Thanks to our event sponsor Page One Power – The link builders you’ve been looking for.
I first met Anne Ahola Ward at SEJ Summit 2014 in San Francisco. I was impressed by her expertise and loved her sense of humor, which is why I’m excited to welcome her as one of our speakers for the first SEJ Summit of 2016, happening in Santa Monica, California, just outside of LA.
Anne will be speaking on mobile usability and optimization, which is what I interviewed her about below. Be sure to check out Anne’s comments on mobile SEO and UX and learn more about what SEJ Summit has to offer.
Your presentation at SEJ Summit is about how crucial mobile usability is for companies. Why is UX so important, and why are businesses dragging their feet on upping their game?
I would argue we’re talking about the Nth screen rather than mobile and friends—meaning tablets, phablets, smart TVs, and the like. If you’re not serving up fast mobile pages, your’e not meeting the demands of your visitors and will therefore lose out.
Is there anything in analytics we should be looking at when studying mobile traffic that is different (or more important) than desktop data?
Time on-site and traffic attribution are the two biggest mobile metrics I like to wrap my hands around, always. Time on site is important regardless of platform, as well as user flow.
There’s sometimes a debate between building an app and solely focusing on a website. When is both a good idea?
Only build an app if you’re doing something special with the phone’s hardware like utilizing the GPS, camera or gyroscope. Otherwise save yourself the heartache and go native! Having both an app and a mobile site are important if you’re resourced well enough to build and promote both. Also, if you’re building for a tablet experience, the app adoption rates are trending higher there right now.
What are some best practices for SEO that are especially important to mobile?
Certain results in mobile have interactive results, like weather. Target carefully!
The meta-descriptions are shorter on mobile, so think about that when creating them. Think about rich snippets, video, bread crumbs!
Bonus Question: What’s a recent book you’ve enjoyed reading?
Bonus answer: Not reading anything for leisure at present because I’m writing a book. Just polishing off the last Art of SEO book by O’Reilly.
Don’t forget, you can buy your ticket for our SEJ Summit Santa Monica conference, taking place on April 13th at Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel.
Additionally, Anne joined me on our podcast, Marketing Nerds. Listen below:
Check the RSS feed or subscribe via iTunes to listen to more Marketing Nerds episodes.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock.com
In-post Photo: ra2studio/Shutterstock.com
This post contains an Amazon affiliate link.
