The number of smartphone users has dramatically increased over the past two years. Initially used only by business managers, the smartphone is now used by people of all ages and income groups. The versatility of smartphones has made them an instant hit amongst the masses. With more and more people are accessing Internet and applications on the go, businesses cannot ignore the smartphones as effective medium for marketing. Yes, the Blackberries, Androids and i-Phones are not just devices – they are the useful channels for marketing. Read the rest of this entry »

Mobile search without a shade of doubt is being viewed as the next big breakthrough in the Internet world. Established Internet giants like Google Inc., Apple, Yahoo!/Microsoft have already started switching gears and are aggressively working in this direction to cater to the needs of a whole new species of customers. In all likelihood, the next three-five years will see more names investing in this promising facet of Internet search marketing.

But who else other than leading Internet search engine brands stand to benefit from this paradigm shift? The answer is business owners operating in the local market. After all, mobile SEO is a wonderful concept that will be catering and in the process, promoting various businesses.

Regionally, North America and European countries are the ones where mobile SEO has already registered its presence and the response has been overwhelming. And why not? After all, from an economic perspective they are still fighting the nemesis called ‘recession’. Unfortunately, it is the local dealers who have been badly hit. In testing times like this, mobile SEO has promised to resurrect their fates by aligning local business needs with revised search dynamics, letting the localites give the benefit of what they have.

In recent Interactive Local Media conference by BIA/Kelsey, it was discussed as how mobile is inherently local and what are its impact, strategies and best practices. Following basic statistical figures came out as a result of many researches done:

• Mobile Internet users rose to 60 million over years.
• Mobile search will overtake Desktop search in next 5 years by Morgan Stanley
• As reported by Verizon and T-mobile, 40% of new devices sold are smart phones
• Nielsen predicts 50% smart phone penetration by mid 2011
• Google reports that 1/3 of searches conducted from mobile devices have local intent whereas only 10-11% of Google searches initiated from a PC have local intent
• Ad units such as coupon redemptions, trade conversion, Cost per action etc are evolving with mobile.

• Mobile has proven worth and ability to independently target more customers than any other channel and its potential is greater than TV and computers because of its better reach to the niche segment.
• Usage of Mobile search has grown 5 times in the last 2 years
• According to the latest data from mobileSQUARED, 2010 will see roughly $800 million spend on mobile advertising and will likely increase to $5 billion over the next five years.
• Apple’s iPhone sees 50 times the number of search queries as the average “feature phone”
• ComScore shows that mobile users are often very active on their phones. Smart phone subscribers, for instance, are all split by operating system and some of the applications available to them, but all are able to access the Mobile Web and they often use their phones to search for information.
• Various activities are been performed by the consumers from their smart phones:

• Google now enables local advertisers to target their campaigns to mobile devices

Yahoo recently launched a new note-taking research tool called Search Pad. The intention behind this is to automatically detect research intent among people using Yahoo! search.

Once the tool start detecting the user’s intent, it may prompt the searchers with an invitation to use Search Pad. The tool can be used with drag and drop and also includes the ability to write free form notes as well.

The tool has rolled out to several countries as mentioned below:

United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina

The mobile revolution has been slow and steady. From a simple device used to call and receive it has become a high end computational device. The answer to Nokia’s tag line “Is this what computers have become?” is a very loud “yes, and maybe more”.

With the onset of the mobile revolution, many web services have also extended and integrated themselves with WAP. Search, the dominant service on the net has also extended it’s capability to the mobile user. Companies like Google, Yahoo and MSN are investing heavily to mark their dominance in the mobile search scramble. It is estimated that mobile search revenues would generate around $33.2 million dollars in 2007 and increase to around $ 102.3 million dollars in 2008(source: emarketer), an increase by more than three times.

While Microsoft provides search capabilities on all Windows Mobile platforms, Yahoo and Google provide search capabilities for a host of other service providers and mobile manufacturers such as O2, Telefonica, Vodafone, Motorola, and Nokia.

On first sight it appears that search capabilities across the mobile and the regular web would be the same. However a lot of factors differentiate a search application on a mobile from search on the regular web:

• Display inhibitions: When searching from a PC or a laptop, you generally have a 14-17’ screen interface. This allows you to have a view of all the results on one page. However the screen size of a mobile is very limited and hence the number of results displayed. Also each device’s display capabilities would be different. As such search engines would have to evaluate effective methods to identify documents with display capabilities for each device type.

• Relevancy: That brings us to the second differentiating factor. The relevancy of search results in a mobile search application needs to be high. In effect it translates into highly contextual and preferably local results. Relevancy implies that search engines would have to involve factors such as

o The location of the mobile user

o The profile of the user: This could be derived from call records, social networks etc.

• Language standards: Mobiles interfaces do not work on plain html and other web standards. The languages used for building or displaying content on mobiles are:

• XHTML: Extended HTML
• XHTML (MP): Extended HTML Mobile Profile
• WML: Wireless Markup Language
• CHTML: Compact HTML

XHTML (MP) is the standard that conforms to Wap2.0 standards. WML is slowly being phased out.

• Navigation: The keyboard of a mobile differs from the large QWERTY keyboard on PCs and Laptops. Even if a QWERTY keyboard has been provided on a mobile device, it would be quite small. As such navigation would be a major concern. Search Engines would need to evaluate each result being displayed to ensure that navigation is user friendly. This would obviously have a major impact on the indexing and the ranking algorithm employed for mobile search. Another important point to keep in mind is that mobiles don’t use the mouse, thereby presenting a major navigation inhibition. Also a page with a large number of images and scripts cannot be employed in a mobile search.

• User Behavior: The role of contextual and local search results has been understood. However the primary purpose of a mobile shouldn’t be ignored. The effectiveness of a search result would be enhanced by a ‘Click to call” or “Click to SMS” link.

One can easily infer that the results on mobile search would be different from those on the regular web. As such the optimization of web sites/pages would differ from regular SEO techniques.

A good starting point, I believe would be a deeper understanding of how Google and the other major search engines plan to index and rank pages.