Mobile is becoming a very powerful tool for getting users to discover your brand content. It is only expected to rise in importance as the number of mobile phone users increases in the near future. The Philippines already is a good example of a place where mobile holds a significant portion of the market – the number of mobile phones in the country exceeds its population.As a professional SEO company, it is our job to ensure that you reach your audiences across all platforms, including mobile. Today I want to discuss tips for ensuring that your brand’s content is optimized for mobile SEO. I’ve compiled these tips based on our experience with our clients’ campaigns.

Is your website optimized for mobile?

Include Mobile Activity in Your Content Marketing Strategy

Mobile SEO should be included in your content marketing strategy from the early planning stages until implementation. It must be included as early as the keyword research and planning stages of your content marketing efforts. At this stage, you will also need to determine how you will measure conversions originating from mobile.

Expand Your Keyword Selection

Google’s move towards more secure search makes it more difficult for you to accurately target keywords that your audience uses for search. This becomes more challenging when you want to rank for multiple devices. Using a larger number of keyword groupings will help you determine which of the content you publish online is being discovered using what groups of keywords.
The key is in creating long-tail keywords out of your initial target keywords, because these are more likely to be used by your audience when searching online. Take the following keyword group for example:

sushi bar
sushi bar Los Angeles
sushi bar in Los Angeles
Looking for a sushi bar
I am looking for a sushi bar
I am looking for a sushi bar in Los Angeles

Set Up Mobile Tracking in Google Analytics

The great thing about Google Analytics is that mobile comes as a predetermined segment already. You can easily select this segment and check your traffic for mobile, mobile and tablets, and tablets and desktops. Clicking on each segment will show your user activity and traffic from each device group.

Comparing your mobile traffic and desktop traffic requires you to create a custom segment for tracking desktop traffic. You’ll need to follow these steps:

Go to the Segment Builder of Google Analytics. You can find it when you click the arrow at the top left of your Overview screen.
Select “+ Create New Segment” at the top left, then choose “Technology” in the left menu bar.
Scroll down to “Device Category.” You will find “exact matches” and “desktop” – select these.
Write a segment name at the top (in this case, just name it Desktop Traffic or simply Desktop), then click save.
After setting this up, it will be easy for you to monitor and compare traffic from mobile and from desktop, and measure conversions from each platform. This will help you allocate resources and develop more integrated content campaigns to improve your conversions in all platforms.

Track both Page-level and Content-level Analytics

Looking at your visitors’ engagement on both page and content levels helps you understand your audience behavior more accurately. By also looking at page-level analytics, you will measure engagement factors that you can’t see in content-level analytics, such as page-specific backlinks, social activity and social signals, and conversions. This will also help you discover any keyword opportunities that you may not be using yet, and help improve your discoverability.

Consider the Human Element

There will always be unpredictable elements in your campaign – the human element. There’s no set formula for engaging your audience because they have different personalities and interests, and they also have different triggers for moving towards your conversion goals. The numbers can only tell you so much. You need to produce content for your audience, and not just for optimization.

Make them interact with your brand and study their reactions through testing. Serve them different types of content and see what approach works for your target audience. Listen in on the trends and modify your content marketing strategy based on what they want to see on both platforms.

We’d love to help you integrate mobile SEO into your current SEO and online marketing strategy. Talk to us today to get started.