Optimize for Local Search

Research shows that up to of “on the go” or mobile searches have local intent. Essentially, when people are looking for a businesses or products, they are interested in results that are local to them. If your business has any local elements, it’s important to leverage these search habits and optimize your site accordingly.

Mobile searchers are commonly looking for the exact location of a particular business, their hours of operation, and their price and availability of a product. Google’s algorithms have grown to understand the needs of mobile searchers and rewards sites that have the most current and relevant information optimized across devices.

To optimize your mobile SEO for local search, you’ll need to understand the intent of your audience and what they are expecting to find when searching for your products or service offerings. This information can help you choose better keywords and include the correct information in your metadata and content.

Start by including your company name, phone number, business hours, and full company address into your site’s metadata and within a contact page on your website. Full address meaning city, state, country, and the zip codes that your business serves. This helps search engines better understand where you are located and can increase your chances of appearing in a local search.

More users around the world are accessing the internet from mobile devices than from desktop computers for the first time, according to internet monitoring firm StatCounter. The combined traffic from mobile and tablet devices tipped the balance at 51.2 percent, vs. 48.7 percent for desktop access, marking the first time this has happened since StatCounter began tracking stats for internet usage.

It’s a huge moment for the web overall: this means going forward, companies that haven’t yet decided to focus on a mobile-first approach to their internet services and web properties really should, as the trend line is unlikely to reverse.

StatCounter also found that the maturity of the market impacts which is the dominant means of access, and as you might have guessed, mobile platforms are far and away the method of choice for internet access when it comes to emerging markets like India, where they account for 75 percent of use. More mature markets including the UK, the US and Ireland still see use swinging in favor of desktop, but the trend is still showing a narrowing gap.

Understand the difference between devices

Mobile: “mobile” or mobile devices refers to smartphones, such as devices running Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone. Mobile browsers are similar to desktop browsers in that they can render a broad set of the HTML5 specification, although their screen size is smaller and in almost all cases their default orientation is vertical.

Tablets: We consider tablets as devices in their own class, so when we speak of mobile devices, we generally do not include tablets in the definition. Tablets tend to have larger screens, which means that, unless you offer tablet-optimized content, you can assume that users expect to see your site as it would look on a desktop browser rather than on a smartphone browser.

Multimedia phones: These are phones with browsers that are able to render pages coded to meet XHTML standards, support HTML5 Markup, JavaScript/ECMAscript but might not support some of the extension APIs in the HTML5 standard. This generally describes the browser in most 3G-ready phones that are not smartphones.

Feature phones: On these phones, browsers lack the capability to render normal desktop webpages coded using standard HTML. This includes browsers that render only cHTML (iMode), WML, XHTML-MP, etc.