Summer Is the Season of Mobile Search

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AppId is over the quota

It's Summer and that means that people will start coming out of hibernation and frolicking more (at least in the Midwest anyway). From patio to picnic more people will be turning to their phone and performing mobile search to find things to do.

To capitalize, you'll need to be easy to find. That means it might be time to take a closer look at your mobile marketing strategy. Mobile marketing is more than just having a mobile website. It also means being easy to communicate with via a mobile device.

For example, when I land on your mobile website, chances are all I want to know is if you're open or not and how to reach you. So, your phone and hours should be front-and-center.

With more than 8.4% of all global websites visits coming from a mobile device, you can't risk losing me when I stop-by. Make it easy for me, please?

In the last twelve months, customers around the world have ordered more than $1 billion of products from Amazon using a mobile device," - Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com (July 2010).

I know, I know, that's Amazon. But you know what, those people that do business with Amazon also do business with you. They have been spoiled by brands like Amazon and now expect something similar from everyone. That's a trend that will continue.

As smart brands continue to raise the bar, stupid brands will appear even more stupid.

Does not take a rocket scientist to get going either. Here are a few quick tips on how to make your small business more mobile friendly:

Keep the most relevant information for customers on the home page and easy to find. Stuff like hours and a phone number are absolute musts.Consider building a mobile version of your website that can detect a mobile device when it's loaded and serve a special "mobile friendly" website. If not a website, consider at least building a landing page dedicated to mobile.Think about the 3rd-party sites that most often appear in search. Yelp, SuperPages, Facebook all come to mind. Make sure that you've updated these platforms as well. They're gonna show up so you might as well tend to them.

That's a good start.

Later in the game you start dabbling with SMS campaigns and QR codes and jazz like that. For now, just master these basics and you'll be more mobile in no time.

For more mobile usage statistics, check out this post.

Jason Murphy is Co-founder of Gabster Media, a Cleveland website design digital & social media marketing agency.

Is SEO or Networking More Important?

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

It came as a surprise to me to learn the other day that SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is often considered to be the only way to get noticed online. While it would be wonderful to see your site on Page One of a search engine, I believe that beyond certain limits, SEO is a waste of time and money for most of us. In the mania for SEO, a lot of us are forgetting good old fashioned networking.

In the early days of the internet, before ecommerce became the focus of everyone's efforts, the sharing of information was the primary goal of bloggers and website designers. The first HTML website I created was for a rockclimbing club I belonged to. The site was a phenomenal success, as well as a joy to build and maintain. I didn't know the first thing about SEO at the time. In fact, I'm not sure the term had even been invented. So how was my site so successful?

Looking back, I can see that my accidental success was based on these elements:

Link BuildingA Monthly NewsletterInformative ContentSharingSite Layout and DesignPassion

I'm not sure what the order of importance was, but my practical efforts began with the site design. I undertook the task because I wanted to contribute something to the club and had just taught myself HTML and wanted to put my new skill to use. I threw myself into the design and layout of the site and didn't go online until I was satisfied with my results.

Proud of my results, I didn't want my website to sit there in cyberspace unread, so I started sending emails to all of the rockclimbing related organizations and businesses I could find. This list included university clubs and local clubs in climbing areas as well as businesses that sold rockclimbing gear. I left no one, large or small, out of my email "campaign." In other words, I started networking.

Rather than tell them that I'd scratch their backs if they scratched mine, I told them I had already added a link to their site in my links list and would appreciate it if they added our site to theirs. To my recollection, every single one of them obliged, including Petzyl, the rock climbing gear giant.

On the homepage of our website, I gave visitors the opportunity to sign up for our mailing list. What they got in return was a quick summary of what was in our monthly online newsletter and a link to its page plus a link to anything that had been recently added to our "Journal" - a collection of member contributed stories about rockclimbing adventures.  We had nearly a thousand subscribers by the end of the first year. That may not be many by today's standards, but the internet was in its infancy then and every single one of those subscribers was what in today's parlance would be called a "target market."

The end result of my efforts was a quadrupling of our club's membership and even online sales of our rockclimbing guidebooks, which I didn't really even try to sell. At the bottom of the homepage, I just directed them to a page where I listed all of the titles and places where they could buy them. Since many of our readers lived overseas and we had no overseas outlets, they emailed me asking if they could buy them.

Netscape was the search engine of choice back then, I think. I'm sure Google didn't even exist. My little site was always on Page One, right there next to Petzyl and the other big names in rockclimbing. I thought nothing of it.

The reason why I feel compelled to write this today is because I have a client who is passionate about offering investment opportunities to others, who he believes are about to be caught in the impending burst of the Australian housing bubble. He knows his subject well, but believes he needs to spend a fortune on SEO in order to get the word out. This is a fortune he doesn't have. He does have passion, though. As of this writing, he has already compiled a modest newsletter following and arranged lunch with the CEO of a major gold and silver depository in Australia. And he hasn't even launched his website yet!

We'll see what happens, but I believe my client is going to have a very successful site, on a meager budget. What he lacks in money and SEO savvy, he more than makes up for in passion and an intuitive understanding of the value of networking, both online and off.

Rob Schneider has been a freelance writer for most of his professional life. In addition to writing articles for print publications, he has written several websites and writes articles for distribution online. Writing gives Rob the opportunity to do research on a wide variety of topics he may otherwise never have explored. Research and the challenge of writing compelling content are what make his job so enjoyable. Visit his website, Writing Resources for more information and some samples of Rob's work.