Future of Mobile Technology

Effective search engine optimization has always been geared towards creating high quality relevant content to please both search engines and internet users; but with the evolution of search rapidly heading towards the use of touch screen mobile devices, the balance is shifting. SEO strategies are focusing more on user experience and that means that the way sites are developed will have to change with the mobile touch screen search platform in mind.
It is no secret that Google has been tailoring its tools to suit search on the go. Emphasis has been placed on bringing up local results and a new feature to enable users to make a call without navigating a site has proved to be popular already. What Google can’t do however is redesign every web page to be suited to mobile browsing, as such SEO professionals are having to reconsider what they can offer the user if they are using a mobile device to search. Ultimately this is the usual combination of increasing page load speed, reducing bounce rate and making a sale.
The problem lies in the fact that mobile devices, although they are fabulous fun in theory, are in fact a frustrating way to search the net; but users are persevering anyway. To capture the mobile consumer market sites need to be modified to match the way people use mobile devices for search. At present, the popular practice is to create a duplicate mobile friendly site that has been slimmed down so to load faster, ideally just 30kb as opposed to 500kb. The smaller site is no indexed to avoid duplicate content issues.
When a user searches for a place, service or product the website can detect that a mobile browser is being used and the user will be redirected to the alternative site and be none the wiser. This however, doesn’t completely solve issues with user experience. People want to be able to navigate a site without excessive scrolling, zooming and pinching, and as anyone who has monitored conversion rates will tell you, the less someone needs to do once on a site, the more likely they are to stay and spend.
That means that the duplicate mobile sites need to become ‘finger friendly’ to match the expectations of the new technologies available to users. These no indexed sites will still rely on traditional SEO of the main site for ranking purposes, and probably get a huge helping hand from paid advertising, but it will be Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) that will ultimately secure a sale.