If I say that there is no such thing as “Mobile SEO”, just plain SEO for mobile search, I may lose many friends among the SEO fraternity. But the fact remains that true mobile SEO could probably prevail if you just have a mobile website, while pursuing sundry SEO activities only on mobile based platforms. To put it bluntly, mobile SEO actually does not exist – it is simply another segment of SEO and so may be treated as such.  Nevertheless, creating a mobile website itself is an arduous task, while there are several factors that need to be taken into account for effectively optimizing the site exclusively for mobile audience, that are listed below.

Check on Your Mobile Audience First

Before commencing to build a mobile website, leave aside optimizing it, it is crucial to comprehend whether your site has the potential to draw mobile visitors or not, as also what could be their volume. Instead of doing any wild guesswork, use Google Analytic to create a sector for organic mobile traffic and then take a look at the volume of visits, type of devices used, the landing pages that are mostly hit, as also the popular keywords.Also, try to figure out the type of content that is liked most by mobile users, so that you may prioritize the style while building you mobile website.

Where Your Site May Appear in Mobile Search Results

Figure out where, if ever, your website is likely to appear in mobile search results, as also the keywords and phrases that have hitherto become visible. If you are unable to do it yourself, take the help of Google Webmaster Tools to find out the prime queries and pages that are showing in mobile SERPs. Incidentally, this will help you identify the content you are supposed to optimize for mobile.

How Does Your Audience Conduct Their Mobile Search?

It is crucial to know about how your potential customers are conducting their mobile search, so that you can take steps to make yourself more visible to them, thus escalating your mobile traffic all the more. Once again, if you find it difficult to resolve the issue, then take the help of Google’s Keyword Tool mobile filter to check the keywords your audience mostly searches with. Also, take a look at “Our Mobile Plant” to fathom how consumers are using their mobile devices.

How Does Your Website Render on Mobile Devices?

To test how the content looks on mobile devices when designing the website is a cardinal issue for the simple reason that if it does not contribute correctly, consumers would go elsewhere. However, there is an easy way of getting the truth. Use Google’s Getmometer, PageSpeed Insights and ‘Fetch as Google mobile bot’ feature in Webmaster Tools for testing how mobile users and bots come up and see your website.

The Type of Content And Products Offered by You

There is a marked difference between content used for mobile as compared to those for desktop. For instance, mobile search mostly comprise local issues. Therefore, you need to determine what your mobile customers are searching for, while checking yourself if you are catering the same. Also, whether you are capable of offering localized content to them and if in the negative, how you may develop it.

Creating Mobile-specific Content is Important

In case the pages on your regular website have not used external style sheets, comprise colossal file size, sloppy code or plenty of multimedia content utterly unfit for mobile phones, you will have no other alternative but to create mobile-specific content on a mobile sub-domain or sub-directory (www.m.yoursite.com OR www.yousite.com/m). But this may prove problematic for SEO as it is likely to split your links as also the traffic between two sets of not too dissimilar pages. However, it may be worth the effort, especially in view of usability and convenience.

Risks Associated With Mobile SEO

When you create a copy of your website and put it on a sub-domain, you run the risk of Google’s irk concerning duplicate content. Also, you would be wrong if you think that the mobile search engines will easily understand and allow the duplication on merit grounds, because in realty, they would just become confused and as a result, your mobile content (newer) will have no hope of ever outranking your older conventional content, even in the event of a mobile search. True, the browser-detection and redirection may somehow take care of the issue, yet your duplicate content will suffer the peril of bleeding a bit of the SEO value from the content on the conventional website.