By - Bryson Meunier
Category - Search Engine Optimization
Posted By - http://tinyurl.com/SearchEngineOptimization05
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| Search Engine Optimization |
As promised last month,
I’ll be sharing more information about how to do mobile SEO
specifically and less about why to do mobile SEO. This month, I’m going
to go through how to do mobile keyword research. First, though, a brief
explanation of why to do mobile keyword research.
Mobile Keyword Research Then & Now
One of the primary reasons for doing mobile keyword research is that
you could be missing out on keywords that your audience uses on mobile
that they don’t use on desktop (e.g., [keyword + “nearby”]).
There are some categories, such as restaurants, where upwards of 30%
of the volume comes from mobile devices, and if you’re not taking that
into account in your keyword research, you could be choosing the wrong
target keywords for your intended audience.
If you still need to be convinced that you should do mobile-specific keyword research, please go here, here or here. For the rest of us, however, this is how to do mobile keyword research.
Mobile keyword research used to be a pain. When I wrote about it back in 2008,
there were various emulators and autosuggest tools that could help you
discover mobile-specific or mobile-centric keywords that your target
audience used on mobile devices, but not the same kinds of keyword tools
that existed for desktop search.
Today, there are good tools from Bing and Google specifically
designed to help marketers cater to mobile searchers, which makes the
process much easier and the data more accurate.
You may have your own process for doing mobile keyword research, but
in order to advance the practice I’m sharing part of what we do here at
Resolution Media. If there’s anything you do that helps, please mention
in the comments, or do as Aleyda Solis did in a recent post
and share your processes for mobile SEO. Together we can move the
needle for this discipline and make it easier for all of us to reach
mobile searchers.
Keep in mind these three steps aren’t mobile-specific, as they apply
to desktop keyword research as well; but there are differences in tools,
metrics, and process that makes mobile SEO keyword research unique.
1. Define Goals & Success Metrics
Keyword research can’t be done successfully without an endgame. If
you don’t know your goals for these keywords, it’s not worth the time
and effort to discover the keywords.
How are you going to use this keyword research? If your content is
adaptive or your site is responsive then knowing mobile-specific
keywords isn’t going to help you that much, as your content needs to be
reusable and device-agnostic.
On the other hand, if you’re researching for a site that is designed
specifically for mobile URLs, you have the opportunity to use different
keywords and content on your mobile pages. Either way, knowing what
keywords your audience uses overall can help you meet your goals.
For example, if your content is adaptive and you want to ensure that
you are accounting for mobile searchers, you can sort a keyword list by
total search volume and select your target keywords based on volume and
how closely the intent of the keyword matches your business goal.
If your content is strictly mobile, you can sort by mobile volume
and/or % of total mobile volume to find keywords that are popular on
that platform and have intent that matches your business goal. Either
way, you need to define what you want your natural search traffic from
mobile search to do once it reaches your site: click, buy, view,
download, convert offline, etc.
2. Keyword Discovery
Once this has been determined, you need to discover how mobile
searchers find your site and how mobile searchers find your competitors
and other sites like yours. Use the following tools to collect a list of
keywords that you’ll then qualify in the third step.
Google Webmaster Tools
GWT can be used to discover how people are currently finding your
site on mobile devices. If you’re not optimized for the most popular
keywords, this information won’t help you discover it, but you can at
least see where you’re ranking for search terms mobile searchers enter.
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