Different Methods to Make Your Mobile Site More Effective - #seopodcast 182

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, so internet marketing specialist. I'm working on making sure I'm not monotone. You've got to keep a wave going on. You guys have just tuned in to the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. That is because of all y'all out there. You over there. You, you, you, you, everywhere. If you're in a position to, and you probably are because you're a nerd, if you're listening to this podcast, and I say that with the utmost respect, or not, your choice, go ahead and tweet right now. And what should they tweet? They should tweet hashtag SEO Podcast. And do this for me. Tag this. Tag this All-Star. Oh, yeah. Tag this All-Star. It's All-Star weekend. We're here in Houston. Everybody's down here right now. So hashtag SEO Podcast, hashtag All-Star. And let us see if we can, you know, feel some of that right there. Punch in the face to H-Town for getting the All-Star. That's hockey, right? Yeah, anyway. Oh, yeah. Remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. Yes. Where our mantra is. Don't be a deuce. It's not a good look. It's not a good look. As usual, tip from previous podcasts, use social media to promote and expand your content efforts. Yeah, you want to make sure that you take advantage of social media sites when you're promoting different content on your site, whether it's blog posts or products or services or whatever it is. Take advantage of the social media platforms to promote that product or service. The reality is, unless you're some sort of miracle content producer, it's hard to produce content. So, when you do produce good content, make sure you take advantage of that in every way possible. Remember, you can contact us, facebook.com slash eWifthow, twitter.com slash eWifthow, youtube.com slash eWifthow. Also, you can do us one of two favors or both favors if you choose. One is three steps. Go on

to iTunes, create an account, write a review. And our podcast is the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. If you choose to send us an email, let us know you submitted the review, and we will give you a punch in the face. By the way, we're going to have a really... That's a patiff. Yeah, patiff. We've got a really, really brutal one here. You want to tell them the other way? Which other way? Go to eWifthow.com slash g plus. Oh, yeah. I'll get it backwards there. Okay. G plus. Or e-webstow.com slash Google plus. Or Google plus. There we go. And what do you do when you get there? You get to our Google plus page, leave us a review. Yes, please. That would be a help. If you get any value out of this. Yeah, if you get value. If you don't find any value here, then don't leave us a review. And remember, we do have a referral program. So if you're an SEOer and would like to send some clients our direction, great. We have a referral program so that you can get renumerated or compensated for that effort. All right. I got two emails here. Let's do one. I like this one. This is from Rob McKay. He said, I just started listening to your podcast a couple days ago. Once I listened to some of the other guys' SEO podcasts and found y'alls, I deleted the rest. By the way, thank you. Appreciate it. I haven't seen... By the way, I haven't seen a review from you yet. I'm sure that's about to happen. Great stuff. Very entertaining and informative. What concerns me is your position on Google. I figured I'd search... The plot thickens. I figured I'd search for you before I link to you, to you at all, and then see how a social relationship between us changes that position to me. Great test. Yeah. That's a great test. I fired up Google on my iPhone and finally found you on page six using the search SEO company

in Houston, and then changed it to SEO company Houston, and finally found you on page 11. With the search local SEO Houston, with the search local SEO Houston, I gave up after page 21. All right. You got us. We haven't been focusing on company, so we're not actually... Company is not part of our search strategy. Right. But... We're going to make a change. We're going to make a change. You got some ideas? I got a few ideas, especially since our podcast is transcribed, and this content will go on the site. This is the perfect time to tell you that we are an SEO company in Houston that focuses on doing SEO in Houston for all companies. So if you're a company looking for an SEO company in Houston, then we're the SEO company in Houston for you. Excellent. Excellent. All right. So that should take care of that. And yes, sometimes it is that easy. By the way, with SEO Houston, we're position four. So... For PPC Houston, we're first page. For Internet Marketing Houston, we're first page. For Online Marketing Houston, we're first page. For SEO Podcast. So... National term, first page. Internet Marketing, also, first page. PPC is actually first position, yo. Let's see. Have you been slapped by the panda or pooped on by the penguin? Neither we've just... What was the word we had the other day? We said it was... Oh, yeah, dude, they came up with a good one. That was Dr. K. Yeah, but I don't know what he said. We'll have to come ping... Penguin something. I met with a client, and he said something about the... Black eyes by the pandas, the black eyes. Yeah. Yeah, if you get hit by a panda, all you get is two black eyes. Yeah. What he said is, I will stick with you because I think you guys are informative, but I thought you really needed to know your position. Thank you, actually. We appreciate that. Ex-military patif to both of y'all. Wow, that's awesome. It sounds like... That's

the kind of patif that might hurt. Yeah. And still leave a smile on your face. I don't know how that works. By the way, this is Rob McKay, as he's said. Wildlife Removal Shreveport. So, I think I checked out his website briefly, and clearly he'll get wildlife out of your wherever it is in Shreveport. And we'll link to you once we get our content up. Yeah. All right, so next email. This is a good one. This is a... We really appreciate the effort. Actually, the passion that he has in this email is palpable. Kicking both scenes. Yeah. Yeah. This is from Burt Van Ketz, van ketz.com. He says, I sure hope the... So, he made a recommendation that we do audiophonic. So, there's a website called... No, Alphonic. A-U-P-H. Yeah, we talked about that last week. Okay. And we've tried... I haven't had any luck, but he wrote back to us and he says, he's curious with the results, and he asks, what happened on podcast number 178? He just listened to it, and the result is he has a splitting headache. Literally, all caps, what the hell happened? Has Charles been abducted by a Cylon? From the start, the audio is skippy. It's very hard to listen. He goes in and says, the info you guys provide is worth its weight in gold. That's why he takes us seriously. That's why he's reaching out to us. He actually finishes it with, sorry for the negative tone of this message, but I really do think your podcast is worth investing the time and effort. A lot of great stuff. This is awesome. Thank you very much. Now, he did bring up something interesting. He said, did you guys ever investigate the results of Panda on the AdSense earnings? Ever since Panda, my AdSense income has almost tripled. In December and January, I had a CTR between 3% and 5%. Just crazy what that can do with the earnings. Ever since Panda, which affected sites naturally. Organic, right. His AdSense tripled, which is strictly a paid

deal. So, that's interesting. I got a theory. Well, yeah, the sites that got a lot of traffic that happen to have AdSense on there brought in more traffic and higher conversions. Right. Oh, yeah, because that's not, it's AdSense. It's not AdWords. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. My theory applied to AdWords. Maybe I should read the emails. So, really, Bert, we really appreciate it. I mean, the email is very passionate. We really appreciate how much you appreciate us. And we're working on it to answer the question. I mean, like I said, we have the mic. We bought a new mixer. We actually have some of our staff right now listening to the podcast as we do it right now just to see if anything needs changing. And so, we're constantly proning, constantly tweaking. And so, appreciate your support and punch in the face to you. Patoof. Maybe we should duck Rob McKay's ex-military Patoof and have him hit Bert. All right. And then Rob essentially gets hits with the kick in both ends. Is that how that works? Yeah. And you can just side step one, two kicks, punch in the face. All right. So, a little bit of news. MS shifts to Skype. You know, Microsoft bought Skype. They're shifting over. I actually had to use Skype from time to time. So, I actually think I had to download a new version or something. I don't know. I just think that that whole process is interesting. Because imagine you've got all these people on instant messenger and probably, whatever, 30% of them or something have a Skype account. So, now you're trying to figure out how do you merge those and the usernames. That's a threat. Good luck with that. Yeah. Google had hell doing it. Yeah. So, I'm just saying. And Microsoft. Now, that's what sucks about the Skype purchase to me was the fact that I have been purposely trying not to use Microsoft products. And I use Skype. And so, now. You use a Microsoft product. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully, it goes smooth.

And I know. I haven't used instant messenger in forever. Like, Microsoft instant messenger. Yeah. In forever. I used to use it a lot. I haven't used it in a while. Yeah. I've never. Because I've never had the Hotmail or the account you needed to do that. I think it was. Yeah. It was a Hotmail or a live account. I think it was called a live account. This was interesting. They. There was a. What's the international police organization? It's got a really cool name. I can't remember. International police organization. Interpol. Interpol. IPO. Interpol took down a hacking group that sold ransomware. And I just thought this was really interesting. So, it's ransomware. It's just. You know how software will pop up on your computer and say, you've been infected. Click here for $39 and we'll uninfect it. And if you click that, you'll get infected. Well, you click that and you pay the $39. And it does something and it comes back and says, oh, it was worse than we thought. For $39 more dollars, we'll make sure we get it all clean. And then that keeps going. The dude was making like $7 million a month off of some dude in Russia. So, this group, similar, except what they said. Yeah, maybe they got some retribution today. What they said was that their pop up would say, hey, we've noticed that you've been visiting terrorist websites, child pornography websites, and other things that people would not want to be associated with, and pay this fine, literally they presented themselves as Interpol, pay this waiver, get a waiver or something. 3% of the people did it. Wow. Knowing that if that was legit, they wouldn't be emailing you or popping up. They'd be knocking at your door. Yeah. Like, there's no waiver for child pornography. There's no waiver for, you know, suspected terrorists. 3%. I wonder how many people. It was a huge, they were making bank, so it was a ton of people. Wow. 3% of them thought that they could. They felt guilty about

it. That's the bad part. Like, 3% were like, damn. I got caught. All right. I need a waiver. Wow. And, you know, half of them were like probably watching regular porn, which is the foundation almost of the internet, and just felt bad about it. It's just crazy. Um, G+, I like this, this is a line, G+, experienced a little bit of an outage, and so they called it temporarily the antisocial network. Um, and then there's a German privacy watchdog, ordered Facebook, so this isn't a governmental entity, it's just a group of people who are, you know, fighting on behalf of privacy, ordered Facebook to allow the use of fake usernames immediately. And Facebook took them to court, and the court said, nein. Apparently, because their, uh, uh, their head, their European headquarters is not in Germany, they felt like they don't have jurisdiction to do that. And I'm like, why? Why would you? I think it's a good thing that you can't have bogus names there. Yeah, I'm glad that Google changed away from it, you know, um, cause now, you know, I was looking at those, uh, SEO rapper videos, and I got tons of hate comments and spam comments and all kind of other stuff under screen names. Yeah. You know, and so now, now it says Charles Lewis. Yeah, you want to hate, if Charles Lewis wants to hate on somebody, he's trying to say Charles Lewis is hating on somebody. Yeah, he can't be, yeah, um, um, um, tan cabinet. Cylon. Yeah, exactly, hating on me. So, so I like it, I like what Facebook's doing, I like what Google's doing in regards to that. I think it's making a safer web, frankly, because now I can tell real people from, you know, somebody who's on their trip. I think that's a foundation of, of why Facebook, you know, frankly took over from MySpace, right? I mean, the interface was kind of, uh, all over the place on, on MySpace, um, and, and Facebook had some kind of fundamentals. You could

only share stuff with people you're connected with, and you had to be who you are. I think that's, that's important. Two key, very key importance, uh, components. All right, we have passed the potatoes. We are now going to pass the meat. Okay, so before we get into our content today, we'll talk about mobile SEO. I'm going to pose a question to our listeners. Same question that I actually posed on G Plus yesterday, um, and I tagged, uh, Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, and Danny Sullivan in it, just to see what the answer was. So, we have a client, and it's rare that this sort of situation comes up, but I'm going to share it with them. Yeah, we have a client. We don't, we don't get clients very often. We have a client who, who specializes in Hardy Plank Sighting, right? And so, the problem is, the correct spelling is H-A-R-D-I-E, right? James Hardy. And so, the site is optimized for the correct spelling, Hardy Plank Sighting. And they rank well. First page position for that. If you add the word Houston, they're a top three position. Okay? But, the problem is, Google prefers the misspelling. Right. H-A-R-D-I Plank Sighting. And we, I've been optimized for that for a couple reasons. One, the client won't let us. Two. Because they're, and let's explain that. Because they're so high performer for James Hardy, they do a lot of revenue, um, they're one of their preferred contractors, they can't have misspellings of the product on their site. For branding, for Hardy Plank branding purposes. Makes sense. Makes sense. And so, here's our dilemma. The misspelled version gets 12 case searches a month. The correct spelling only gets two. Yeah. That's a problem, Google. And so, my question that I posed was, A, um, why, with James Hardy being such a big brand, is the misspelled version the preferred search query? Yeah. Second question was, what can I do, as an SEOer, to, to, to suggest, um, that you guys change the spelling? Right. So, get back with me

on that. Yeah, that's it. Because, uh, you know, I think, my, my kind of temporary result was, you know, bid on Hardy Plank misspelling in AdWords. To take advantage of that traffic, and that's working, but, you know, I'd rather rank naturally for, organically for that, for the term that's searched most. So, yeah, this is clearly a Google issue. In fact, what should be happening is somebody should be typing Hardy without the E plank, and Google should be saying, did you need, and Google should auto-correct, it actually should say, showing you results for Hardy IE, and it does. When you search Hardy IE, it says, showing you results for Hardy I. Right. Oh, it actually does the reverse. Yeah, it actually does the reverse. By the way, I don't. It says, so click here to see results for Hardy IE. Was it ever spelled Hardy with just the I, maybe at some point in the past? Maybe, maybe that's part of the challenge. Yeah. I don't know. It's interesting. I doubt it. I doubt Mr. James ever changed his name. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? So, yeah. So, anyway, that's that. If you guys know something, hit us up, podcast at edasswefstyle.com. Tell me what you think about it. Or, frankly, I'm Charles Lewis. Find me on G+, and comment on that post. It's my latest one, so it should be at the top. Today I'm going to talk about mobile. So, put an article from Search Engine Land, 10 Simple Tips for Effective Mobile SEO. Pretty cool stuff in here. Some things I kind of disagree with. And, you know, we had this debate internally all the time about, you know, app versus mobile version and things like that. And so we'll get into a little bit of that today. But some of the tips were actually pretty good. So, number one, he says, be a psychologist. You know, use short-tail phrases. People search on a mobile device differently. Yep. You know, people look for abbreviations. Frankly, that's when the search suggests and the

Google Instant stuff plays a key during the mobile search. Yeah. Because, unfortunately, people are probably driving. And so, you know, so you want to, ah, I've done that. Like, man, I need to find this. For some reason, I must know. Right now. The origin of the word hardy plank. Yeah. Right now. Right now. And so use that. And optimize for those short-tail queries. Number two, think social first, mobile second. I like this concept because it's on a mobile device, whether it's a phone or a tablet. But either way, there's apps running in the background. And so they are already logged into Facebook. Twitter's already active. And so on. LinkedIn, if they have that app, it's probably running as well. And so on your mobile development, think how easy it is going to be for people to be social with your content. So if you're pushing blog posts or you're pushing podcasts, like we'll be doing pretty soon, then, you know, we'll make sure that the option to share this on Facebook is extremely accessible. Yeah. Think social first, mobile second. Three is know where mobile searches are going. I think this is really kind of goes back to what your plan is, what you want people to do once they find your site. If you're pushing a product, then your eventual goal is to get them to a product page where they can make that purchase. And so understand that and then design a site, design your layout in that format to get them there as soon as possible. So, um, size matters. I like this one. Um, I like this one. I like this one. Okay. Yeah. Size matters. Pressing a navigation link can be cumbersome. And so I, I, that's, that's very important. You know, a lot of times I visit mobile sites and it's just hard to navigate because it's not a mobile version. It's their, it's their version. And if you're not on a GS3, right, you know, bigger screen, then it's even harder. And so, um, um, think about that

when, when developing your mobile version, make it, make sure that the navigation items are, are big, that they're easy to get to, that you won't fat finger them. They're probably isolated away from other links. Um, so, so people can, won't have any issues and a bad experience when, when going through the site. Um, number five, develop to scale, don't scale to fit. I like this one. Um, because a lot of times people want to retrofit, you know what I'm saying, their site and call it a mobile version when, when that's not really what you should do. And we've, we've wrestled with this, you know, where people just want to squeeze the entire site into a mobile app. And we're like, okay, let's be realistic. Somebody's on a mobile app looking for your service. What are they really looking for? There's fundamental things that they're looking for, like customers looking for locations. And then there's other things that might be useful, like if you're in a fundraising, uh, portion of your business, phase of your business, then you might want potential investors to, to be able to reasonably quickly find, you know, investment details about your business. And other than that, you don't need all the, you need a lot less fluff or you can bury the fluff. Yeah. If you're a brick and mortar business, then, then having, you know, the contact page and locations, all of that is, is, is key. Frankly, having the, you know, the click that automatically goes to Google maps, having that address be a link, things like that. Those are key functions that, that 90% of the people searching on a mobile device for your type of business are looking to do. Uh, click the call, for example, is a key function you must have. And so, so consider. And address. That's, I mean, I can't tell you, that's, you know, one of those times when you're doing what you shouldn't be doing, which is like, I need that address and a map. Exactly. And I'm like, I can't

click it because it has not been made clickable. So now I've got to, you know, stretch out the, the read here and then remember it and then go to nav and type it. Oh, I copy it. Oh, hold it down. So I press it and then I'm like moving those little pins back and forth and copy it and then go and I'm like this. Oh, yo, don't. Good thing we've got Braille on our streets. So, so develop the skill. Make sure that you, you've taken the consideration. Really, that's a good time to really incorporate what your sales funnel is, what your process is. They see a blog post, blog post features a product, that product goes to a product description, that description goes to a page where they can check out. Then that should be the, the path of clicks that you set up on the site and, and of course, have it easy to share, easy to call, easy to click and find your location if they need to. I like number six, link location matters. So in, in this example, he's talking about really the link to, let's say, um, um, view the desktop version, right? Some sites do a horrible job of making the link to visit the desktop version of the site accessible. It's usually small and off hidden somewhere. And so you want to give people that option and make it pretty prominent. Yeah. Because, uh, you know, a lot of times I'm not driving. A lot of times I'm just on my couch. I don't feel like going to my office. Right. So I'm on my tablet or I'm on my phone. And so I, I don't, I don't mind looking at the full version of your site at this point. You know, maybe I'm visiting somewhere or I'm sitting in a restaurant and I have time is what I'm saying. And so, uh, and there's other information. I may not be interested in buying that product. Right. I may want to do something else. Research it, read about

it. Yeah. And so. Try to check out the specs, get into the details. Exactly. So make, make that link accessible and prominent. Um, number seven was don't forget to click the call. Um, make it easy for customers to call you directly from the mobile site. Um, eight better be addressed. Yeah. That, that's, it's not, but, uh, it should have been. Yeah. Um, well, he knew we was going to cover it in step four. Um, I like this one. Use rich content sparingly. So, you know, um, well, and it's, it's kind of so-so because I think these days, you know, with 4G and, and all of this other stuff, faster phones, better phones, frankly, uh, rich content isn't as big as a barrier as it could have been, let's say three years ago, four years ago. Yeah. If you, well, unless you're on the Blackberry, then maybe. Then, uh, just get off the Blackberry. Yeah. And rich content won't be a problem because I think rich content helps sell videos, images, things like that. Those are, those are necessary to see. And frankly, I like looking at them on my big screen phone. Then it's easy to see them as well. So, so, you know, now optimize it. You don't want to have a mobile version with, you know, uh, uh, images that are four megs in size, you know, fresh from your digital camera to your mobile site and don't do that. Yeah. Of course, you know, make sure that they're optimized well, but, but I think rich media is okay on a mobile device. Um, okay. So number nine apps versus mobile friendly. And so I think this is, um, I think it just depends on what your goal is. It depends on, on what you're, what you're trying to accomplish. If you're just trying to, if you're noticing from your analytics, you're getting a lot of mobile traffic, um, but you don't really push out anything or have events that people need to know about all the time or things like that, then,

then maybe an app isn't the right direction to go. Maybe just a well optimized and well designed mobile version of your site would be sufficient. Yeah. Um, but if you're, let's say you have products for sale and you have, um, events that you push out every week or twice a week and you have, you know, other things that really need to tie into a whole bunch of social stuff, um, then maybe an app is the direction you should go. One of the reasons we're developing an e-web app is because, um, so you can get the podcast easier, so you can get notified and have them, so you can share it on Facebook easier, so you can reply with us easier. We're trying to increase the amount of communication we have with you guys. And so we're thinking social first. Yep. I mean, that's the whole premise of our mobile app is to be more social. It's to be more social. Yeah. Interesting. Cool how you're doing things right and you don't realize it. I love that. I've always, I had this raised from really young. You know you're stupid when you're smarter than you think you are. Yeah. Yeah. You know you're stupid when you're smarter than you think you are. Yeah, because if you're smarter than you think you are, then you're stupid. That's what that means. So it's just easy to understand in reverse. So number 10, this is the last one, embrace search engine crawlers. I mean, I like this sentence here. Search engines understand that mobile-friendly versions of your web pages are just that and not duplicate content. And so, you know, if you have a mobile-friendly version, it's okay to have that dupe content. But I think what he doesn't mention and what you should do is make sure that your mobile version is on a subdomain. Frankly, M, you know, .ewebstyle or whatever your domain name is. And that way Googlebot knows that, oh, this is a mobile site. Okay, so this content is cool. It should be duplicate

over there. Right. And that way the page names you can pass your juice. You don't lose links and all of that. It all stays together. So, yeah, make sure that. That's a good question. What code behind the scenes do you need on your web page to let the Googlebots know that it's a mobile version? You put it in your robots file. Yeah. You put it in your robots file as a user agent mobile, and then it knows to index this content differently. As mobile. Mm-hmm. Cool. You see, you learn something new every day. Yeah, so that's it. I'll post that link on Facebook and hit us up. Tell them what you think about it. All right. We got any blank stare? No, no blank stare, really. I will make this comment in regards to the sonic boom and the whole thing that happened in Russia today. I think that's kind of, you know, I don't know how to feel about it, right? It's groundbreaking. Like, you know, it's a meteor that people actually heard. Well, people saw and heard, but no one saw and expected it. Exactly. And so I think that's kind of groundbreaking and huge and worth some scientific investigation and things like that. But my heart goes out to the people who were injured, right? There's like 950-some people, you know, from shattered glass and things like that. And so, ouch, you know, prayers out to you guys. But at the same time, you got injured because of a meteor. Like, who can say that? Well, apparently, Javier was telling me earlier that there's some dude who got hit by a meteor tab pellet or something, like, went through him. He's like walking down the street. What was that? Oh! Well, yeah, they said it was going 30, well, 30 kilometers a second. Just about 40 miles a second. Second. So, yeah. Yeah, that's like, put a house in bed. Done. Yeah, you didn't know I left, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah. And apparently, why Russia?

Because there was another big, I can't remember, it's Tunguska event happened in 1908 in the middle of a forest in Russia and a meteor exploded and knocked all these trees down. I don't know, Russia somehow in the path. But hopefully everyone over there is doing well. All right, you guys have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes, also internet marketing podcast on iTunes. That is because of you. You know what, I'm going to add one more thing that you could do to help us. We are your SEO company in Houston. Just so you know. So, that's perfect. Here's what you could do for us, a small little thing. If you write a blog or post or whatever, put a link to eWebStyle and put SEO company Houston as the anchor text and link that back to us. That would be a great little favor. Throw it in your blog. You know, if you're giving tips about whatever it may be, throw it at the end. You know, this content organized because I listened to the SEO company Houston podcast or something like that. And help us out with a link. That's another great way that you can give back. And we really love giving to you guys. Thank you guys for tuning in to the most popular podcast on iTunes. To all of you all out there. All y'all. All y'all. Until the next podcast. All y'all. Until the next podcast. My name is Chris Burris. And I'm Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now.