Having built an online business during the dot-com boom and bust, I’ve always been a bit skeptical about the mobile revolution. Every year since the late 90s, we’ve heard that this would be “The Year” for mobile. In the past year, though, my skepticism has been challenged by a wide range of data, and I no longer believe that the mobile web is simply a miniature desktop. This post is an in-depth analysis of why I think online marketers need to start paying attention to mobile now.
Google’s “Mobile First” Shift
It’s no mystery that I follow Google’s actions pretty closely. When Google launched a significant redesign back in March, Jon Wiley – Lead Designer for Google Search – posted this on Google+:
For a long time, we’ve assumed that mobile would naturally follow desktop, and trends like the slow death of WML (Wireless Markup Language) seemed to support that assumption. In the past two years, though, Google has repeatedly designed and launched new features on mobile first, including the most recent ad format and the latest version of Google Maps.
So, it begs the question – what does Google know that the rest of us don’t?
Google’s Greatest Fear
In July of 2013, Google migrated AdWords advertisers to what it calls “enhanced” campaigns. Many in the industry viewed this as a euphemism for preventing advertisers from bidding separately on mobile and tablet vs. desktop. Google had been experiencing long-term CPC losses, and most analysts blamed those losses on advertisers’ unwillingness to pay the same rates for mobile/tablet clicks as they did for desktop.
Google has strongly resisted splitting out mobile vs. desktop performance, going as far as to tell the SEC that “...disclosing or quantifying the impact of only one factor, such as platform mix, could be misleading and confusing to investors.” This has nothing to do with usability or confusion – Google is afraid of mobile and its impact on their $60B bottom line, the vast majority of which depends on advertising. Mobile-first design is about survival, plain and simple.
Google’s Multi-Screen World
Back in 2012, Google released a fascinating study about the multi-screen world. It paints a complex picture of how we use multiple screens to navigate the web, and often perform activities across mobile, tablet, and desktop. Google ended that report with eight conclusions, and this was the final one:
What led them to this conclusion? A couple of data points give a very interesting view of the impact of mobile on search. First, Google reported (see slide #20) that a full 65% of searches begin on mobile phones. Second, they found – which seems obvious in retrospect – that we reach for the “screen” that’s closest (slide #34). So, if you see something on TV, hear about it on XM Radio in the car, or read about it in the doctor’s waiting room, you’re going to reach for your mobile phone.
More Mobile Trends (2014)
Recently, Mary Meeker’s closely-watched annual state of the internet report was released, and it contains a great deal of data about where mobile is headed. Smartphone adoption is climbing and tablet sales are skyrocketing, but I’d like to focus on one graph that sums up the trend pretty well (from slide #9):
Globally, the percentage of page views coming from mobile devices has jumped substantially in the past year, and accounts for almost one-fifth of North American page views. Critics will argue that desktop usage has not substantially decreased, and that’s true, but the problem is this – as mobile gets to be a larger piece of the picture, we’re seeing less and less of that picture by excluding mobile data.
Look at it this way – let’s say we had a sample of 1M page views, and all of them came from desktop visitors. That would give us the pie on the left. Now, let’s say desktop holds steady at 1M page views, but mobile is now 19% of total views. This is what that reality would look like:
If we only look at those 1M page views, then it seems like nothing has changed, but the reality is that the desktop piece of the pie has shrunk. If we ignore mobile in this case, we’re missing out on 234,568 page views, and our picture is incomplete.
Why This Matters for Search
So what if someone starts a search on mobile – why should that matter to us as search marketers? The problem is simple: while Google desktop search design is being inspired by mobile design, the reality of a small screen means that mobile SERPs can look very different. Just as Google found with ad CTRs, this can lead to very different user behavior.
So, how different are mobile SERPs? I’d like to look at a few notable examples of desktop vs. mobile SERPs, starting from most similar to least similar. For all of these examples, the desktop SERP was captured on a Windows 7 PC using Chrome, at 1280x1024, and the mobile screen was captured on an iPhone 5S using Safari.
Here’s a fairly basic SERP (a search for “plumbers”) with ads and some local features. The desktop version is on the left, and the mobile version is on the right. I apologize for the reduced size, but I felt that a side-by-side version would be the most useful:
The impact of the smaller screen here is readily apparent – even though the desktop SERP shows eight full ads above the fold and the mobile SERP shows only two, the desktop screen still has room for three organic results, a map, and a couple of local pack results. Meanwhile, the one organic result that does pop up on the mobile screen has the advantage of being the only organic element on the “page”.
Unfortunately, we have very little data on relative CTR for either ads or organic results, and Google is tweaking both designs all of the time. I think the core point is that these user experiences, even for a relatively straightforward SERP, are clearly different.
Let’s look at another SERP (“army birthday”) where the major elements are similar, but the screen space creates a different experience. In this case, we get one of the new answer boxes:
An answer box is disruptive on any screen, but on the mobile screen it occupies almost the entire SERP above the fold. Of course, scrolling is easier and more natural on mobile, so I don’t want to pretend this is a true apples-to-apples comparison, but if the answer meets the user’s needs, they’re unlikely to keep looking.
Let’s look at a standard Knowledge Graph box, in this case one for a local entity (“woodfield mall”). Here, while the styles of the Knowledge Graph boxes are similar, the SERPs are radically different:
While the desktop SERP has a rich Knowledge Graph entry, we also see a substantial amount of organic real estate. On the mobile SERP, a condensed Knowledge Graph box dominates. That box also contains mobile-specific features, like click-to-call and directions, which could easily divert the searchers and keep them from scrolling down to organic results.
Finally, let’s consider a SERP where the presentation and structure are completely different between desktop and mobile. This is a search for “pizza” (from the Chicago suburbs, where I’m located), which triggers a local carousel:
Carousels – whether they’re local, Knowledge Graph, or the newer song and episode lists – are a great example of mobile-first design. While the desktop carousel seems out of place in Google’s design history and requires awkward horizontal scrolling, the mobile carousel is built for a finger-swipe interface. What’s more, the horizontal swipe may derail vertical scrolling to some degree. So, again, a single element dominates the mobile SERP in this example.
The Mobile Feature Graph
These differences naturally lead to a follow-up question – do mobile SERPs just look different, or are they fundamentally showing different rankings and features than desktop SERPs? You may be familiar with the MozCast Feature Graph, which tracks the presence of specific SERP features (such as ads, verticals, and Knowledge Graph) across 10K searches. I decided to run the same analysis across mobile results and compare the two.
The table below shows the presence of features across both desktop and mobile SERPs. Data was recorded on June 5th. Both data sets were depersonalized and half of the queries (5K) were localized, to five different cities.
For the most part, SERP features were consistent across the two devices. While it’s very difficult to compare two sets of rankings (even when they differ only by a few hours), the similar number of sitelinks suggests a similar make-up of 10-result vs. 7-result SERPs. A cursory glance at the data suggests that page-1 rankings were not dramatically different.
The big feature difference (which is entirely driven by layout considerations) was in the presence and structure of AdWords blocks. Mobile SERPs only allow top and bottom ad blocks, since there’s no right-hand column. While bottom-of-page ads are the rarest block on desktop SERPs, they’re fairly common on mobile SERPs. The overall presence of ads in any single position was lower on mobile than desktop (at least for this data set). All of this has CTR implications, but we as an industry don’t have adequate data on that subject at present.
The local data is somewhat surprising – I would have predicted a noticeably higher presence of local pack results in mobile SERPs. Google has implied that as many as half of mobile searches have local intent, with desktop trailing substantially. Unfortunately, collecting comparable data required matching the local methodology across both sets of SERPs, so my methodology here is unreliable for determining local intent. This data only suggests that, if local intent is the same, local results will probably appear consistently across desktop and mobile.
The Google Glass Feint
Beyond our current smartphone and tablet world is the next generation of wearable technology, which promises even more constrained displays. Right now, we tend to think of Google Glass when we hear “wearables,” and it’s easy to dismiss Glass as an early-adopter fad. When we dismiss Glass, though, I think we’re missing a much bigger picture. Let’s say our timeline looks something like this, with us in the present and Glass in the future…
In other words, I think it was fair to say that Glass, whether you love or hate it, was clearly a future-looking move and is pushing our comfort zones. It was ahead of what we were ready for, and so Google pulled us ahead…
Let’s say we’re not quite halfway-ready for Glass. Stay with me – there’s a point to my crude line art. What about the wearables that aren’t quite as futuristic, including the wide array of fitness band options and the coming storm of smartwatches? Our perception now looks something like this…
Before Glass, we were just warming up to fitness bands, and smartwatches still sounded a bit too much like science fiction. After Glass, challenged with that more radical view of the future, fitness bands almost seem passé, and smartwatches are looking viable. I’m not sure if any of this was intentional on Google’s part, but I strongly believe that they’ve moved the market and pushed ahead our timeline for adopting wearables.
This isn’t just idle speculation paired with pseudo-scientific visuals (it is that, but it’s not just that) – Samsung sold half a million Galaxy Gear smartwatches in Q1 of 2014. Google has recently announced Android Wear, and the first devices built on it have hit the market. More Android-based devices are likely to explode onto the market in the second half of 2014. Rumors of an Apple smartwatch are probably only months away from becoming reality.
I expect solid smartwatch adoption over the next 3-5 years, and with it a new form of browsing and a new style of SERPs. If the smartphone is our closest device and first stop today, the smartwatch will become the next first stop. Put simply, it’s easier to look at our wrists than reach for our pockets. The natural interplay of smartwatches and smartphones (Android Wear already connects smartwatches to Android-powered phones, as does Google Glass) will make the mobile scene even more rich and complex.
What It Means for You
My goal is to put the data out there as matter-of-factly as possible, but I personally believe that the long-awaited mobile disruption is upon us. Google is designing a SERP that’s not only “mobile first”, but can be broken into fragments (like answer boxes and Google Now “cards”) that can be mixed-and-matched across any device or screen-size. Search volume across non-desktop devices will increase, and mobile in all its forms may become the first stop for the majority of consumer searches.
For now, the most important thing we can do is be aware. I’ve always encouraged browsing your “money” terms – what does your URL really look like on a SERP, and how does the feature set impact it? I’d strongly encourage the same for mobile – open a phone browser and really try to see what the consumer is experiencing. If your business is primarily local or an impulse buy driven by TV and other advertising, the time to consider mobile is already behind you. For the rest of us, the mobile future is unfolding now.
Pete - I know we have this discussion a lot, but I figured now's as a good a time to bring it back up as any. Apart from the traditional 2 tasks SEOs have thought about with mobile (#1 - responsive design/load speed and #2 - confirming rankings & visibility in mobile), are there any new actionable items to add to the checklist? My sense is that mobile is huge, will keep getting bigger, and has all sorts of implications beyond the SEO/inbound world, but it's tough to identify what the new actions are that we need to take. Maybe you've got a secret list of things marketers should be doing now that mobile's become bigger? Or is mobile really just a whole lot like a smaller, location-aware laptop?
Could this mobile-first design initiative from Google be the reason why Google might be getting rid of authorship profile pictures in search results as suggested by Google's John Mueller a week or two ago. :) I think it is.
And are all the designs (mobile and desktop) built to help combat ad fatigue and insure AdWords' CTRs stay high? I think they are :-)
Ed Chi's paper from a couple of years ago,
Social Annotations in Web Search
clearly showed Google's surprise that searchers were ignoring social annotation photos. and that those were earning absolutely no additional clicks. Google removed those photos that used to show up under search results with messages such as "John Doe shared this" and "Kanye West +1'ed this". If no one clicks on results with photos like that, why keep on showing the photos.
The same with larger authorship photos. If no one click on the photos of strangers who are authors in search results (like in Ed Chi's more recent Google usability study on pictures in search results told us -
All the News that’s Fit to Read:A Study of Social Annotations for News Reading
Why keep those photos?
When Google introduced Rich snippets and invited us to try them out, and :"become part of the experiment" they didn't guarantee ,more clicks. though they definitively suggested that was possible. There have been case studies showing recipe rich snippets were quite effective in earning more clicks - but it appears that's not true for everything.
The stuff bout stealing ctr from ads is akin to saying "search results aren't the most relevant because more relevant result would steal away ctr from ads." You're better than that kind of crap, Rand.
I am most certainly not better than that kind of crap! I think you'll find that, indeed, I am right on par with crap :-)
Bill - we simply disagree. I believe there's motive behind Google's removal of author photos that's linked to attention/clickthroughs being drawn away from ads. I don't think it was the only catalyst, but I also don't believe it wasn't a consideration.
Neither of us knows for sure - Google won't say, so we're left speculating. Perhaps we can, at least, agree that if they were more transparent (which, supposedly, is a core value for them) debates like this would be less common and the suspicions I hold could be better put to rest (or confirmed).
p.s. Did you catch Wordstream's study?
It's an interesting theory, and I do suspect that authorship didn't play well with mobile, but I think there may be a mix of problems with authorship. It's certainly possible that it was impacting ad CTR. It's also possible that, as Google suggested when they first tweaked authorship, it was getting used/abused to the point of giving people a false quality signal. In other words, it was easy to get authorship even when the site might not in any way deserve that extra authority boost. I suspect Google is trying to balance that out and just found authorship was too prevalent.
It's frustrating - both from a product and research perspective - because we don't have the data we really need (and Google isn't eager to supply it). I suspect that mobile has a wide-ranging impact - having very little impact for some businesses and quite a bit for others. A lot of that impact would be seen in the difference between desktop and mobile CTRs, which we don't have access to. So, I'd suggest a few things:
(1) Look at your overall desktop/mobile/table traffic mix. In Google Analytics, that's under "Audience > Mobile". You can further split that by "Source" (under [Secondary Dimension]) to get a sense for how your search traffic is split. It doesn't reveal the entire richness of multi-device search, but it's a start. For Moz, we're only about 8% (mobile + tablet). It makes sense - our site isn't mobile-friendly, and as a SaaS and content provider, we're not in any way a local business. If that number is more like 20%+, though, I'd start taking things pretty seriously.
(2) Ask yourself if you're in any way a local business.That could mean you have a storefront, or it could mean you deal in local information. If anyone is going to look up information about you on the go, take mobile seriously.
(3) Finally, take your money terms and at least look at them on your phone. Is the layout dramatically different? Are you getting knocked off the first page? Is a Knowledge Graph box or some other entity dominating? Just make sure you know the state of things, as they stand today, so you can make informed decisions.
THIS!
"(2) Ask yourself if you're in any way a local business.That could mean you have a storefront, or it could mean you deal in local information. If anyone is going to look up information about you on the go, take mobile seriously."
#1 - looking at the mix is interesting, but I don't know what you mean when you say "take mobile seriously" from an actionable perspective. It sort of seems similar to saying "take Asia seriously" if you have lots of visits from Asia (even though neither mobile nor Asia are big conforming blocks of users that all behave the same and have the same needs that are necessarily different from the status quo).
#2 - again, if my business does provide local information, what does it mean to "take mobile seriously?" What's the actionable changes I should make beyond watching rankings and thinking about design/speed?
#3 - this sounds like my original #2 above - looking at rankings makes sense. I feel like it's kinda like watching my rankings in local or from a different country/region if I know lots of searchers from those places are interested in my site rather than being revolutionary, but I agree it should be on the list.
I feel like I must be missing something! Everyone's so excited about mobile and to me, it just seems like a relatively minor change compared to the emotions and messages around it. If mobile were taking people away from web browsing and/or away from platforms that also exist on the web, it would strike me as a bit more revolutionary vs. evolutionary, but it seems like all the data shows that more mobile means more web use, more Facebook, more Twitter, more of same (especially if you assume that playing mobile games isn't really the same as the other kinds of mobile use).
There's a few industries that feel truly disrupted - online dating for example (due to location awareness), some parts of travel (again, due to location awareness), games a bit (due to the fact that we all now have pocket Game Boys that can download games on demand) - but I get the sense one could make a compelling case that mobile has had far less impact on SEO and the web marketing world overall than, say, Google's animal updates or the growth of remarketing, or the rise of content marketing.
This is my thought excercise for myself - imagine that I'm the CEO of 5 different businesses, and then ask the question "now that mobile is a rising share of my web traffic, what should I do differently that I wasn't doing before beyond #1) design/speed and #2) watching how rankings show in mobile?"
A - Local ice cream shop with several locations
B - Online retailer of custom t-shirts
C - Manufacturer of parts for industrial equipment
D - Maker of HR software
E - Law office helping companies with regulatory issues
I can see the case where, for a few kinds of companies, thinking about a native mobile app (HR software for example) could, conceivably, make sense, but I'm just struggling to see the revolution and the new, actionable stuff.
Rand, Pete, others,
To jump into this discussion and take it in the design/layout direction. Responsive has definitely dominated the discussion from the design and usability standpoint. But one design aspect that is affected primarily by mobile, and which we haven't seen much discussion on, is the move to a card/box system of displaying information. This article shows the trend well: https://medium.com/@intercom/why-cards-are-the-fut...
1) With the dominance of responsive, this is definitely a trend that should get more attention and study.
2) As a method to display content, cards have this way of being very singular in their approach in displaying information. If you think of flash cards used to memorize words, one word, or one principle (ex: photosynthesis) would get the the whole card to its self. Cards leave zero room for competition. One card takes all is definitely the approach as Pete pointed out with the Google mobile vs desktop view.
3) Cards transform the way content is consumed. In the content world, longer authoritative pieces provide credibility, authority, and rank. Yet with cards, information needs to be summarized, digested, snippet-ed, and ultimately shortened. Outside of academics, we might be seeing a stronger push for shorter content in the right context, vs longer content. Where in the past Google relied on the longer quantity of content to interpret its context. Now it may be using the nature of the short context, think twitter metadata, to establish relevance and interpretation.
I think the problem is that we want this to be tactical, and it's not. This isn't a technical SEO situation (outside of responsive design) where we can just add a few tags or tweak a few things. This is a broad strategic question, and I can't answer it in a one-sized-fits-all-way, or even without deep knowledge of an industry.
Let's look, though, at what mobile has already disrupted, or will soon:
(1) Social Media
Your comment about Facebook is telling, I think, because it's what we're all seeing with 20-20 hindsight. I can use Facebook on desktop and mobile, and other than a UI difference, what does it matter? Maybe mobile adds a bit more traffic, but that's not revolutionary, right? Let me give a few examples why I think it's not right at all.
Twitter is born for mobile. The 140-character limit and mostly texts posts make updating and reading on mobile a breeze. That's not just about extra traffic - it's about critical mass. If I had to go back to my office to check Twitter on my desktop after the end of the work day, I wouldn't bother. With mobile, I can follow conversations while I make dinner, check push notifications at a stoplight, etc. This makes the entire experience sticky. Without that, I might not just use Twitter 20% less - I might not have adopted it at all. That's speculative, so let's dig deeper...
Where would Instagram be if we still had to have our film developed or even take our digital camera home and download pictures? The mobile phone/camera tie-in made Instagram possible. It wouldn't just have 20% less traffic without mobile - it wouldn't exist at all. Facebook found Instagram so disruptive that they paid $1B for it.
Would FourSquare exist if you had to return home, login to your PC, and enter your location by hand? No. It's an entire social network that only exists because of mobile.
(2) Downloadable Music
The adoption of digital music, as inevitable as it seems, was inherently a mobile phenomenon. It took the iPod, with it's promises of holding hundreds of albums in one portable device, to really change the system. Even with portable tape/disc players, we still paid by the album and bought physical media.
Now, years later, look where we are. Mobile phones have almost completely supplanted dedicated digital music players - we all have them, we all have headphones. To say that you can play iTunes, Pandora, etc. on your desktop misses the point that, until our music went mobile, the digital download revolution didn't really begin. After mobile, it's rewriting the music industry.
(3) Payment Processing
This one's coming soon - our mobile phones will almost undoubtedly be our payment gateway. The future (I'm sure this will ruffle a few feathers) isn't Coin - it's not some specialized device that may or may not be widely adopted and just adds another thing to our wallet. The future of payment processing is ubiquitous, convenient, secure access to our money via the mobile devices we already carry. This will revolutionize not just payment processing, but e-commerce.
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The problem is that, after these transitions occur, they almost seem inevitable, and mobile just seems like the platform. In all of these cases, though, I think mobile was the driver, and there's more to come.
I can't do the thought exercise real justice, in a deep way, but I'm going to try. These will probably be more strategic than tactical.
A - Local ice cream shop with several locations
With local, we've obviously got to cover the bases. Are the locations all correctly submitted to Google? Are they available in Google Maps and Apple Maps? By extension, are they available via voice searches and Siri. This is mission critical for a pure local business like an ice cream shop.
Ideally, they'll want Knowledge Graph entries with easy access to phone, address, and hours, and probably click-to-call. Again, these are the basics, but many local businesses don't do them.
Why not let people pre-order on the way. Ice cream is an on-the-go and often impulse buy, so let people easily browse, mix, and order flavors on their way to the shop. What about letting people create flavors (within reason) from their phones? Make it social - the most popular flavors gets featured, maybe the "winner" of that month's flavor gets a price.
B - Online retailer of custom t-shirts
Let's take the Instagram model. Focus on photo-based shirts. Let people create shirts directly from photos on their mobile camera. It not only makes the process easier, but it encourages one-up purchases that are often impulsive or vanity-driven. I just took a great picture of my kids - let's make a t-shirt? The next day, that idea may seem stupid, but if I can reduce friction, I've made a sale that wouldn't have happened.
C - Manufacturer of parts for industrial equipment
I know someone in this industry, and parts management and ordering can still be surprisingly low-tech. Equip mobile phones with simple scanners or decent software tied to the camera and let people photograph parts or scan part numbers. Let them order multiple parts from just a picture of the entire piece of equipment, or show them those parts based on that equipment.
It sounds obvious, but the last time I ordered parts for a fridge (and this was GE - a big company and UX leader) I had to read through multiple PDFs, reference part numbers, and type them in to order on a separate screen. What if I could've just scanned the serial number and the sections and parts all popped up in an easily selectable and orderable format? This could steal real market share.
D - Maker of HR software
So many HR tasks, like filing sick leave, reporting vacation time, finding insurance forms, require a ton of hand-holding and manual intervention. Making software simple and mobile, instead of pages of downloadable forms, lets employees handle these mundane tasks when they have a chance. I'm on the train home, and I remember I need to file a reimbursement - put it at my fingertips. This is an entire industry based on reducing friction.
E - Law office helping companies with regulatory issues
Similarly, regulatory compliance is mostly a huge pain in the ass. Make forms mobile and pre-fill complex templates with company information and personal accounts, leaving just a few fields to go. Allow simple attachments of photos and documents. File directly to a cloud/central server and provide quick, automated audit feedback to fill in missing data (instead of having a person to review and reply days or weeks later, leading to weeks or months of delays). Again, mobile isn't just a different interface - it's a different modality, mindset, and opportunity.
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Obviously, these are just ideas, and I don't want to oversimplify these industries. Someone could do none of this and still grow, or they could lose market share very slowly and not notice until it's too late. If everyone and their competitors fails to take the opportunity, maybe not much will change. Still, the opportunity is being lost, and that's money on the table. Eventually, someone will come along and take advantage of the new modality.
Can or will everyone do it? No. This isn't a matter of some tactic that everyone can follow. This is a matter of deep, strategic innovation that can change industries.
Maybe it's just degrees of interpretation. My feedback on your examples:
A) wasn't particularly about mobile - just general web marketing/Local SEO (some of which happens to be doable via a mobile device)
B) Taking photos from phones and digital cameras seems wise, but not particularly mobile centric. The integration of cameras and phones makes it more convenient and usable for consumers/creators, but isn't causing a huge actionable shift for the retailer (they either offer custom uploads for designs or they don't)
C) Again, not especially mobile. It's nice to make it work well with mobile, but a great website should have already been offering a streamlined experience. Pairing it with a scanner for hardware for those in the industry who do it all day could make sense, but that scanner could have (and, in many cases, did - think supermarket handheld scanners) long before mobile got big.
D) An app might make sense - Moz uses Workday and their mobile app is actually better than their web app (which is insanely frustrating to me, because I prefer my keyboard on my desktop to my phone, but hate Workday's web interface). They designed for mobile first and made a sucky non-mobile experience as a result.
E) The law office themselves would do this? That sounds like incredibly complex, hard-to-build-and-maintain software. Wouldn't they just use Docusign or another provider like everyone else? Building their own seems like a terrible waste of resources.
I see the point that you can think about how mobile might include some new tactics or even strategic shifts for some businesses. I just feel like the pendulum has swung too far and many investors, marketers, and developers are trying to overapply mobile to every tactic and practice vs. thinking about which ones are really worth the investment beyond design/speed & rankings.
Hey Rand - I'd like to chime in with a few thoughts here since I think about mobile so much at HotPads and Zillow is very bullish on mobile overall.
From a strictly SEO-perspective, there are a lot of things to do to make sure your site is friendly for crawlers. Google discontinued Googlebot-Mobile, so that should show us how Google is thinking about it. Depending on your implementation of a mobile friendly site, there are different things to do (ie rel-alternates in the <head> or XML sitemaps, etc) to make it SEO friendly.
More than anything, if we're going beyond rankings and design and looking to what we should care about which is conversion rates and sales, the come-uppance of mobile means we have a lot to measure and optimize for. Depending on the size of company you are in, this may mean more work for you or it may mean working with new teams to make sure they are thinking about mobile.
As Avinash recently said, Forget mobile first, it's a mobile only world!
John - OK, I get that paying attention to user satisfaction and conversion rate on mobile devices is also important, but to me, that's not very different from looking across browsers or across screen sizes or O/S' as we did from 1997-2007. I hear the message of "mobile! mobile! mobile!" but I keep struggling to find the actionable changes - the things every business needs to do dramatically differently now that mobile is popular that we never would have done before mobile was big...
Maybe I'm getting to be an old fuddy duddy, but many of the cries of "Mobile is a revolution! It changes everything! Get ready for your whole business/marketing/market to be disrupted!" feel inaccurate vs. a message of "Mobile adoption is a lot like the other changes we've seen to the web world - some businesses will be deeply affected, and many won't be affected much at all, and overall, it just adds location awareness and more overall web usage."
I think there's a lot of wisdom in the questions you're asking, Rand. I think the biggest takeaway for me is that mobile a) makes things more complicated to measure, and b) we have to shift our paradigm for how we build things for the web because of mobile. That second one is big (and I'll tell you about it in person when I see you next week because I can't write it on the Internet yet). I also have only become such a mobile advocate since I started working in a space where mobile is huge (it was ~20% of HotPads traffic two years ago and last month was nearing Zillow levels).
For me, mobile isn't so much about user acquisition or growth in all verticals (though in some like mine it is). It's also the user experience when someone gets to your site from an email that they opened on mobile. Something like 80% of B2C emails are opened on mobile devices. If you're sending them to your site that is not mobile-optimized, they'll bounce faster, engage less, and generally be less satisfied with the experience. For long term engagement/retention, this is a big concern no?
Finally, to my point about we have to shift our paradigm about building for the web. From what I've seen recently, most engineers are still very desktop-focused. That's natural, because we all work on large screens at work (I have dual 24" monitors). We've all always built for desktop. But now we have to think about mobile and so we have to relearn how to code things to work cross-platform, which adds a lot of development time. It's fascinating to me that we all use our mobile devices all.the.time, but at work it's so easy to forget about it.
You should also ask Spencer Rascoff about mobile next time you talk with him. He's super bullish on it.
Designing your content and product experiences for mobile, then porting them to desktop is an interesting suggestion (and one that I could see arguing is unique from just designing well for mobile). That said, I think it makes even more sense to design well for both the same way you'd design an in-store/physical experience differently from how you'd design a web experience. And I'd only do either if I was very confident that the investment would pay off. Most of my mobile experiences aren't nearly inhibited enough that I could make a case for mobile-first design were I CEO of those companies, but a few are, and those feel like places where big opportunity does exist.
Interesting. It makes sense to hedge bits a bit, but then to be willing to invest. I know years ago Zillow wasn't all about SEO or mobile. Now SEO makes up a lot of traffic and is talked about a ton internally, as is mobile. SEO was an opportunity where we were being beat bad, so we invested in it and saw awesome returns. Our now VP of Marketing came in to drive the mobile effort, which also is huge in our space (though we are a location-based vertical, it's true, which makes it all the more powerful for us).
For Moz, to bring it back to specifics, I'd start with making the blog responsive. I wish I still had access to Distilled's Analytics to talk about the effects we saw in engagement when we moved the blog to being responsive (anyone from Distilled want to chime in with numbers? Phil? Will?). For a company like yours that has been built off the back of content, and many of your now paying customers started off by engaging with your content, if you want to keep first-time visitors engaged then a mobile experience, to me, is imperative. I'm trying to think of a lightweight way for you to test this, but not coming up with a good one.
We've talked about this before, but https://moz.com/rand is mobile responsive and friendly, yet its mobile metrics are actually worse than the main Moz blog :-)
Designing for mobile first is not only interesting, but also essential in some markets here in Asia. Where in countries like China and India internet access on desktop is being leapfrogged by mobile, mobile first is our key priority.
Of course the content itself should be platform neutral - but I'd be interested in seeing what thoughts there are around the SEO implications for content planning with plethora of platforms even just in mobile now.
Hello john,
As per your mention data that 80% of B2C emails are opened on mobile devices is exact figure which I am dealing right now. And as per my point of view this will increase gradually in future. From last 3 month's I have lost some of my business just because we haven't focus on responsive web design. So if we have to engage our customer in this ratio then we should have to use responsive web design. For now snippet and author is not having such significance in search engine. We are now on stage where we have to maintain our ranking after changes in web design. Thanks for this useful information John.
I'd add App Indexing to the checklist (if you have an App): https://developers.google.com/app-indexing/ - this impacts any business with an Android App which can perform similar actions to their website. Granted, it's not a widespread audience at the moment, but what happens if/when say, Apple perhaps ranks iOS Apps in Safari via Duck Duck Go?
This is going to be a fascinating area to watch I think. Right now, Apps are only found by searching the Apple/Android etc store. The first complete App search engine (an App itself?) would be pretty interesting, if it's even possible.
Good call Dan. If you have an app - app store SEO seems like a significant new marketing tactic that requires embracing.
I didn't see this discussion at the time - only found it now via your & Pete's tweets at MozCon.
I'm broadly with you Rand that there are few tactical changes directly as a result of increasing mobile use if you're already getting all the basics right.
The sea-change I think is coming is:
All of this means two big things:
Combine those effects and the strategic threat is that someone who truly gets mobile (mainly on the UX side, but also nailing the little details of search+social discoverability that are more mobile specific) can get a real jump on you.
Here in India, I'm seeing lot of mobile users on the websites. I worked for some very different niche portals(small & big both) but one thing was very common among all, that was website access with mobile & tablet devices, and these numbers are increasing month by month. Also noticed lots of click on Adwords from mobile, sometime more than Desktop.!
Everyone is just publishing that Mobile site is the need of today. I also think that in future everyone will get huge traffic from mobiles. That is why Responsive web design is also need of today and I think that everyone who is going to make a website should design a responsive website which could work well both on PC and Mobile Devices.
I think you are thinking in the right direction but I just don't see "wearables" being more and more popular. Phones have bridged the gap between laptops and desktops by empowering users to complete basic tasks such as email, conferencing, social networks, etc. but they've also grown in size considerably. That's the core reason why I don't see watches and other items growing beyond a niche. People won't accept them because they are too small and too underpowered compared to having a phone (which you need to have anyways currently).
Google glass will be heavily subjected to human vanity. It's a nerd toy that fits a small niche.
It will take some very complex thought and consolidation of resources to find the next big thing in mobile computing. Positioning yourself to take advantage of whats on the market now is not ideal in my opinion. Those resources are better spent being better at the devices that the other 95% use, IMHO.
I don't think it will happen overnight, but I think there's a place for wearables even if they don't replace desktop functionality. Smartphones are much more functional than they once were, but there's still a lot you can't do on them that you can do on a desktop, laptop, or even tablet. Their interfaces have been refined and we've learned to get enough functionality out of them that they've achieved mass-adoption. They didn't replace desktops or laptops for any of us (or very, very few), and yet we still have them.
What I think is different about 2014, is that the hardware/software has evolved to a point where a smartwatch can be much more than just a digital watch with a few extra features. Google Now is maturing, and is pretty useful, in some circumstances. Screen resolution is at the point where a smartwatch can be functional in interesting ways. People are going to design custom apps that fit the format. I think we're at a point where critical mass is close.
The other interesting thing to me is that smartwatches may propel the technology forward. The kind of miniaturization that's necessary and the improvements we'll need to battery life will help lower costs on components and make other wearables more feasible and affordable.
I think your mind is in the right place, but I'm just not sure what will be the next big thing. The rate people accept new technology is at a blistering pace and it certainly will happen several times in the next decade. As if marketers didn't have enough to constantly stay ahead on it looks like we now have to play the role of technologists.
"If you're not first, you're last" - Ricky Bobby
Great post, touching the people and marketers who are unconvinced with Mobile Technology. In the last you discussed Google Glass "the future beyond smartphones and tablets", really interesting and informational, But do you think it's going to cover up market over the next 3-5 years in countries like India, China. I would also like to know what is the current demand and supply ratio for the mobile devices?
Attending one of Google's conferences several years back, everyone on the panel told us, get your mobile ready. Everything from marketing to web designs have mobile in mind. At that time mobile visits were in the 8%for our client - now is in the 30%. Some products were at the 50% mark.
Thanx for the insights.
Having a mobile responsive site is a must these days, it seems like every site i visit if they are not mobile ready I'm gone. Another thing I've noticed is some mobile site give a shorted version of their website, don't you think it should be the whole thing?
Great insight. Matt also mentioned in his AMA session regarding growth of mobile traffic.
DR Pete., I have a question! How can one mark the forms on site with auto-complete markup? This was marked as important when it comes to mobile optimization. It's another way to better UX. It would really be helpful if you can advise me on this.
Great Read. Thanks. Definitely love seeing more discussion around Mobile SEO. I didn't read anyone speaking about AJAX and dynamic content delivery on mobile. We're working on this right now, and definitely saw a sharp drop in our numbers. Curious if others experience the same? Our next attempt is using an html snapshot solution for indexing, but worried about the authority flow disruption even with snapshot. We're ultimately doomed in effective mobile SEO, if the entire thing turns java script and bots continue to struggle with properly crawling, indexing and assigning authority.
I have been helping companies with their mobile strategy for over 5 years now and it is surprises me how many are still missing the boat on where mobile needs to fit into their business model. Even before getting fancy with a full featured app, start by making sure your digital brand on your responsive site looks as exceptional as it did on the designer's screen. We have tried our own device labs and emulators. The best option has been the latest rev of Mobilizer. Multiple screens rendered simultaneously, including the device shells or without.
Seems like paying for something such as Mobilizer which tests responsive layouts is a bit excessive when there's a wealth of developer tools out there for free for most browsers. The mockup images do admittedly look nice though.
Thank you for the post! Mobile is surely a important part, but most people use different devices during the day, and the content delivered should be suited accordingly. This would create a better 24 hour experience, and more loyal customers.
I saw traffic from mobiles is growing in my analytics
Why mobile matters now?
Because people spend 24 hour with mobiles. Is nt this enough to answer this question ?
Well Research; You are the real Data Analyst :)
Almost every one in the industry know the importance of mobile. Traffic from mobile and tablets are increasing day by day. And those who don't have mobile optimized website are loosing a huge traffic. The time has come to have your website optimized for Mobile or other digital devices. Google have started working to provide his mobile users good experience because they know that the future is Mobile.
Yah thats true...... Responsive websites gonna benefit from that and old sites going to need to change them self before it's too late. Just like Edwin said "mobile age has come to us at a speed faster than we thought!"
With time, more and more people are going to switch over to mobile and other portable devices. The mobile users trend is rising and this trend is expected to continue for some time now. Hence, it is very important that marketers now start to focus on mobile users.
I could not agree more. However, I am going to add or point out something. Optimizing websites for mobile devices is an important thing to ADD in the overall marketing stuff but the focus should be properly divided between mobile and desktop. In my honest opinion, mobile searches may increase and may go higher than desktop searches but it won't replace the importance of desktop devices. People are not switching to mobile devices, they are just adding it to their lives.
Paolo--great observation. I expect mobile use to gradually increase and level off in the next few years. After that, I expect the mobile/desktop mix should stay roughly the same for awhile until there is a different "way" to view the internet.
Mobile is defiantly here to stay and is only going to get bigger, I'm still not convinced of smart watches in the next few years but I'm sure in a longer term sense people will want even more portable access but I would wonder if it would be smart watches or more of a voice search function like Siri & Cortana etc.
all though mildly off topic on tool I enjoy checking with is -
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Pretty good for a rough check list of things you can fix that will help your mobile users.
Google is paving the way to conversational search. So the question is ... "What device you use to ask?". Some will prefer their phone, others their watches or eyeglasses (contact lenses?).
You will not have a move towards one device, but to a multitude of devices.
It will be like "Start Trek", you will ask your: phone, TV, car, watch, home assistant ... you name it.
Conversational is not a small step it's a huge one :). It's all about getting the answer/information that you need as soon as possible to you (And some ads in the mix). The device will no longer matter.
Cornel
They have paved many roads that led to empty fields. Google might be pushing to change the core of how it's system works but I don't think it will replace a significant amount of it's usage. It will be limited by the technology acceptance curve as well as being tasked with taking people used to typing and texting and converting them into asking a question. Personally, SIRI tried this and I found it to be slower than the norm for many tasks as well as frustrating if you didn't get it right the first time.
I think you are right, that it will meld into a more seamless interface, but I don't think it will happen in the next 5 years, at least not on the scale to be majorly significant.
That is based on current tech though 5-10 years down the road it could change humming bird already paved the way to help not to mention the next generation of kids if they are used to searching in a different way it would change the way Google and search engines handle most things.
Most things could happen in next 5-10 and it really is all speculation at this point but still exciting prospects.
Definitely! As anyone that has succeeded in life knows ... you will dig many holes before you strike oil. It will be interesting to see what sticks in Google's technological gold panning.
Really good job using visuals to aid your opinion and overall message, Dr. Pete. I really enjoyed this post on a common topic, but written in a way that isn't boring or the same old mumbo jumbo.
There seems to be something to the theory of looking to search experiences now on mobile devices in order to better understand what Google/Bing/others will do in the future across all devices.
While testing and fluctuation will always make deciphering temporary changes from permanent ones, it still may be a good general explanation for how to see the future of search, today. Am I way off there, Pete?
Hi Dr. Peter!
The mobile comparison graph shows some really influential data which could push a great change in the way marketers would want to plan their campaigns. The result of the comparison are way higher than what we could have expected. I am certain that soon mobile SERPs would dominate desktop/ laptop SEPRs and a very basic reason for the same is the time frame for which we have the hand devices with us in comparison with the time we are in front of the PC/ Laptop.
Bookmarking the article!
Thanks.
Some really good points Dr. Pete. Reading this post I just can't help but focus on the Adwords part of all of this. While mobile does allow for significantly less number of ads, they do occupy a greater percentage of the screen than desktop.
https://i.imgur.com/FfgA5cz.png
On desktop a searcher is presented with ads and organic results. To me, it's a proper listing and it appears as though Google is presenting a list of results alongside a few ads.
On mobile with most screen sizes you are shown ads in a typical service industry SERP and nothing else. Even on my larger Android phone screen (or Google Now) Google only shows 1 non-ad result.
https://imgur.com/LcHqolE
In this SERP its almost a no-brainer that any searcher is going to click-to-call (cha-ching).
Do you think Google is going to allow organic search results to enable some sort of schema markup to click to call? Or do you think Google is going to continue to reserve this for "paying customers."
Thanks for always thinking ahead and giving us stuff to chew on :)
Yes! mobile matters, more for B2C than B2B.
Few have access to such awakening data, mobile age has come to us at a speed faster than we though! Those who are already well prepared for this will surely gain more from this new era. Your writing reminds me of the recent changes made to Google+ author in SERP, one important reason for doing so is make the Google SERP compatible to all screen sizes!
Great post Dr. Pete! I would love to see data on people that first searched on mobile, then used a desktop to "convert". My biased opinion is that this happens a lot. I've found myself doing this very often where I will research a product on my phone after I see it or hear about it (email or text myself the product or url), then get home and go on my desktop to order.
It's also interesting how long it has taken (and is still taking) people to make mobile friendly sites. There are so many times that I'm on my phone trying to find a product and come to a site where I'm constantly having to zoom in, swipe, zoom out, and basically stand on my head while juggling to try to get through a site. My point is, if it's taken this long for people to accept/optimize for mobile...i would hope that the future of wearable and other devices don't require too much more optimization of sites...or it may get messy.
The year of the mobile is finally here, 2015. Those who have had time to prepare for her arrival with this article are very lucky. For those who find that now, as I hope it is not too late.