Why South African businesses should not allow mobile SEO to give them grey hairs (yet)

With businesses dedicated to mobile SEO, there must be a market for it, right? However, there have been many arguments questioning the usefulness of mobile SEO and whether businesses should even create mobile sites.

To gain some more understanding into this debate, I looked at opinions of those with experience in this field.

What do the experts have to say?

In February last year, Bryson Meunier wrote this article where he discusses common arguments against mobile SEO, one of which proposes that since the iPhone and other smartphone users are able to access full HTML web pages and these are shown in search engines’ page results, then optimising a site for mobile users would be a waste of time.

Meunier disagrees with this argument by referencing sources stating that smartphone adoption drives mobile web usage but he says: “SEO best practices will generally make a site accessible to smartphone searchers.” However, he also says that accessibility is “not an end game” and while making your desktop content accessible to simple users makes you “ok for mobile search”, you “won’t be optimized, and you may not be prepared for the future of search”.

Over a year later, in another article by Meunier, he lists 16 reasons why people should optimise their mobile sites. Included in his reasoning is that mobile search is evolving and mobile ranking factors are becoming more prevalent so brands that don’t optimise a mobile site today will be “busy playing catch up tomorrow”.

Moving on to an article by someone who also has experience, but perhaps less enthusiasm, in mobile SEO, I took a look at what Bena Roberts wrote in August last year :

“The fact of the matter is that the market for mobile SEO is still early… mobile search engines are continuing to evolve and develop… what I have found this momentous past year is that achieving effective mobile SEO results is not a given. In fact, it is not as easy as it seems and I urge users to be weary of parting with money freely for the chance of global mobile eyeballs… Mobile SEO is hard, hard work… There is no magic in the mobile web and as I celebrate one year of visibility mobile I realise what we have learnt, had to re-learn, test and master has been incredible.”

Roberts documents her argument with a personal example. After getting one of the leading UK newspapers to the top of all mobile search engines on three different keywords in December 2008, she found her hard work had come to nothing “due to changes from key search engines and obvious buying search keyword campaigns from competitors”.

For discussion of a more recent nature, I looked at what Gareth Owen had to say in his article entitled “What’s next for search, SEO?” Since people are using the Internet in different ways via different devices, Owen tackles the question of how search engines will know what is important or whether something is more important for a mobile user than a tablet or laptop user. This is his answer:

“There are still a lot of “ifs” involved here. Ultimately, the search engines might feel that what exists now is good enough to tell them which are the most important sites… But perhaps there is an argument that for each device you will need a site specifically optimized for each different version of Google. Google for mobile, Google for smartphone, Google for tablets – each version might prefer different types of web property to display higher in the listings. Ultimately there isn’t a definitive answer right now…” However, his belief is that SEO will encompass social media and skill-sets that include a large degree of developer knowledge specifically for ensuring websites are compatible with multiple devices.

After looking through the above opinions, I’d like to draw your attention to phrases that have been mentioned in order to highlight a trend in these various arguments which supports Owen’s argument that there is no definitive answer right now. These phrases include, “may not be”, “the future”, “evolving”, “tomorrow”, ““still early” and “continuing to evolve and develop”.

Let’s give this debate some more background information and look at what Andy Hagans says on his website. Before saying that those with mobile sites are “slugging it out in the present mess”, he says, “mobile SEO and SEM are, well, very immature”.

Can we say that this has changed? Are mobile SEO and SEM now mature? There seems to be a common problem here. It looks like SEOs are still unsure as to how mobile SEO works and how businesses can rank high in mobile search.

The test

To gain some more insight on the subject, we at Webgrowth decided to conduct an experiment. After installing Opera Mini to a smartphone, we conducted a search using Google Mobile Search and searched Google.co.za for what we thought was a highly competitive market – “American news channels”. This is what we saw:

We then conducted the same search, but this time on a desktop, using Google.co.za again. The results were:

Thus, the top six results stayed exactly the same with a few small changes after that. As you can see from the first table, websites without mobile sites are still in the top results, and beating some that own mobile sites. Taking the example of Reuters, one can see that in both mobile and desktop search, Reuters has maintained its position.

If this is the case, I have to ask – is there a difference between Google’s algorithm in mobile search compared to desktop search and does having a mobile site make any difference to your ranking in Google Mobile Search? My immediate response would be “no”. But, I’d also like to jump on the bandwagon and agree with a common argument seen above. Perhaps a “not yet” is more suitable.

With more and more people worldwide using the mobile web for search and social networking, there is obviously reason to suspect that mobile SEO might be a market businesses should think about entering at some point. However, with so much uncertainty as to how one ranks high on the mobile web and how best to optimise a mobile site, I think that businesses would be wasting their time in the current scheme of things and that, in time, when there are more answers, this is a market that might be worth tapping into.

Lastly, I’d like to bring this argument home. After searching Google.co.za on Google Mobile Search for “news channels South Africa”, only two of the top results had mobile sites and they were ranked as number three and eight, with other channels without mobile sites ahead of them. Their ranking remained the same in desktop search.

If companies are targeting a mature search market i.e. USA, and don’t know all the ins and outs just yet, then there is no point for South African businesses to delve into this market right now. Like all businesses, SEO is most successful when one knows what works and what doesn’t.

So, best we wait for the Americans to get it right before we try competing with them.

About Margot

Margot Knight has written 8 post in this blog.

Margot is the newest member of the WebGrowth team. She is passionate about copywriting and has an inspired desire to grow her knowledge of online marketing.

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