Here are the questions:

1. Is mobile SEO an imperative right now in terms of capturing significant traffic, or are we in a stage where we are currently laying the groundwork for something coming soon in the world of mobile search?

2. If a company had time and resources to do only three things right now, what would be the three mobile SEO tactics you would recommend doing that would have the most benefit?

3. What will be different in mobile SEO/mobile search a year from now? What should mobile marketers be prepared for in this area?

Click through to see our answers!

Unfortunately the Google Keyword Tool doesn’t currently break out tablet queries separately, but lumps them in with smartphones in the category of “mobile devices with full internet browsers.”

I’m trying to change this, and give marketers a more useful tool. I’ve suggested this to both the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Google Webmaster Tools product managers, but things happen faster at Google when they have popular support.

If you agree with me, please voice your support in the Google AdWords forum, where I have posted an official feature request.

Actually found a few resources that were new to me, so I’d definitely recommend checking it out.

Click through to the PDF for a larger version with working links.

The purpose here is to do some basic reverse engineering of the smartphone search results to try to get a better sense of what ranking factors are driving placement in the top three listings of Google smartphone search.

As with any Google reverse engineering exercise, you’re chasing a moving target, so these results could become outdated with any significant algorithm change. Also, Google search results vary by query, so larger, more diverse sample sets could yield slightly different results. That said, the exercise is meant to present a more objective picture of Google mobile search results in order to reduce guesswork for businesses looking to improve their standing in mobile search results.

Of course, as a white hat SEO I believe the only way to build long-term rankings in Google is to follow their webmaster guidelines and compete fairly with your fellow webmasters. My hope is that Google will create such detailed guidelines for mobile, smartphone and tablet users, as indexing, ranking and user experience can differ for these users from the standard desktop Google user experience, and the Google advice on how to approach it has been inconsistent at best. However, in the short term this study should give webmasters a better sense of what they need to focus on in order to do well in Google smartphone search.

Subscribe to this blog or follow it on Facebook or Google+ to get updates on when the complete whitepaper is available. For now, here is the section on mobile sites and their impact on Google smartphone search:

With Google releasing their Go Mo tool recently for mobile web site creation, many webmasters have wondered if having a mobile web site would help them appear in search results for mobile searchers. Since Google has long told webmasters to think of the user first, providing mobile content to a mobile user would theoretically be thinking of the user first. Google also has a blended ranking algorithm to present mobile content to mobile users, but it doesn’t seem to be very powerful in US smartphone search, as only one of the sites listed was a mobile site.

Update: since this study was done in December 2010 and May 2011, Google has launched an update to smartphone search that uses the destination URL in search results for websites that redirect smartphone users to mobile content, so the results would likely be very different today—resembling more closely the percentage of sites that redirect to mobile content.

Being a mobile site isn’t the only way to cater to mobile users, however, and mobile formatting or mobile redirects could indicate to the engines that a mobile site exists, should a user want to access it, which could be enough to bump the site up slightly in the rankings. However, the great majority of the sites in the sample neither redirects to mobile content nor reformat it for mobile users.

Oddly, the great majority of the sites in the sample do offer mobile content: either mobile sites or desktop content reformatted for mobile users. This might indicate that having a mobile site is a ranking factor for smartphone search.

However, when we looked at whether these mobile sites were actually indexed by Google, it appears most of them aren’t actually indexed, and even fewer of the sites that Google knows about are labeled as mobile-friendly with a green phone in feature phone search results.

Clearly being a mobile site is not necessary for smartphone ranking, as most of the results presented are desktop results. Furthermore, having a mobile friendly icon in Google feature phone results is not a strong indicator of ranking in smartphone search results. However, given that most of the sites returned do have mobile versions of the sites, having mobile content could somehow produce a lift in smartphone search results.

For businesses looking to define their mobile strategy and wondering whether building and optimizing a mobile site could help them become more competitive in smartphone search results, it’s clear that the great majority of the sites in our study do offer mobile content. In our view, the percentage is likely to grow, as providing a mobile user experience is in line with Google’s user-first philosophy.  As with the early Web, businesses and webmasters who think of the user experience and design content that will delight rather than frustrate mobile users are likely to be the long term winners in the rankings when it comes to Google mobile search.

I’ll be there discussing practical tips for marketing in a social local mobile (SoLoMo) world. Including the pitch below if you want more details. Be sure to register soon, as there are worse places to be in December than a resort in Arizona and you get to learn bleeding edge social media strategies and tactics from some of the brightest minds in the business!

More details here:

Keeping up with digital marketing can be challenging: there are so many different channels to tap into, such as Social, Local, and Mobile. But smart marketers are mastering these emerging channels and leveraging them for competitive advantage. Are you? Like many marketers, you’re probably interested to know more, but aren’t quite sure where to begin. Or you might be wondering: How can I best leverage these new digital channels to drive results? Or how do I know if Mobile is right for me? Or how can I get Social and Local to work together?

During this session Bryson Meunier, Director of Content Solutions at Resolution Media, will provide marketers with an overview of each of the three channels and how these channels are earning consumers share of voice and engagement with marketers’ brands. Additionally, his presentation will go a step farther, diving into the actionable techniques marketers need to take, such as:

• Prioritize social network activity based on mobile reach: For example, Facebook and MySpace, are more than just social networks, but are prominent platforms for the mobile channel. MySpace has over 25 million mobile users and Facebook has over 7 million (grown 150% since Jan 2010).
• Understand consumer behavior on all platforms – How to develop appropriate content for overlapping channels:�Messaging to mobile users in social environments
• App introductions
• Surveys
• Mobile coupons
• QR codes
• Social messaging to mobile users:�Like us on Facebook,�Place Pages QR Codes (going away)
• Check-ins – How to use check-in analytics platforms like Kenshoo to understand the impact of search and other channels on driving online users to check in.
• Mobile Deals
• Accurate Budgeting – Organizations often have a budget for social and a budget for mobile, but not a budget for SoLoMo. Understanding the overlap and setting aside a separate experimental budget for SoLoMo can give marketers more leverage than just carving budget from either social or mobile.

Meunier will also include optimization best practices and highlights from client campaigns that demonstrate the convergence of Social, Local and Mobile. Overall attendees will walk away with a solid understanding of how these channels overlap, how to develop an integrated plan, and what actionable techniques are needed to effectively and efficiently manage these digital assets.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/116830155226800059190/116830155226800059190/about

Of course there’s always Facebook if you’re old school:

http://www.facebook.com/mobileseo

And RSS if you’re prehistoric like me:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/NSEOMSEOBlog

As always, thanks for following the natural search and mobile SEO blog– now in our fourth year of bringing you the truth about mobile and SEO.

http://www.seobook.com/brands

Many people will believe this because of Aaron Wall’s personal brand, as he was one of the first to expose the closely guarded secrets of SEO to the masses with his SEO book web site, and he writes detailed posts that are sometimes thoughtful even if they’re misguided, which have gained him a reputation and the nickname “The Professor”. He has a loyal following of SEO geeks who are probably upset that I’m even asking this question, but is it true? Does Google search have a bias toward brands?

I work with businesses large and small doing white hat SEO, and some of these engagements over the last ten years were with the biggest brands on the planet: FedEx, Apple, Lowe’s, Groupon, Gatorade, etc. I know the challenges that small businesses face when trying to appear for relevant queries in Google, and I’ve worked with enough large brands in my career to know that large brands have challenges too.

Affiliates Dominate the Organic Listings

If Google favored brands, brands would come up in the search results ahead of affiliate sites a large percentage of the time, no? But have you used Google lately? The results are often filled with small businesses and affiliate sites. Take, for example, the query [deal of the day] or [daily deals]. These are high volume queries that brands large and small would love to rank for, and a lot of them have content that is relevant to the query, but only one large brand appears in the search results for [deal of the day] (Amazon), and only two well-known brands appear for the query [daily deals] (Target, eBay). Groupon or LivingSocial are some of the hottest brands in the daily deal space, but they don�t show up for the terms. Who does? Affiliates, mostly; and small businesses with exact match domains and content that’s highly targeted to that query.

How about Black Friday? It’s coming up in a few days, and Walmart and Target are spending millions to get people in the stores and online to entice consumers to buy with them. Yet, most searches for black Friday terms are dominated by affiliates, and Walmart and Target are nowhere to be found. If trends are any indication, it looks to be bigger this year in the US than ever before, and many brands with Black Friday sales would love to appear for this query. But Google doesn’t show brands at all.

Thanksgiving is in a few days, and cranberry sauce is currently number 20 on Google’s Hot Trends at the time of writing. When you look at the results, SEMRush shows that the first result is not a major brand, but SimplyRecipes.com, which is owned by one woman in California.

The first five results, in fact, are not large brands, but advertising-driven publishers: simplyrecipes.com and allrecipes.com.

Searchers won’t generally look past the first five results, but if we do we see that smaller brands make up 60% of the top 20 listings, according to SEMRush.

Another of the hot trends queries this week, [green bean casserole], has a branded website as the first result– CampbellKitchen.com, a site owned by Campbell’s Soup Company that showcases related brands. But if we look at that site compared to SimplyRecipes.com, it’s clear that SimplyRecipes.com– the affiliate site– is the more powerful domain:

Click to enlarge image of organic strength of Simply Recipes versus Campbell's Kitchen

You can see Simply Recipes is clearly the smaller of the two brands, as the search volume for its brand terms is a little over 21,000 searches per month, while Campbell’s Kitchen brand terms get over 790,000 searches per month. In spite of that, Simply Recipes shows on more than twice as many non-brand keywords with 15x the search volume. According to comScore, this gives Simply Recipes (the affiliate site) about 13x the organic traffic of the brand site Campbell’s Kitchen.

Tell me again how Google loves brands?

What is a Brand, Exactly?

One problem with the Google loves brands theory is that one’s definition of brand could include these smaller brands like Simply Recipes. They’re definitely not a large brand, as they’re not listed in lists of the top 100 global brands, and it’s unlikely that most searchers are aware of Simply Recipes before their first visit to the site. In terms of navigational search volume, which is how search engines can determine brand strength, Campbell’s brands are much stronger than Simply Recipes in terms of brand recognition and search volume, but Simply Recipes still has 21,000 searches per month, and it could be argued is still a brand. However, where do you draw the line? How would Google, in Aaron Wall’s theory, determine what a brand is in order to give it preferential treatment? It would almost have to be in terms of navigational search volume, and in this case the opposite of Wall’s theory occurs: lesser brands get more traffic from Google. Does it matter if it is a brand with search volume if the search volume is so much less than a brand that it’s trouncing in the search results? At some point it becomes impossible to prove or disprove the theory, as any web site with a name could constitute a “brand”; and of course that includes just about all of them.

Still, I keep running into situations in the search results where large brands are getting trounced by affiliate sites for high volume competitive informational, non-brand keywords, and I wonder how many instances like these I can demonstrate before it’s clear to everyone that Google doesn’t give brands more visibility in search results than affiliate sites.

Google as Democratic Enabler

In the comments of the post Aaron Wall says that this theory isn’t about brands appearing in the organic search results 100% of the time, but appearing in the six other places on the SERP he mentions at the close of the infographic. But really, anyone with a local business, a paid search budget (however small) or a shopping feed can appear in any of these slots. What do these have to do with brands?

And visibility in search suggest and on the search results query refinements is about search volume, not about brands, per se. People search for brands because brands spend millions promoting their wares, and create demand. Google sees the search volume around brands and common keywords and wants to give people what they’re asking for faster. That’s why they also list types and stores in the search refinements. People search by stores, types and brands for certain general queries, and Google includes quick links to these queries to get users to the results they’re looking for faster. It’s not a conspiracy against affiliates. It’s a search engine creating a better product that serves its users better.

There’s a reason Google released the Panda on the SEO community: because they were getting killed in the press for providing low quality results. When sites come up that don’t match a searcher’s intent, and don’t solve that searcher’s problem, Google fails at its job and runs the risk of having its users defect to Bing, Blekko, Facebook, Twitter, or some other source of relevant information. Users search for brands, and Google is giving them what they’re searching for. It’s really as simple as that.

Enterprise SEO Challenges

What Wall’s infographic doesn’t get into is how difficult it is for brands to appear in search results because they’re frequently shooting themselves in the foot. Affiliates often have an advantage over large brands because they can move faster and implement at will. In large organizations promoting large brands it can often take months to change website copy because it has to go through multiple departments and stakeholders in order to get implemented, and sometimes positive change on a website is overridden because of turnover or another department with another initiative and no knowledge of the positive change that has occurred. I once had a client with more than 100,000 authoritative links being prevented from passing link equity because of a temporary redirect and no one to care. Small brands don’t have these problems. It’s common in enterprise SEO to have to come in after a redesign in which the entire site was designed in Flash or AJAX and go through months of education and project management in order to get the site indexed again, let alone returned in search results for relevant keywords. Affiliates may have problems with Panda or generating link equity, but large brands have issues of their own. Even if Google wanted to move every large brand to the front of the search results (which they obviously don’t, given the results I’m seeing), many big brands would be making it difficult for them to do that by splitting their link equity a thousand different ways and accidentally removing their sites from the index.

If you don’t represent a large brand and you want search visibility, don’t cry about it with infographics about how evil Google is for doing their jobs. Do what Wall did back in 2004 and align your brand with something people are searching for that you sell. I’ve been doing SEO long enough where I remember seeing Aaron Wall do his own branding by buying paid search ads for queries he wasn’t ranking on in 2004 when no one really knew who he was. But because SEO was new and one of the top queries at the time related to SEO was [seo book], Wall was savvy enough to make it his brand. Large brands spend millions on advertising to create or stimulate demand, but if you align your brand with a keyword that already has demand, the playing field is leveled.

Bottom line is, brands have problems, just as affiliates do. They’re just different problems. If you’re an affiliate marketer, stop wasting your time complaining and move quickly and experiment, because many large brands, for whatever advantages they may or may not have in search, will almost always be at a disadvantage there.

My latest column in Search Engine Land looks at how to use keyword research and the mobile percent of total volume metric to identify keywords and concepts that are most important to your mobile users.

Beyond that, there are many suggestions for branded mobile content based on mobile keyword usage, such as ringtones, wallpaper, television commercials, mobile coupons, and other content smartphone and feature phone users are interested in.

The following appears in full on Search Engine Land.

Consider Mobile Content Carefully For Users & Better SEO

I�ve spoken a lot in these columns about the�differences between mobile SEO and desktop SEO, often warning webmasters to�do more than just reformat their desktop content�for smaller screens. But if you�re in the process of creating a mobile site, you may be wondering what to put on your mobile site that�s different than what is on your desktop site.

What content (if any) would be interesting to users of a mobile site that�wouldn�t�necessarily appeal to a stationary user on a desktop or laptop?

As search marketers, we should already understand the power of keyword research in letting your users tell you what they want and how they want it said on your website, and keyword research can help prioritize what content goes on a mobile site as well.

For example, you may sell car insurance to an English speaking audience in the United States, and you want to see how users are interacting with that type of content on mobile devices versus desktop devices.

Using the�Google keyword tool in AdWords, you can filter by mobile volume in the advanced features, and select category data for insurance keywords for mobile users and desktop users.

If you put that data in a table like the one below, you can quickly see opportunities for content that mobile users are looking for en masse.

Continue reading on Search Engine Land.

Take Amtrak.mobi, for example, which is a Usablenet site and one that a Usablenet representative mentioned to me in a call a few years ago as being a satisfied client. When I looked at the number of pages indexed in Google, the total is three; and two of those are error pages. For non-SEO people this means there aren’t many pages available to compete for relevant queries. What’s more, the title tags are branded, so Amtrak isn’t even attempting to let the engines know that their site is relevant for anything other than their brand. This is likely to result in primarily branded traffic, if they get any at all.

Sure enough, when I used SEMRush to check the overall health of Amtrak.mobi, I found that all of the organic traffic that they get is branded, and they’re not even ranking first for the navigational term [amtrak mobile].

Likewise, Staples’ mobile site, which Taylor highlighted as a Usablenet client that follows two of his three tips for better mobile SEO, is only ranking for four keywords that aren’t navigational in nature, and those are long-tail queries with a combined total of 27 searches per month.

By any definition these sites are not optimized for search traffic, let alone optimized for search traffic from mobile devices. It’s not that Taylor gives bad advice in the Mashable article (though it’s really too vague to be useful). It’s that there are some inherent flaws in the Usablenet platform that prevent content from being properly indexed and ranked.

There are some brands that use Usablenet’s platform in spite of its shortcomings. If you find yourself in this predicament, don’t assume that your content is search-friendly just because a Usablenet VP wrote an article on the subject on Mashable. Follow these three tips from a recent article I wrote for Search Marketing Standard to make your Usablenet content a little more search-friendly, though still not completely optimized for mobile search, I’m afraid.

One of the questions I get most often about mobile SEO is this: I�m already doing SEO� do I really need to do mobile SEO separately? What�s the difference between the two?

There are some who would say that there is no difference between desktop SEO and mobile SEO. It�s a topic that often garners friendly debate � Andrew French, �a fellow Mobile Mondays columnist, has even gone so far as to say�there is no mobile SEO, just SEO for mobile search.

To me, this is like saying �there is no oncology, just a branch of medicine for cancer.�

On the one hand, yes, oncology is a branch of medicine for cancer, just as mobile SEO is a niche within SEO that deals with SEO for mobile search.�On the other hand, if my general practitioner thinks I might have cancer, my next step is not to have him or her diagnose and treat the cancer. My next step is to a specialist, an oncologist, who will help me diagnose, treat, and hopefully remove that cancer.

Likewise, SEO for mobile sites can be done by SEOs, or even webmasters without an SEO background, who apply general SEO principles about accessibility, relevance and marketing to mobile search. But there are nuances and differences in optimizing mobile sites that don�t apply to desktop sites, and some that apply more to mobile sites than they do to desktop sites.

Sherwood Stranieri covered one of these differences in�The Mobile Content Dilemma: Brevity Vs. Optimization. When it comes to text on a website, SEOs in general are going to push for more keyword-rich text to convey the relevance of the page to search engines, and Web designers are going to push for less. This applies even more to mobile sites, and it becomes harder to justify the SEO best practice of putting at least 250 words of relevant text on a mobile webpage.

There are different standards for mobile sites because of the different user experience, and SEOs who try to apply general best practices to optimize these sites are generally going to fail at implementation. Someone who has done mobile SEO regularly, however, will understand the nuances and attack the problem with enough precision to make a difference.

Mr. Stranieri�s is one example of a difference between mobile and desktop SEO, but it�s not the only one. In an�upcoming seminar, I�ll be presenting 18 differences between mobile and traditional SEO, and there are probably even more than that. Let�s focus on a few of the more crucial differences here.

Continue reading on Search Engine Land.

Though I believe these are the best of the best practices available, take them for what they’re worth. Best practices are fine for DIY projects and those with smaller sites just trying to compete, but if you represent an enterprise-level organization and you actually want to be optimized for mobile search, the best practice is to consult a professional. I’ve been at this since 2005, am writing a book on mobile SEO, am teaching a course in mobile SEO for MarketingProfs University’s Search Marketing School and am available for hire by contacting Resolution Media today.

These are my top 25 mobile SEO best practices:

1. Avoid transcoders (e.g. Usablenet) and hosted mobile solutions that don’t allow you to customize things like under which domain the site is hosted or which pages get indexed. This could add a lot of irrelevant content to the index which will make it difficult for engines to index your entire mobile site.

2. Don’t develop an app until you’ve developed a compelling mobile web site. Apps have limited reach, are only returned in search for app-specific navigational keywords and the link equity for the app benefits app stores rather than your site.

3. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Google Webmaster Tools search query data and keywords in web analytics to better understand your mobile user. Compare mobile search volume, impressions and traffic to desktop search volume, impressions and traffic to determine which keywords and concepts are most relevant to a user accessing the site from a handheld device. Mobile users search differently, and if you don’t do separate keyword research, you could be missing opportunities.

4. Use Quantcast or other demographics measurement tool to understand the demographics of a mobile user in your industry or on your site, which could differ greatly from the desktop user. Case in point: Major League Baseball’s mobile site is older and less affluent than their desktop site. Putting targeted messages in front of their mobile users based on assumptions about desktop demographics is unlikely to be effective.

5. Develop a searcher persona of a mobile or tablet user based on keyword, demographic, technographic and/or psychographic research. Motivations and interests of this user should be the basis of mobile wireframes. This will allow you to build content that will be of value to this mobile user, as that’s the only type of content that is able to be optimized for smartphone search. Wireframe the mobile site, identifying which content is relevant to mobile users and which content is being reformatted for these users from the desktop.

6. Build mobile site at domain.com/mobile. Buy and permanently redirect .mobi domain and permanently redirect all popular variations of mobile URLs to this subfolder. While m.domain.com subdomains are the most popular variations of mobile URLs, and any variation (including dotmobi) can be optimized for search, adding a subfolder instead of a subdirectory is the only option that uses the full trust and authority of the root domain, which could help in ranking. Not building a mobile site and only formatting desktop content could make your brand less visible in search engines for navigational queries from users looking for branded mobile content.

7. Develop mobile site in HTML5 for smartphone and tablet users. Site should be text-based, with enough keyword-rich text to convey the relevance of the page to search engines. Use progressive enhancement mobile design strategy to ensure content is accessible to feature phone users and search engines. Mobile boilerplate is a standards-based HTML5 template for creating mobile web apps that works well for optimized mobile sites.

8. Desktop pages should be made accessible to mobile searchers through handheld CSS. If desktop pages are transcoded on a separate URL, use canonical tags to pass link equity back to desktop pages with equivalent content. I believe there’s value in creating pages specifically for mobile users in addition to presenting desktop content, but if you decide to format your desktop content for mobile access, use canonical tags or handheld CSS or you may split the link equity between two URLs.

9. Create unique and keyword-rich title tags for your mobile content that doesn’t exist on the desktop. This is a best practice in traditional SEO, but agencies who build mobile sites are usually not focused on mobile SEO and often miss the most basic building blocks of SEO.

10.�Do not block your mobile site from desktop or mobile crawlers with robots.txt. Identify duplicate content with canonical tags and allow both crawlers total access. Blocking a mobile site from traditional Googlebot with robots.txt could make it invisible to smartphone searchers entering navigational queries.

11. Use canonical tags for all necessary duplicate content, including carrier-themed pages, which are common in mobile design and development. Not doing so could split a site’s link equity and make it more difficult for relevant content to rank.

12. Build links from other mobile sites and desktop sites that discuss mobile content. Link equity is a ranking factor in mobile search, and not building links could make content less authoritative and less visible in search. The following are tactics for building links to mobile sites:

• Link out to mobile content to increase awareness and incent organic reciprocation.
• Link to mobile site from desktop site. Many sites say “visit our mobile site from any mobile browser”, which is a missed opportunity to help the search engines understand where the mobile site is located.
• Advertise mobile content to mobile specific audience on mobile sites and in a mobile context
• Use mobile domain, URL or QR code when appropriate in offline advertising in mobile context
• Include footer link to desktop site. Don’t force users to view mobile content

13. Use tel link and unique mobile 800 numbers to track conversions separately on your mobile site. This won’t help in ranking, but it will allow for proper monetization of mobile search, which can help secure additional funds and facilitate the mobile SEO process.

14. Avoid black hat tactics and schemes designed to artificially inflate ranking. True in white hat SEO, true in white hat mobile SEO. Black hat or gray hat SEO carries a high degree of risk for people who look to SEO best practices lists for their optimization advice. Doing it incorrectly could result in de-indexing, lost revenue, and public humiliation.

15. Avoid Session IDs. Session ids are a major indexing problem, whether mobile or desktop content, but it’s more prevalent in mobile SEO because of the problems with tracking mobile feature-phone traffic. If you must use session IDs, use parameter handling in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools to exclude the session IDs from the index.

16. Avoid drop down boxes without text equivalent. This is not just a mobile SEO best practice, but it’s more prevalent in mobile sites since designers are more text-averse.

17. Create mobile sitemap(s) for mobile-specific content. It’s not necessary to put transcoded pages in the mobile sitemap. Some research (epub format) indicates that mobile sitemaps could help with faster indexing and ranking of mobile sites.

18. Use robots.txt file or password protection to exclude secure content, and include a link to mobile sitemap in robots.txt file. This could help the mobile site get indexed faster.

19. Verify site in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools, and exclude extraneous parameters that cause crawl problems. This could help the mobile site get indexed faster and reduce crawl problems.

20. Include enough on-page text to convey relevance to search engines. Mobile usability gurus are in favor of eliminating text on mobile sites, but some keyword-rich text is necessary to convey the page’s relevance to search engines. Reduce, rather than eliminate on-page text.

21. Optimize page speed. This is a best practice in traditional SEO as well, but Google sees speed as even more critical in mobile search. Additionally, this could result in a better user experience, which will result in more links, word of mouth and conversions.

22. If possible, validate the site using Ready.mobi or the W3C Mobile OK validator. Validation by itself is not a significant factor in ranking, but can make the site more usable, which (like #21) will inspire repeat visits and links.

23. Create and optimize mobile applications before submitting to Android Market and the App Store. Because apps are discoverable in Google search when users enter download and apps along with popular non-branded keywords, optimize using variations of these keywords. Use Chomp top search queries and Yahoo! app store search suggest to understand app store search behavior and keywords.

24. Optimize social media profiles, images, maps (e.g. Google Places page(s)) and other mobile content for mobile-specific keywords. Optimizing images will help with Google Goggles and other mobile visual search or augmented reality search engines. Social users and local users are often mobile, so optimizing these assets for the words that mobile users are searching on increases relevance of the content and could make it more visible to this growing social local mobile (SoLoMo) segment.

25. Find information sources you trust and test new best practices to validate their efficacy. Because mobile search is a newer and still emerging field in 2011, there are many “experts” who give false information that sometimes does more harm than good. The field is also changing rapidly, and has evolved from meaning “how to optimize a wap site” to “how to market effectively to tablet, smartphone, featurephone and other users of mobile devices who search” in four short years. Subscribe to this blog, read Mobile Mondays and see my updated list of trustworthy mobile SEO resources for the most accurate and timely information on mobile SEO.

We’ve been using SEMRush at Resolution Media since it was SEODigger, so when I was recently asked to write a review it wasn’t a hard decision. While it has limitations, as a low-cost competitive research and new business tool it is one that we use frequently and one that I recommend to small businesses looking for a low-cost alternative to enterprise SEO tools.

What is it?

SEMRush is a database of query data for Google US that provides rankings and traffic for 40 million keywords and almost 15 million domains in the US, and 88 million keywords and more than 41 million domains worldwide. It’s analogous to having a Google search query report for any domain or keyword you can think of, without having to verify any sites to see it.

SEMRush is generally more affordable than enterprise SEO tools, with free plans available and PRO plans starting at $69.95 per month. More money gives you access to more results and more support, with Enterprise plans starting at $499 per month.

How does it work?

SEMRush’s FAQ doesn’t specify exactly how it gets its data, but it’s likely by pinging Google, which is technically against Google’s terms of service. Users of SEMRush aren’t violating the TOS directly, because they don’t send automatic queries, but they are using a service that probably does. If you have issues with this, SEMRush probably isn’t the tool for you. Google usually penalizes egregious violations of the TOS by removing offenders from the index, however, and SEMRush currently has over 2 million pages in Google�s index, so it’s likely that they’re not aggressively using Google resources for the service, or are using parameter-based rankings to gather the data. More on SEMRush’s crawl in this somewhat dated interview with SEMRush CEO Michael Goldfinch.

SEMRush data is available through the web interface at SEMRush.com, and programmatically through an API.

Why is it valuable?

There are a few uses for SEMRush that make it worth the price of admission for clients that don’t have budgets for enterprise SEO tools like Bright Edge or Conductor. Here are four we keep coming back to:

1)����� Find your client’s true competitive set

Many brands still think of their competitive set as those brands they compete with offline, and quickly discount online-only competitors as harmless if they’re aware of the competition at all. Tools like SEMRush and AdGooRoo are great for identifying online competitors quickly. For example, Coca-cola may think their biggest competitor is Pepsi, but when it comes to the keyword [cola] in Google, they’re also competing with Cola.org and Cost Of Living Adjustment, neither one of which has anything to do with soft drinks. Understanding this at the beginning of a campaign, be it SEO or paid search, can help level-set expectations and benchmark performance more accurately.

Of course, this information is readily available by doing a keyword search in Google, but the data in SEMRush is already processed, and can be easily accessed through the API for more complex reporting without using Google resources unnecessarily.

2)����� Do a quick SEO audit for potential clients

One of the techniques that I covered in my presentation on Advanced Keyword Research Tools at SMX Advanced this past June was how to create a poor man’s SEO X-ray with SEMRush data. When it comes to quickly assessing keyword performance for a new client or prospect, SEMRush is one of the best tools to have in your toolset. It even has an advantage to most enterprise SEO tools, which typically require some time to set up a new client and their target competitors.

3)����� Data mining, modeling and other more advanced applications

If you have a lot of data about search engine results, you can start to model that data to tell you more about attribution, forecasting, relevance and other applications that would be difficult, if not impossible, without the data. See Myron Rosmarin‘s presentation from SMX Advanced Seattle 2011 for an example of one such application using SEMRush data: Data Mining for “Importance” (SMX Advanced login required).

4)����� Mine competitor keywords

When I first started doing SEO, one of the best ways to find keywords that competitors were targeting was to run a keyword density report on their web pages or open their source code and view their meta keywords. It was never a great way to mine competitor keywords, but it was all that was available at the time.

With SEMRush, you can pull a list of keywords your competitor is ranking on organically, and a list of keywords they are bidding on in Adwords, which is a better way of quickly understanding which keywords they may be targeting. This information might not be right for the brand that you’re optimizing, but it can be used to help you find the keyword targeting strategy that’s right for your brand.

What’s missing?

1)����� Mobile

This should be obvious to most readers of this blog. Given that mobile search will soon outpace desktop search to become the preferred method of access, and that it now accounts for 14-30% of Google query volume, and that mobile rankings can differ dramatically from desktop rankings, not having mobile search results and rankings could dramatically affect campaign results.

2)����� Vertical search

Given that YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google, it would be nice to have data on YouTube rankings as well. Video SEO is not always easy to quantify, and having ranking data could make video search easier to monetize. Same with Local SEO, Image SEO, and a number of other interfaces that bring relevant traffic that aren’t included in SEMRush.

3)����� Bing

Again, because SEMRush just includes Google search data, Bing is nowhere to be found. Because Bing’s current market share is around 30% (comScore), it’s becoming less and less advisable for search engine marketers to completely ignore Bing when planning SEO campaigns. If you’re just using SEMRush data to assess the health of your campaigns, you have no option but to ignore Bing.

4)����� More actionable reporting

SEMRush contains a lot of great data, but in order to understand and act on that data it’s necessary to export the data and manipulate it in Excel, sometimes for several hours. Enterprise SEO tools like Bright Edge and Conductor get around this by doing the manipulation on the back end, and providing very specific optimization recommendations up front. For SEMRush to get to the next level in terms of the value it provides, it really needs to follow suit, modeling the data and presenting it in a way that is immediately actionable, which it generally falls short of today.

5)����� More than ranking reports

While it’s a great database of ranking and traffic data, it doesn’t include link data, social data, on-page optimization data, or any other data that SEOs typically use to optimize campaigns. If you’re looking for a one-size-fits-all SEO tool, this is not it.

In closing

Overall, SEMRush is a great alternative to running manual ranking reports, and should be considered by every small business owner or agency still running Webposition or Advanced Web Ranking. It’s not the Taj Mahal of SEO tools, but it has a lot of great data that search marketers can use to optimize their SEO campaigns, and for a price that small business marketers and smaller agencies can afford.

An easier way to find the top Google searches, however, is to use Google Insights for Search. You can use it to find the top Google searches in a given year, or in the past 7 days.

The top 50 web searches in Google in the United States for 2011 so far are these:

Search term � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � Volume index

To find these, simply go to Google Insights for Search, enter the country and search type you�re interested in seeing popular terms for and the time you�re interested in seeing, leave the search terms field blank and hit Search.

The interface (above) will show you top ten searches and top ten rising searches for the time period you�ve specified. However, if you download the CSV, the export will display the top 50 searches.

Unfortunately mobile searches aren�t specified, so I had to use a more indirect method to find these. However, if you�re just looking for top Google searches for 2011 (or any year), as many visitors to this site are, you can use the method above to find them easily.

There are many applications for this technique. For example, if you�re Amazon or a large e-commerce site that wants to see what people are buying this week in the Consumer Electronics category, simply select Product Searches as the search type, drill down to the Consumer Electronics category, select 7 days as the time filter and location United States, and Google will give you the top searches this week in that category in Product Search.

Or if you�re a large flower retailer or some other business whose target search results are affected by image search, you can use the tool to find the top image searches in the Flowers category for 2011.

If you�re looking for the top Google searches for 2011, look no further than Google Insights for Search. Just be sure to leave the search terms field blank, and use what you find to make relevant content easier to find.

It’s easier than it was when I was learning, as Google now has a Webmaster team and fantastic help center that helps webmasters and marketers understand how to make content more relevant to users and search engines.

There are also training courses for those who don’t have the time or energy to filter through the entire help section and get the information that’s relevant to them. Back in 2007 I was the first graduate of SEMPO Institute’s Advanced SEO program, and I’ve learned quite a bit since then about SEO, and particularly SEO for users accessing search engines through mobile devices.

I was honored recently to be asked to teach a course in mobile SEO by Marketing Profs University. It’s part of a larger 13-course training seminar being taught by some of the most recognized experts in the industry, including Rand Fishkin, Lee Odden, Stephan Spencer, Eric Ward and others. Each course includes both a recorded seminar, as well as an opportunity to ask questions to the experts about SEO.

My class is called Mobile Search Marketing Advantage, with an emphasis on the SEO part of search marketing. In it I cover how to secure budget for mobile search marketing, 18 differences between mobile SEO and desktop SEO, and the top five action items for marketers looking to make a dent in mobile search this year. Here’s the description from the site:

The Mobile Search Marketing Advantage

Speaker:
Bryson Meunier�Director of Content Solutions, Resolution Media

Wednesday, September 28�1:30pm-2:30pm ET

Mobile search is set to surpass desktop search in four short years, according to IDC, and Google’s mobile search product manager expects mobile search to surpass desktop search even sooner than that. When that happens, will your business be ready? Maybe not, as 79% of businesses don’t have a mobile website. In this class, we’ll look at the ins and outs of mobile search and discuss the best practices your competitors haven’t even started to think about yet.

You will learn:

Mobile website or apps�which is best for your business
How mobile search engine optimization (SEO) differs from traditional SEO
Today’s top five mobile search marketing action items

If you want to learn what I know about mobile SEO, this is probably the best opportunity to do so without hiring Resolution Media.

Since you read this blog, MarketingProfs has allowed me to offer a discount to you, my readers. If you use the promotional code MOBILE when registering you’ll save at least $200 on the regular price.

As someone who is involved in hiring SEOs pretty regularly, I think a course like this goes a long way in supplementing whatever limited experience a candidate might have. And since this particular course is taught by some of the giants (not me) in the search marketing industry, this is quite a deal that MPU is offering.

Check out the site and the full agenda here. If you’re interested in registering, use the promo code MOBILE at checkout and save $200.