Mobile-Centric SEO – Why Now’s the Time to Catch Up

Two of the most important words in the world of Internet marketing right now are KitKat and Hummingbird. Just in case you don’t know, the latter is Google’s latest and most significant algorithm update in its history, while KitKat is the most recent build of Android – the OS that appears on 80% of all smartphones in the world.It doesn’t take an SEO genius to realise the mobile revolution that’s going on all around us. According to on-going studies, it won’t be long before there are more mobile gadgets in use the world over than there are people on Earth. And it’s not like we have a long way to go right now – 7 billion people across the world are currently using 6.8 billion devices.    As far as marketing minds are concerned, the shift represents an enormous challenge and an unprecedented opportunity at the same time. One of the biggest changes of all is the way in which the vast majority of mobile searches are in some way influenced by location – local search is already the mainstay of the mobile web surfer.In addition, mobile search by way of voice command is fast becoming a news standard and is expected to explode in popularity over the coming year. With the wearable tech market just emerging, more and more Smartwatch products and others like Google Glass are going to hit the shelves all over the world and depend on voice control. The way this will affect the overall search engine concept is enormous, as when we speak a search naturally we would be more likely to say “Find me a cheap restaurant on Fifth Avenue” than “New York Restaurants” – the latter being the way most would approach a keyword search via an engine.Because of this rapid and game-changing shift, various considerations need to be revisited in order to get ahead, including:

• How keywords are used in terms of phrase length, sophistication and placement
• The ways in which the content is accessed and how it is acted upon
• Who the target market is populated by and their behavioural patterns
• How spoken commands differ from those entered into standard search engine boxes
• What point of the buying-cycle readers are entering the site/page at

Google’s resident SEO guru Matt Cutts summed up the way things are going at a recent conference, stating that: "Mobile is probably growing faster than anyone in the room expects. Mobile traffic to Google will surpass desktop traffic to Google pretty soon – not in weeks or a few months, but soon."Or in other words, Google knows probably better than anyone else just how the global market will look in the future when mobile takes over entirely, so it’s not exactly a shocker that Hummingbird turned out to be so mobile-focused.Now’s the TimeThere’s really no more sitting around and waiting for the mobile revolution to happen – it’s happening right now and has been for months. Instead, the time has come for decisive action as to only get on-board with it all now is effectively to be playing catch-up with those really on the pulse of what’s happening web marketing wise.