It should come as no surprise that mobile search marketing is outpacing just about every other form of marketing, given the ultra-competitive smartphone and tablet sectors. Tech companies are simply responding to the impressive numbers gathered by Google: mobile search already exceeds desktop search by a factor of about 60 in 2015, and the numbers are only growing. Additionally, just over half of the American population uses mobile phones to access the internet, with over a billion people worldwide right on the horizon. Ostensibly, these increasing numbers mean that even more people will be accessing the web via smartphone before too long. Here’s a look at how you can use mobile search marketing to find your business’s target audience.
What Is Your Traffic Searching For?
Of course, as a business owner, it’s in your best interest to know what kinds of content work best in the mobile space. The form of these mobile devices gives you a hint: short, direct content works best on the smaller screens of mobile devices, where there’s little room for fluff. Mobile search is generally used by people on-the-go, which means that time is limited in terms of getting the right information to them when they need it. It’s even better if you can curate content and have a professional arrange data in infographic form, or employ video marketing. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, a video is worth even more.
Geo-Targeting Is Gold
An understanding of how your prospective customers use their smartphones translates into a big advantage—if you put that information to good use. For example, it’s a reasonable conclusion that many people use their mobile phones for searching while traveling, as they’re out and about. Their destination is probably within their daily commute or just outside of it—otherwise they would’ve planned well in advance, making it more likely that they’d search from a desktop device. As such, local marketing has an edge over global marketing. Your keywords should have a geo-targeted qualifier—they’re easier to rank for in Google Search, and you’ll get more targeted traffic as a result.
Additionally, Google appears to be placing a lot of emphasis on local marketing with recent algorithm changes. There are plenty of high-traffic websites that highlight your local offering, too, such as Yelp, Google My Business (formerly Google Places), and local directory websites that list events in and around the relevant cities. Something as simple as placing your business address and phone number in the provided profile can increase local traffic significantly once the search engines crawl the data and add your site to Google’s database.
All Times Are Not Created Equal
Mobile search requests skyrocket during the early to late evening, so if your marketing team can somehow set up and take advantage of the increased influx of website requests, you should be able to outperform competitors. Making a push during the holidays also helps increase your reach a great deal, as a certain fraction of these new users will bookmark your website for future use if you deliver when they need it.
With so much site traffic and so many web searches taking place on mobile devices, it would be foolish not to try to take advantage of every opportunity to capture those audiences. Mobile search marketing can help you pinpoint who your business’s target audience is, what they need, when they need it, and how best to get it to them. What’s not to like?