Developing a Real Content Strategy for Mobile
Let’s be honest: despite Google’s many helpful posts and announcements about the rise of mobile search and the changes it’s made to its algorithm to encourage responsive design and other mobile-friendly practice, many SEOs still believe that if they’ve made their site design responsive, then all is good and their mobile efforts are up to par with the competition.
In 2016, it’s not just short-sighted to think this way, it’s just plain wrong. When it comes to additional technical changes you can make to your site to improve its rankings, Google has adjusted its algorithm to reward fast-loading sites so if your site is dragging, fix that fast.
But what about a content strategy for mobile? What does that look like? Mobile search is all about speed; users make decisions in quicker periods of time, not to mention the importance of site speed! So when getting your content in front of your audience, do so at times that you know your site experiences traffic surges and pump out content in that period of time. But it’s not just about pushing out content at optimal times, it’s about pushing out targeted content, so if at 6pm 40% of your traffic comes from mobile devices, a mobile-focused post is ideal.
In addition, going back to our point about speed, formatting is a crucial way to appeal to readers’ limited focus through such tactics as the judicious use of bullet points and a summary sentence at the top of the article that communicates the article’s primary point. Using a lot of headers is also a good idea as not only does it make your text more scannable, as Google’s Hummingbird algorithm functions similarly to a thesaurus, but also improves your chances for ranking well for those keywords in the headers.
In addition, when writing for mobile, try and keep your sentences as concise and to-the-point as possible as readers are more likely to scan an article on mobile and short sentences improve comprehension. In addition, following our general rules regarding best practices for blogging, be sure to include social share buttons and make them easy to see and access so that readers are motivated to share your content!
Furthermore, you need a mobile-specific keyword strategy and research that is different from what you did for desktop users as mobile users tend to search queries or questions like “how do I get to Walgreens from here” more often than desktop users, along with a high usage of “near me” searches. Also, optimizing for vocal search is crucial as 20% of Google searches on Android devices are voice search queries. As we’ve discussed in the past, start a list of keyword phrases and questions where you pair your core traffic-driving keywords with “who, what, why, when, and how” to create queries that mobile users are likely to input (“when does the Key Foods close.”)
When strategizing and creating content for mobile users, you need to be thinking about the individual user and what he or she is trying to accomplish via your mobile site and then modify the content accordingly. By focusing on personalization you will ensure that your mobile site’s content is perfectly attuned to the mobile user.
