Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can start bringing your customers and revenue within a few weeks. Mobile devices are becoming the necessity of life. So do you need to SEO your site for mobile devices?
As soon as the buzz about mobile SEO appeared a couple of years ago, many "mobile SEO experts" began to sell their services to help you "SEO your website for mobile search".
In my view, however, "SEO for mobile devices" is a misconception. It implies that there is SEO for computers and SEO for mobile devices. But there is no such thing. There is SEO for search engines. And search engines crawl, scan, index, analyze and rate web sites regardless of how users search: via mobile devices or not. So strictly speaking, SEO for mobile devices is a wrong term. Furthermore, there is no separate .mobi domain that you need to register. All typical domains will work perfectly well for mobile devices (.com, .ca, .info, .net, etc.). Everything you do for regular SEO will work for mobile devices.
In other words, it is more appropriate to speak about web design for mobile devices than SEO for mobile devices. But don't rush to re-design your website. Sure, there are some new platforms that allow you to create mobile friendly sites very quickly, but if you already have a website, you don't need to re-design it to make it friendly and accessible for mobile devices.
If your site is designed with a W3C compliant code and follows proper accessibility standards, there is very little you would need to do to make it mobile friendly. Recent statistics show that most mobile queries are sent for contact information, weather updates, maps, directions and similar "quick" and highly practical pieces of information.
These statistics are hardly surprising. How can one expect to see mobile users conduct research or serious shopping using a tiny screen and two thumbs while also doing something or going somewhere else. If you are at home or in the office, you'd probably use your computer instead of your blackberry to do research or shopping, right? So if you are using your mobile device to look up something online, you are most likely going somewhere or in a transit state between various destinations. Doing research via mobile devices with tiny screens is simply not convenient, so majority of people will postpone doing research and shopping until they get to their laptops or computer monitors. And if they do look up something online, a few sentences about your company and products or services as well as your contact information will be the information most mobile users would want.
In other word, if you already have a website, all you need to SEO for mobile devices is the messaging on your home page and your contact page. You don't even need to worry about images, as iPhone and Blackberry downloads images the same way your browsers do. But it is always good to stay informed, so test your site for mobile devices to make sure that your key messages are visible well.
As for "mobile SEO", there is a couple of more tricks that you could do to accommodate mobile search, but they don't matter a lot and you won't lose much (hardly anything) by ignoring them.
To summarize, is mobile SEO important? My answer is "not really". Google displays search results regardless of how users search: using their computers or mobile devices. Focus on quality code, usability standards, and traditional SEO techniques.
