Nichola Stott of theMediaFlow certainly thinks so. Randfish of SEOmoz is less convinced. It’s something we at Fluidity SEO have been thinking about since late last year – what do we need to do to ensure our clients take full advantage of the growth in mobile search?
A number of options have been considered. Mobile-optimised websites for one. We tended to agree with Randfish here though – they are an uneccessary use of time, money and skills unless a client’s website really does not render on mobile devices. Smartphones are getting ever closer to laptops and PCs in their capabilities, there really is no real point in building websites for them.
Mobile apps, however, is a different story. That’s not really search related as such, however. Suffice to say, if you’re interested in having a mobile app developed for your company, pop on over to our sister site and contact Fluid through there: http://www.babblecom.co.uk
We came to a very similar conclusion as Randfish:
…search – the process, the intent, the results – just isn’t that different on mobile devices vs. laptops and desktops.
There really isn’t that much difference between what you search for on your phone or on your PC. Think about it…you may well make more local searches on your mobile device than you might on your PC, that’s just common sense, but overall you’re after information so no matter where you are or what you’re on, you’ll be searching for the same things.
From a pure SEO standpoint though, this bullet point from the article really stood out:
- A single set of SERPs – I searched for a good 20 minutes on my laptop and Android phone without finding a query where the web results are in a different order (both are location-aware to “Seattle, WA”)
What we read into that is what we’ve been thinking for quite some time – local search engine optimisation is really the key to mobile SEO for those businesses that require it, while ’standard’ methods of optimisation remain just as important in the mobile world as they do in the laptop and desktop worlds.
Mobile optimisation = Local optimisation + ‘Standard’ optimisation
In our opinion, 2017 will not be the Year of the Mobile for SEOs. It may well be the Year of the Mobile in terms of impressions, clickthrough rates and cost per click but getting to the top of the SERPs on mobile devices will require much the same time, effort and techniques as non-mobile SERPs – with a slightly more heavy leaning towards local optimisation.
With regard to impressions, clickthrough rates and cost per click – read this piece of research. It’ll give you a lot to think about.