Mobile Trends and Search Optimization: Why Aren’t We Catching Up?

As mobile search continues to grow at a rapid pace, we cannot miss the opportunity to become better mobile search practitioners.

When I think of the current state of mobile search practices, my mind flashes to dog racing. I'm not particularly a fan, but the image of those dogs chasing a mechanical rabbit reminds me of the current state of mobile search. Right now, the mobile consumer is the rabbit and marketers and technologists are the dogs - everyone's moving quickly and trying to keep up the pace.

Mobile purchases are expected to outpace desktop purchases in the near future. Juniper Research estimated that annual retail payments on mobile handsets and tablets should reach $707 billion by 2018. Yet, according to Uberflip, only 25 percent of brands have a mobile strategy. If mobile marketing is the coming supernova it's expected to be, why aren't more enterprises first-movers in the mobile space?

Mobile Consumer Behavior

Fifty-five percent of all time spent with online retail in June 2013 occurred on a mobile device. Add to that comScore's assertion that just more than 50 percent of time spent engaging with websites is being done on a mobile device, and you can see that paid, organic, and site optimization for mobile are paramount to global search success.

With thanks to mobiThinking.com, here are some additional data points regarding mobile behavior, specifically mobile search behavior:

• 25 percent of overall search queries are now on mobile devices. - BIA/Kelsey (April 2014).
• In the U.S., mobile accounted for 34.2 percent of all paid search clicks in December 2013. It is expected to be 42 percent by December 2014 and 50 percent by December 2015. - Marin Software (March 2014)
• 58.7 percent of smartphone users access search; 73.9 percent of tablet users access search. -ComScore Mobile Future in Focus (March 2013).
• During the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, 60 to 65 percent of Olympics-related searches were performed on a smartphone or tablet. - Google (April 2014).
• The number of calls to businesses driven by mobile search is growing at 42 percent per annum and is predicted to fuel a staggering 65 billion calls in 2016. - BIA/Kelsey (April 2014).

To further push the notion that mobile search needs our full attention, Yahoo and Kenshoo partnered to survey 350 global marketers about their mobile marketing practices earlier this year. They revealed a stark reminder that multiscreen behavior is being driven by a negative impression of the mobile experience.

This is the first reason there aren't more first-movers. Marketers have been lagging when it comes to taking ownership over their mobile presence. As the BIA/Kelsey report showed, more than half of all mobile shoppers are low-funnel, high-intent buyers while searching. But if they arrive on a search result, landing page, or site not optimized for mobile use - click, they're gone. Solutions such as responsive Web design should make it easy to deploy mobile. So, where are we failing our mobile search audience? Part of the disconnect lies with search optimization practices.

Mobile Optimization: Thoughts to Consider

While many brands recognize the need for mobile optimization, adoption drop-off remains high because of a lack of cohesive, device-driven, activity-based strategies. Here are some of the more prominent issues facing mobile optimization neophytes.

1. Consumers still buy locally. U.S. e-commerce still represents less than 10 percent of all retail spending, with the balance usually completed within 10 to 15 miles from home. What's changed is that mobile and Web searches are being used to find brick-and-mortar goods and services that will be purchased in-store. So, while online conversions are great, the reality is that we must optimize for offline conversions as much if not more heavily right now. How do we generate a call to the store? Can we drive a visit through our mobile presence? Effective optimization recognizes the pathways that connect search behavior to in-store activity. 
2. Paid campaigns and site optimization deserve focus. Organic listings are being pushed further down the screen, below the fold, and Google has indicated that click-through rate (CTR) drops substantially after position four. While organic optimization is still relevant, a focus on paid campaigns and site structure is probably going to result in better return on investment (ROI).
3. Authoring boosts results. Structured authoring for mobile, as it is for desktop applications, enables quick viewing and rapid response. What is the task at hand, what is the concept being delivered, what is the reference? The general objectives remain the same for both formats. However, the intent of the mobile user is very different from the "lean back" desktop user. Therefore, search optimization is dependent on authoring that renders a result that encompasses low-funnel criteria mobile users invoke such as price, dimensions, inventory, etc. 
4. Tagging for mobile activities. Tags targeting the nature of high-intent consumers will be more effective in mobile than for desktop. What do they want while searching for solutions? Quick, hard facts that can lead to a purchase or further activity within 60 minutes. Local calls-to-action, though a seemingly obvious tactic, aren't being considered when marketers create mobile campaigns. There still remains a lot of desktop mentality during migration to mobile search marketing when it comes to tagging landing and site pages. 
5. Click- to- call features for all mobile sites. The rise of click-to-call appeal to mobile consumers has been met with a stunning lack of deployment by many brands. Search is inexorably linked with inbound calls on a local level. For many services (IT, financial services, home improvement, especially) and complex goods verticals, qualifying calls to local merchants are required to make a sale. Therefore, it makes sense to leverage mobile search (site, paid and organic) with click-to-call functionality.

The second reason there aren't more first-movers into the mobile marketing space is the Hummingbird-spawned move to semantic search.

How Semantic Search Influences Mobile Optimization

The evolution of semantic search poses the same challenges for mobile as it does for desktop. But mobile searchers are typically more oriented to navigational searches than research searches. In other words, they are using search to retrieve actionable information, such as a store location or product price, rather than attempting to explore any resource for information about an unknown. Therefore, the contextual attributes that exist for mobile semantic search are more likely to be structured around factors like geo-location and prior browsing activity.

Readability

Remember, we want to develop content that meets the two readability standards: those of the user and spider. The user is looking for action, while the spider is looking for relevance. Just as with desktop, Hummingbird has moved mobile optimization to a contextual approach. So metadata, page content, site structure, etc. that are built around conversational queries will tend to have better visibility and higher engagement.

For example, site pages filled with action-driving copy like "protect your skin" and "limit sun exposure" on clickable content within a skin care mobile site provides context for search engines and engagement for visitors.

Semantic search will drive localized SERPs. This, in turn, drives the need for sharper location-based optimization, which serves a more personalized experience that meets the local consumer on their terms, using their devices to shop locally.

Page Design Impact

On-page elements enable the user experience. Effective element attribution can lower the historically high abandonment rates by mobile users. Rendering instructions deploy page design elements, such as font size and color, background, white space, and other on-page characteristics. Mobile users seek a formatted page that fully displays on the horizontal axis and has robust functionality. Page rendering should quickly adapt to mobile access. Load speed is incredibly important, so is element positioning. Clean design attributes like simple navigation, concise copy, and lean imagery help drive mobile engagement. "Heavy" content such as video feeds must quickly orient, load, and stream seamlessly.

Mobile searchers look for different content cues on devices. Buttons, sliders, and image links move traffic on a smartphone. (Beware, the same doesn't hold true for feature phones.) HTML5-designed mobile sites rely heavily on CSS3 to deliver unique page views across smartphones, feature phones, tablets, and phablets. But you don't have to be immersed in code to optimize for mobile deployment. Best-in-breed tools like Adobe's Muse CC makes it easy for Web design neophytes to create a mobile site without code.

When it comes to page design, you should consider that searchers may use multiple devices for one purpose. For example, a person searching for a new vehicle on his smartphone during a lunch break may wish to return to a page on the home desktop after work. Chrome's multi-device features make this easy. Responsive design (or dedicated mobile sites) allows you to deliver the appropriate page layout for each device. Optimizing for multi-device search flow enables a better user experience with your brand.

Social

Google has shown us that social activity, while not an official ranking factor yet, is a signal that must be accounted for in the mobile space. Semantic search optimization is important in your social campaigns as well. Social activity that is optimized for mobile viewing gets more engagement, leading to higher visibility through indexing relevancy. (Hint: video, apps, images, and links that connect followers to other mobile-centric content is typically more effective when it comes to mobile ranking.)

Within the desktop environment, search has long been the primary conduit providing a path for our brands to reach consumers. The time where we must put emphasis on our mobile search marketing practices is here. The mobile generation has sprouted quickly and is demanding. We've got to adapt to the change that this movement has thrust upon us.

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Local Listing Management Priorities: How & Where to Syndicate Local Data

Multi-location businesses face unique challenges in the management, optimization, and distribution of local business listing information. Accuracy is critical for every business, but those with a number of locations must also master scale.

It's easy to get bogged down in spreadsheets and a hodgepodge of tools. After all, most marketers struggle to see the ROI from local campaigns, so it can be difficult to justify putting budget here to streamline your efforts. You might simply rely on Yext, or have an agency do the work for you.

My last column looked at on-page validation or SEO factors, local landing page user experience, and local listing management together as components of your blueprint for multi-location brand success. This post will dive deeper into local data syndication – where to focus your efforts, how to do it properly, and scaling your efforts for maximum ROI.

Android Plateaus But Google Near 100 Percent Audience Reach

The August comScore US smartphone market share report is out. The story is familiar: Apple and Samsung are the top two OEMs, while others are down or flat.

On the OS side, comScore agrees with earlier Kantar data showing small gains by Windows Phone in the US. But the news here appears to be that Android may have hit a ceiling. This may be in part because, in the US at least, the Galaxy S4 has underperformed.

These data also don’t reflect the release of the iPhone 5s and 5c.

The most interesting part of the report are the data on app and mobile web usage.  They show that Facebook remains the top mobile app but that in the aggregate Google sites and apps reach more than 92 percent of the US smartphone population.

In the wake of Twitter’s S-1 it’s interesting to see that Twitter is not a top 10 app or mobile site. That either signals challenges ahead or, if you’re an optimist, suggests that there’s stil lots of room for growth.

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Google's Search Market Share Shoots Back to 67%

Google is once again gathering more search market share and remains the uncontested top search engine in the U.S. In July comScore reported that Google's market share shot back to 67 percent after having fallen below that mark three months ago.

ComScore's monthly analysis showed Google is up 0.3 points from June and 0.2 percentage points from July 2012.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer earlier this month said "Search is far from over," but Yahoo hit yet another new low, declining 0.1 percentage point in July at 11.3 percent. Compared to July 2012, that's nearly 2 percentage points less than its 13 percent share.

And while it appeared that last month, Yahoo and Bing were merely trading market share, Bing didn't gain from Yahoo's loss in July. Bing's share stayed the same from 17.9 percent in June. This is up more than 2 percent, however, since the 15.7 percent market share it had in July 2012.

Both Ask and AOL declined 0.1 percent in July, with Ask at 2.7 percent and AOL at 1.2 percent. Both are down from this time last year, where Ask had 3.1 percent of market share and AOL had 1.5 percent.

When it came to Google-powered organic searches in July, the search engine held steady from June with 68.6 percent of searches. Bing experienced a 0.3 percentage-point increase at 27.1 percent of searches in July.

Data show there was a total of 19.4 billion explicit core searches in July, with Google ranking first at just under 13 billion (up 1 percent since last month). Bing came in second at 3.5 billion searches, up 1 percent since June, followed by Yahoo, which held steady at 2.2 billion.

Ask was down 2 percent in July from the previous month at 516 million. AOL was also down – 5 percent – at 239 million.

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Google's Search Market Share Drops as Bing Passes 17%

Google's search market share dropped slightly once again, with Microsoft and Yahoo slightly edging up, according to comScore's April 2013 search engine rankings.

Google dropped 0.6 percent in April, dropping from March's 67.1 percent to 66.5 percent. However, this is exactly the same search percentage as in April 2012, so their overall search market share in the U.S. has remained stable.

Microsoft's Bing saw the biggest increase with a total search market share of 17.3 percent, making it a 0.4 percent increase in April 2013 over their search share in March 2013. By contrast, it is a very significant increase from April 2012, where Microsoft had only 15.4 percent share.

Yahoo has continued a downward slide, despite Marissa Mayer taking over as Yahoo’s CEO and wanting to get Yahoo back in the search game. In April 2012, Yahoo had a 13.5 percent share, but they have dropped by 1.5 percent in the last year, as they are now sitting at 12 percent for April 2013.

While Google is still the huge powerhouse when it comes to search market share in the US, Microsoft / Bing is definitely making its presence known with a nearly 2 percent increase from this time last year. However, when comparing year to year, Yahoo and Microsoft are merely swapping market share between themselves, rather than making a dent in Google’s dominance, something Mayer, sees as a major problem.

Meanwhile, Ask's April search market share remained unchanged from March at 2.7 percent, but AOL's dropped from 1.6 percent to 1.4 percent in April.

Of the 20 billion searches conducted in April, Google led with 13.3 billion, followed by Bing at 3.5 billion, Yahoo at 2.4 billion, Ask at 539 million, and AOL with 290 million.

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5 Ways to Use Online Sales Video to Drive Leads and Sales

Using online marketing promotional videos drives action and increases conversions across the entire sales funnel - from small ecommerce transactions to longer enterprise level sales processes.

The reasons are clear when looking at consumer behavior - we are quickly becoming an audience of viewers, not readers.  As such, they prefer watching online company videos and product videos to reading text.  Online advertising video is easier to consume, more engaging, easy to share and provides consumers with more information to help make informed decisions.  From brand awareness to lead generation to customer acquisition…there is nothing else that comes close to the effectiveness of a well-designed promotional video message. 

How to make video advertising that delivers

Image via CrunchBase

As video ad consumption soars, so do marketers' video budgets.

There are more than 785m visits to online video websites in the UK each month. Spending on online video advertising in the UK hit 109m in 2011, more than double the previous year.

And the mind-blowing numbers keep coming – comScore’s May estimates for U.S. video views topped 10 billion for the very first time.

But when will the digital ad industry rise to the challenge?

Right now, brands that want to capture online audiences have few options and the benefits from pursuing them are limited. For the most part, video-ad targeting remains primitive, the resulting metrics are inadequate and brand safety is rarely assured. Marketers often fail to look beyond pre- and mid-roll, which bring their own constraints, and consumers barely even register on most brands' lists of strategic priorities.

If we as an industry want to create video advertising that truly delivers on its promise – bringing together the best of television and digital to engage consumers in entirely new ways – we need to shift gears, and soon.

We must not focus simply on basic execution issues like placement, positioning and pricing. We also need to improve on the targeting, accountability and brand safety fronts. Finally, we need to consider the consumer in a new, more thoughtful way.

Smarter targeting

First, we need to help the brands and agencies we support reach the audiences they need. Display brand advertising works best when it’s contextually relevant to the content of a page, and the same goes for video advertising. Until we can offer video ad targeting that leverages the full breadth of digital data and its environment, we’re selling ourselves short.

Reconsidering ROI

Brands and their agencies love digital for the belief that they can track all aspects of performance; with online advertising we can measure to our hearts’ content. However with pre-roll – the lion’s share of video advertising – the numbers we get are typically completion rates and CTRs, confusing and often contradictory measurements that reveal nothing about ad effectiveness or user engagement.

We should be able to tell advertisers how long a user was engaged (not because they were forced to!) watching a video, what they did afterwards, whether they shared the ad and what the impact was.

The scale vs. quality dilemma

To look at those soaring video-consumption numbers, you’d think quality inventory was bottomless. On the contrary: One reason video might well continue to lag behind television is the impossibility of competing with the latter’s scale.

With video, brands face a difficult decision: Should we go for reach and compromise quality, or sacrifice scale to protect our brand? Until now, there’s been lots of demand for premium video advertising, but not enough premium content to fulfill the requirement of pre- and mid-roll execution.

For video to realise its potential, the industry needs to make a more concerted effort to respond to the needs of agencies and marketers, either by looking to new channels for content or by thinking more broadly about how to reach audiences in the right environment with video.

In part, this is about analytics keeping pace with technology. For example, until reporting agencies like comScore broaden their definition of “video network” – which still dates to the era of embedded video players – to accommodate new delivery platforms, agencies and advertisers won’t understand the full range of solutions at their disposal.

Putting consumers in the picture

Finally and most importantly, the industry needs to pivot 180 degrees to put user experience at the center of every video campaign. With our consumer hats on, we need to consider the “value exchange” of video advertising. Brands need to look closely at what they offer users in return for their time and attention. And they need to think anew about what people want, to create advertising in the interest of the consumer.

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7 tools to monitor your competitors’ traffic

T

oday we’re going to examine a number of tools and resources for getting insights into competitors’ traffic data. We’ll assess their strengths and weaknesses as well as the validity and usefulness of the data provided.

We’ve had clients asking us for a better view of overall market size and what kind of traffic their competitors are getting, since it can be tricky to find meaningful predictive data even when you know who your competitors are or should be.

It is worth pointing out that a number of these services suggest they can provide better data if you claim the sites by entering your ownership credentials. I can’t testify to the accuracy of this, and our analysis is based upon the free version of the tools as we did not have paid access to any of the tools.

We tested 25 sites for which we had reliable internal data, giving us insight into just how accurate these tools really are — or aren’t.

Alexa: Too often, dubious numbers

1

Strengths: Alexa is good for comparing different sites traffic and for monitoring general traffic trends. It can be quite useful for comparing one site to a competitor site (up to five sites at a time). The index is massive and contains some data about all of the 25 sites we tested.

Weaknesses: Not so great for the smaller sites. As you can see below, you won’t get any of the traffic charts for sites ranked outside of the top 100,000, which means if Alexa thinks you are getting fewer than 10,000 visits per month you’re unlikely to glean any great information. Accuracy is a serious concern. This does call into question the usefulness of the tool in general. The numbers reported are not helpful for predicting traffic on their own.

Accuracy: We want to keep this all anonymous but let’s just say one site that we know gets 10-20,000 visits per month had an Alexa rank that was more than five times better than a site that we know gets 75,000+ visitors per month. And this was not just a one-off event. So I have to seriously question the reliability of this tool. It didn’t seem to be too bad at predicting the trends for a single site but the charts are extremely difficult to make any real use of. Interestingly it seems to be skewed in favor of sites within the search marketing space. Sites in the search marketing space that we looked at regularly outranked sites receiving more than 10 times as much traffic on a monthly basis.

How to best use Alexa: The tool is interesting for comparing similar sites or sites within an industry, but be very cautious about using this to make any meaningful suggestions or estimates on traffic data. The most accurate data seemed to be the data from the visitors by country — the percentages we looked at were not too far off.

Cost: Free. Options for site audits for $199.

 

Compete: Good UI, questionable data

2

Strengths: Compete has a useful interface, speaks the right language (unique visitors, visits, etc.), offers the ability to compare multiple sites, and its data is easy to understand and well presented.

Weaknesses: Accuracy, somewhat limited number of sites – many sites that it classifies as “low sample sites,” and the cost of the Pro option.

Accuracy: Again, accuracy is a serious concern here. The data was off in some cases by as much as 2,000% for monthly visits. The accuracy seemed to be a bit better for the peaks in traffic and some of the general trends we looked at but was certainly not reliable enough for us to suggest reporting competitor traffic based upon this information.

How to best use Compete: It should come as no surprise that Compete is best used for comparing competitors. The scale of the data is way off but some of the trends seemed to be fairly reliable. I wouldn’t advise reporting any numbers from this data as they do not seem close/reliable at all – often off by a factor of 200% or more — however the trends are reliable. The information could be meaningfully used to look into seasonal trends between competitors.

Cost: Free. The Pro membership is $499 per month.

 

Google Ad Planner: Some unique twists

3

Strengths: Google Ad Planner has a few things going for it: Its “sites also visited” data is good, the keywords searched for can be quite valuable, and the “audience interests” data is interesting.

Weaknesses:: Accuracy, lack of data for small sites.

Accuracy: The accuracy was really mixed. For many of the sites AdPlanner provided much better data than some of the others. However, they were still off by miles for some sites – off by as much as 1000%. Given the occasional “big miss,” I would not be comfortable using this data to make traffic predictions for a client.

How to best use Google Ad Planner: The data about other sites visited as well as keywords searched for (with affinity) could be extremely valuable as well as some of the other metrics reported on and audience interests. However, the traffic data is not particularly meaningful and can’t be relied upon.

Cost: Free.

 

Google Insights: Numbers normalized for search

4

Strengths: Google Insights offers generalized trends around key phrases and key phrase groups and regional information. Trusted source.

Weaknesses: It was difficult to read the data. There were no hard numbers about traffic. It was hard to compare entire sites to one another.

Accuracy: You can bet that the accuracy of this data is going to be pretty good given that the data provider has access to more data than anyone else on the Internet. However, the fact that the numbers are normalized and more designed for key phrases and search terms and trends than for traffic data means that the search volume will correspond perfectly with the traffic to a site.

How to best use Google Insights: The tool could be quite helpful for finding the most valuable pockets of key phrases and key phrase groups. This could be particularly valuable when looking at a competitor site and trying to figure out which of their key phrases are driving the most traffic. It could help you see which of the key phrases within a key phrase group might be the most valuable.

Cost: Free.

 

Google Trends: For broad information gathering

5

Strengths: Google Trends for Websites is good for illustrating magnitudes of difference between sites. It allows comparison of multiple websites, and it includes regional information.

Weaknesses: It’s not good for comparing sites fairly similar in size. It does not provide information for smaller sites when logged in, it’s accuracy is uneven and it provides no numbers.

Accuracy: The data seem to be more accurate when only trying to compare traffic from search; it does not seem to do as well in assessing overall traffic. When comparing websites with drastically different traffic numbers, the rough visual estimation appears to correspond quite well with the observed analytics data as well. When visiting the site and logged in, Trends it does provide numbers and ranges, though the data looks to be off on a few of the sites I have checked. It is not as far off as the data for the same sites using AdPlanner, but still considerably far off — e.g., reporting 140,000 visits for a site that receives about 320,000 unique visits daily.

How to best use Google Trends for Websites: Trends is great for broad information gathering. It gives some insight into similar searches when comparing sites, and in general it is unlikely that you will find better comparative data out there without direct access to your competitor’s analytics account. However, Trends does not provide numbers and thus can only be used to venture a guess at what sorts of numbers competitors are pulling in.

Cost: Free.

 

Quantcast: Nifty Media Planner Tool

6

Strengths: Quantcast provides traffic numbers that are easy to follow, displays information nicely, offers some demographic information and has an interesting Media Planner Tool.

Weaknesses: Unreliable and often inaccurate, lacks data for small and medium trafficked sites. Inability to compare sites.

Accuracy: The biggest shortcoming of the Quantcast data is accuracy. As with some of the other services, the traffic data is estimated and is nowhere near accurate on the sites for which Quantcast had any data. Data was off by as much as 10 times the actual analytics data for some of the sites.

How to best use Quantcast: Although the data is not particularly reliable for the traffic data, some of the other tools the site has to offer seem quite interesting and worth further investigation. The demographics information provides a reference as to how the data compare against Internet averages.

Cost: Free.

 

SEMrush: Most accurate of the bunch

7

Strengths: SEMrush‘s data includes sites of all sizes, a list of key phrases and rankings for those terms — and provided the most accurate data of all the tools we examined.

Weaknesses: The data were still imperfect. Customers must pay to get full data lists. And the data is only for Google traffic.

Accuracy: The data were not perfectly accurate, though generally speaking SEMrush did not miss the mark for any of the sites we tested the way a number of the other tools did. In the end, the data were surprisingly accurate. As with some of the Google data, the information reported is just the Google search engine traffic, but this is our main area of focus and was quite accurate when drilling down into that specific area of traffic within analytics.

How to best use SEMrush: Although imperfect, this tool came the closest to providing accurate data that I would, at least with a word of warning, be willing to share with a client about potential expectations or about where their competitors’ traffic may be. Most importantly, the add-on options and ability to see the keyword lists and how the competitor ranks for these terms is extraordinarily appealing.

Cost: Free to $499 per month. We used the free version.

A look at two final sites that estimate Web traffic

comScore

Unfortunately, we struggled with comScore. We were unable to get a log-in or sneak a peek at any of the data.

How to best use comScore: comScore offers a number of reports and insights into markets, including reports on local market size as well as information about valuable/important keywords in an industry. It would be very interesting to find out where this data was coming from and how good it was, but we were not able to achieve this in time to publish this information.

Cost: Not disclosed.

HitWise

Unfortunately, we were not able to get data from HitWise in time for publication.

How to best use HitWise: HitWise, similarly to comScore, works on a reporting basis insofar as you speak to them about the types of market reports you would like, or you can create custom reports. While we cannot comment on the accuracy of the data, the services offered look to be better tailored to an SEO‘s needs than do the reports offered by comScore. However, generally speaking HitWise will not work with agencies, which will be a bit of a bummer for some of you.

Cost: Free to $695+ per report

Conclusion

I hope that the findings from all this research will be valuable to you. Ultimately, it’s an incomplete study. For the time being I would rely most heavily on SEMrush for predicting traffic and estimating how well a competitor is doing, but all of these tools add something to the ever-growing traffic toolbelt even if it may be for a purpose other than that which I was hoping they would achieve.