Signs of Growing Future Opportunities in Mobile Search Marketing

1. Rising mobile search usage leads to growing visibility opportunities in local/map search.
2. Major search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo! collectively agree to support the www.schema.org webpage markup language for structured data.
3. Despite alliances, all three major search engines still compete for your data.

Put together the puzzle pieces of an expanding online market, new standards in search engine technology, and a clear division between how each search engine will pursue this mobile market to reveal a mobile SEO strategy for your website.  This article provides the data and rationale behind mobile search marketing. The goal is to provide optimally structured data to search engines — data that search engines compete to obtain and provide to an expanding mobile internet market.

Rising Mobile Search Usage

The steady rise in mobile search usage indicates that now is the time to invest in mobile SEO to prepare for the coming dominant internet. Last year, Gartner, Inc. research predicted that by the year 2013, mobile phones would overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide:

Context will center on observing patterns, particularly location, presence and social interactions. Furthermore, whereas search was based on a ‘pull’ of information from the Web, context-enriched services will, in many cases, prepopulate or push information to users.

Morgan Stanley Research published a similar timeline, explaining that mobile internet users will outnumber desktop users accessing the internet in 2013.  Other predictions indicate mobile search overtaking desktop search from as early as 2012 to as late as 2015.

This is why utilizing mobile SEO is necessary. Search engines pull data from your website and then push that information to users based on the search query.  They have been evolving to provide modified search results based on a visitor’s context.  In 2007, Google began producing blended search results, called “universal search,” and in 2009, the search engine began integrating rich snippets from videos, images, news, maps and books into its results.  In 2008, Yahoo! began hosting SearchMonkey developer parties to introduce web developers to its rich snippet code which provides data for blended search results.  In 2010, Bing referred to itself as the “Decision Engine,” providing similar blended rich snippets tailored to search intent.

The inclusion of rich snippets depends on the keyword query, and the algorithms that serve the snippets are affected by the context of user location.  Search engines assume that certain keywords are utilized with the searcher’s intent to discover information, while other keywords are utilized when the search intent is to find a location.  The searcher’s location, identified by IP address or GPS, allows rich snippets to become customized according to geo-location, and  all of the major search engines serve up authoritative, keyword-relevant local results closest to the user’s location.

Google, Bing and Yahoo! Agree on Structured Data Format

On June 2, 2011, Google, Bing and Yahoo! announced their initiative to support a common set of schemas for structured data markup.  What is structured data markup? A “markup” is website code – for example, “HTML” stands for Hypertext Markup Language.  Structured data refers to data that is already categorized and can be imported into a database.  Search engines pull this structured data into their specific databases for recipes, videos, products, events, reviews, people, organization, and etc.  These databases are indexed and served as rich snippets in search results. Data for events, organizations and reviews are fed into Google Places pages and help optimize for local/map search results from a desktop or mobile device.

Search engines are constantly crawling the internet, attempting to decipher individual items that can be added to these specific databases. Using the schema markup to tag items on your webpages will structure the data in a way that is accepted by all major search engines.  In many cases, existing data on your website is already present – it just needs to be tagged.

By adopting a common schema, we can conclude that search engines have agreed to make it easy for themselves to gather structured data from websites.

Google, Yahoo! and Bing Are Competing for Your Data

Despite the Bing/Yahoo! search alliance and the cooperative adoption of schema.org, all three search engines are still collecting and displaying structured data independently. Bing may be supplying Yahoo! web search results, but Yahoo! inserts its own rich snippets. The latest search market share from StatOwl indicates that Yahoo! and Bing are head-to-head in generating search traffic. Google, Yahoo! and Bing each maintain a separate database for maps, as well as images, video, news, and so on).

Furthermore, each search engine maintains a unique approach to attract and provide a user-friendly experience to visitors.  Google’s mission remains centered on providing a deep-crawl and relevant search results to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”  Bing, the “decision engine,” makes an assumption about a visitor’s search intent and attempts to surrounds him/her with all possible points-of-action that he/she may wish to take during that particular search. Yahoo! maintains a traditional community portal experience, providing prominent gateways to news stories, videos, chat, browsing, shopping, dating, and more.  Each of these search engine experiences rely on pulling structured data to serve rich snippets based on perceived user search intent.

Local and Mobile SEO Opportunities

If your website is not written with HTML 5, microdata format or schema.org vocabulary to tag content for rich snippets, you are not making the most of your mobile SEO opportunities, meaning that you are lacking in visibility in mobile and local search results.  Marketing scare tactics aside, this is a new adaptation of technology.  Elliot Nix, Google Senior Account Executive of the Mobile Ads Team, revealed at the Mobile Search Marketing event in Atlanta on March 31, 2011 that according to Google internal information, 79% of advertisers do not have a mobile SEO landing page.  Now is the time to begin utilizing mobile SEO opportunities. Because you may not be behind your competitors at the moment —  but this is your chance to be ahead of the game.