The other night there, when I was being Dad’s taxi picking up my eldest, on the road home I thought I’d try some conversation to help cut into the journey, however no matter how I tried to converse, it fell foul to her undue attention to her mobile phone. ‘What you doing?’ I quipped. ‘Browsing the web’, she replied. ‘Can you bring up my site?’ I asked. ‘Nah!’ She responded (*sigh* I hate teenagers!) But it got me thinking, no, not how much I hate teenagers, but how more-and-more of us are interacting with the web via our mobiles, and why mobile seo should be wrapped with any website project.
One of the things I wondered about mobile browsing, was how websites appear on-screen. I have written about this in the past via articles but never touched on it here in any depth at NSM. Frankly, if your site has been validated to the W3C Standards by your SEO Company or Web Design agency, then you have a visible site via mobile search. If not then you may be losing out on some valuable traffic, but just how much volume of traffic, I hear you wonder, are you missing out on with this fast, emerging search application?
The Rise of The Mobile Machine
In 2008, the UK market share saw that 10% of the people searching online were accessing from their mobile (source : Search Engine Land.) When you consider, that almost half the UK population, roughly, 34,104,175 people have internet access (Source: Nielsen/NetRatings), then this equates to 3,410,415 mobile browsers. Suddenly, mobile seo, takes on a whole new importance, and sites that don’t measure up should take heed, this marketshare is expanding at a record rate.
In-House Joke
I have being validating sites for a number of years now, too many tbh, and I remember some aged old gurus in some-far-off distant forums, proclaiming that W3C Validation was a nonsense and their site still ranked without ever attempting to pull their sites up to the required standards. Obviously, they never even attempted to think about mobile browsing then, neither did I, but I’ll bet when you raise the question to them that today, they are potentially blocking out 10% of their marketshare with having antiquated web design code driving their site, they’ll at least consider the question instead of responding with ‘ROFLMAO’ quotes, as a croaky singer once said, ‘the times they are a changing’, … mobile coverage will one day reign supreme!
Images courtesy of Lynne from Polr Web.
I can sympathise with your teenage comments. I drive Batman into work and on a daily basis the only response to conversations I get are grunts while he surfs on his iPhone. Men.
Still, he comes in handy when I need to do such things as those screen dumps for you
Are you just saying that we should make our sites valid and leave it at that or go whole hog and craft mobile-specific stylesheets?
I’ve not had a mobile phone for about 6 years, so I am not on top of my game with all this gubbins.
It depends on your site, David, take this site as an example, there is no specific mobile stylesheet attached to it, yet it renders fine on mobile browsers, as far as im aware.
It is coded to strict css disciplines, however, which does help, all im saying is those that don’t validate not only run the risk of losing visitors via normal cross-browser experiences but are also missing out on the growing mobile demand.
There is a meta you can stick on for iPhone/PDA to adjust the width of the automatically displayed content. I’ve not tested this but apparently you can use . Anyone know any more about this.
Hi Mike, I’m not aware of this tag, but if I do come across it I’ll surely post it for your attention.
Teenagers will be teenagers. Just ask your own parents. Not much hope for parents there, I guess.
@ Peter, yeah I guess I was a handful to my parents as well, except I had the CB radio instead of mobile communications.