Shopping and surfing the web on mobile devices has drastically increased over the last few years, mobile technology is constantly expanding and the peoples desire for the latest technology trend does not stop growing.
With this in mind it’s now more important than ever that you are marketing with mobile users in mind, I’m going to run through a few reasons why I believe mobile really needs to become the focus for marketing.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):
For mobile SEO 2015 was the big year for change, with Google announcing that there were now more searches taking place on mobile devices than on desktop platforms and also unveiling its first major mobile SEO algorithm, titled “Mobilegeddon”.
Mobilegeddon was announced in April 2015 and was somewhat of a warning to website owners to make sure their websites were responsive or face the possible threat of a decrease in search rankings.
A year later and Google rolled out yet another mobile update and it has now been confirmed that Google will soon be implementing a ‘Mobile first index’ meaning it will start ranking its listings based on the mobile versions of websites, rather than the standard desktop versions in an aid to benefit the majority of its users.
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Now is the time to really focus your web design and SEO campaign around mobile users, it is now reaching the stage where it is not just enough for your website to be mobile friendly but more that when you are designing your site you are thinking and actively serving mobile users first.
Social Media
Another key marketing channel to think about is social media; with over 80% of social media time being spent on mobile devices it’s vital you are taking this into account when planning your strategy.
Its important businesses and marketing teams are thinking about designing and constructing social campaigns that really focus on grabbing the attention of the majority of users to maximise success, this could be achieved by utilising features like device and location targeting, deep linking and of course, video.
The forever-growing social statistics show no signs of stopping in the near future and Facebook also revealed last year that 84% of their advertising revenue for Q2 in 2016 came from mobile ads and that by 2020 figures for mobile advertising and social usage will rise by up to 80%.
Accelerated Mobile Pages
AMP was a project Google, Twitter and some other companies designed to basically make really fast mobile pages using lightweight HTML. In short it involves using a streamlined version of CSS and certain tags and things like Javascript are not allowed and it really pulls out all the stops to make pages as fast as possible for users.
These pages are obviously designed with mobile users in mind and really focus on readability and speed, so things like images don’t load until they are scrolled into view and Google actually hosts a cached version of the page to really make things fast.
AMP pages are becoming increasingly important because these types of pages are dominating at the top of SERPs and appear above the regular rankings usually in the form of a carousel for popular queries and particularly for news stories.
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Its unknown whether this sort of technology will roll out onto desktop platforms but nevertheless it brings a whole new ball game in regards to content marketing, blogs and news articles.
Conclusion
Trends and data online are showing huge things for mobile, predictions for the next few years and beyond are really showing that mobile is starting to dominate online marketing.
The face of SEO is changing completely as Google rolls out new plans and technologies to benefit the majority of search users on the web and email marketing studies are also showing that more and more people are opening emails on their smart phones and tablets.
This again draws to the conclusion that this marketing channel is another that needs to divert its focus to mobile users and now is the time to really start focusing on mobile technology when creating your marketing strategy if you haven’t already begun doing so.
About The Author
Mohd. Atif
I am digital marketer and blogger. Specialised in SEO, PPC and Content Marketing. Have done Google certification - Google Analytic & Google Ads. Read More
