a high ranking for the term "car insurance" or the other term above, it may mean having less keyword specific links, and more brand-driven keyword anchor text links from relevant content and sites as well as relevant, quality linkworthy content.

Creating a Web app or mobile specific content that users want to use and share will build you relevant and natural links with diverse anchor text that is 100% natural and will ensure your link profile continues to look natural and avoid any penalties in the future.

An off the cuff idea would be create a car running cost guide which could use petrol price data in your vicinity, combined with car running cost data and approximate insurance costs to create a Web app to assist with people deciding which type of car to buy.

This would attract links that are relevant to auto insurance, cars and the general online automotive world, all the places which you would want a link from. This type of content will help you build natural relevant links which are all related to the keywords mentioned above.

Creating the content isn't just going to get you links, it really isn't a case of "if you build it, they will come", they won't. If you have a PR team, marketing team and link building team, they must be involved. These teams will seed links to app and target influencers who can publish a link to your site from places you would never normally be able to get a link from with high trust and authority.

If you're serious about using your mobile site to attract links, you have to be 100% committed to creating something unique, linkworthy and preferably free, or you'll find you've wasted a lot of time, money and effort for very few links.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Mobile Mondays

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