Businesses are embracing content marketing across platforms. Company websites now host news articles and corporate blogs, while social media accounts feature their own engaging posts, videos and graphics – but marketers know it’s not enough to leave custom content static on the ‘net. Brands must make sure content is also accessible to mobile device users browsing the web, and that it’s designed to improve SEO.
Marketers spending on mobile
Mobile is a fast-growing marketing segment alongside custom content, social media and video. Brafton covered a Nielsen report that found 70 percent of marketers planned to amplify their social media participation in the next year, and 64 percent expected to increase their focus on video marketing.
According to findings from the Mobile Marketing Association’s “Mobile Marketing Economic Impact Study,” brands across industries should expect big things from mobile because businesses spent $139 billion on the still-nascent sector in 2012.
“Even in its infancy, mobile has irrevocably transformed society,” said Peter Johnson, one of the study’s researchers. “With the introduction of new technology to increase accessibility and connectivity, mobile has the ability to reinvent itself and remain indispensable to the consumer and marketer relationship.”
The study does, in fact, predict that mobile marketing will continue to be a driving force in outreach efforts. By 2015, mobile spending is expected to top $400 billion.
Make the most of mobile investments
In order for marketers to see ROI on this marketing channel, they must make sure their websites are optimized for viewing on mobile devices and designed for SEO.
The latest post on the Google Webmaster Help channel from Search Engineer Matt Cutts asserts the ongoing importance of including certain elements in website architecture, if marketers want their pages to look good on both desktop and mobile devices.
Because of the way web servers cache search results, publishers should continue to use the HTTP Vary: User-Agent header in their URLs for websites. This provides web servers with information about whether the sites can return different content to both mobile and desktop.
If publishers don’t clearly indicate that their sites can be displayed on mobile devices as well, Google’s web crawlers may not index the pages properly or display them in search engine results pages (SERPs) and dampen their SEO successes.
