Mobile Search, A Missed Chance For SMEs

Along Internet use on mobile phones set to overtake desktop browsing by early 2013, it is wondering that business – Large and Little – are not taking full benefit of mobile search.

Telecommunication giant company T-Mobile indicates in their recent study that 46% of local businesses are not seeable when users search via smartphones. For those local businesses that took the step to optimize visibility for smartphones saw the benefits, with 44% experiencing more customer inquiries.

With the time for mobile revolution seemingly being now, here are few techniques to help SMEs take benefit of mobile search and get in front of their rivals.

Local Listings:

As we know that both Google and Bing provide free of cost local listings in Google+ Local and Bing for Business. Erecting and finishing these local profiles with heighten your firm’s visibility within the SERPs for few local keywords.

Even though this looks apparent to the majority of online marketers, only 16% of local business had filed their business on Google+ Local (formally Google Places).

Local profiles are not limited to Google+ Local or Bing for Businesses. There are lots of other local profiles that SMEs should be contributing their business to, including:

Yelp
Brownbook
Hotfrog
Crunchbase

When you start creating your local profiles, it’s compulsory that you should use the same information on all websites. This includes rendering the similar address, phone number and Fax number across the board.

I am using Getlist.org, to get the quickly determine which local listings is visible on and how you and others can improve.

Make Your Website Mobile Friendly:

When we start making website we forget to improve website visibility on mobile devices because now mobile devices is becoming a necessity with the vast range of desktops, tablets, and smartphones that are available. With 70% of users taking action within an hour of finishing a search on their smartphone, creating a mobile-friendly website becomes a far more attracting view.

There are various SME which are using open source CMS platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, or Magento, making your website mobile friendly can be very easy. For WordPress websites, I have got WP-Touch as a better way to make your sites mobile friendly, while I have used the “mobile plugin” module for Drupal.

For those that have a handy coded website services such as Telnames can be a good option, providing a mobile improved TLD to run beside the normal website.

First make sure that your mobile friendly website link (or .tel) has been added to your local listings to provide the user with the best experience when searching by a mobile device.

Optimize for Mobile & Local Search:

With Google showing that over half of all search queries on a mobile phone have local aim, it is necessity that you optimize your website for your local area.

There are various factors to think when optimizing your website for local search. David Mihm’s Local SEO factors survey renders some bang-up information on what people consider to be the most significant ranking factors.

Some factors from the survey include:

Business address
Location targeted keywords
Local citations
Location in title tag

What techniques have you used to optimize your SME visibility in mobile search? Are you viewing a growth in mobile search traffic to your SME? I look forward to seeing your comments below or on twitter @SEMandSEONews