Well, mobile commerce is supposed to boom exponentially in the next 5 years. Google realized it early on and captured a major chunk of the mobile operating system market based on the freely available Android platform. But, is a normal Business ready for the mobile commerce? Or is the smart business owner laying sufficient stress on having a mobile site for the business?
It is true that mobile commerce is severely decapitated right now on account of a complete lack of focus and a less than favourable user experience. There are other bottlenecks as well, and these include lesser adaptability of the search algorithms to the mobile websites. But, things are changing fast, and this is borne out by the fact that Google is now using 'mobile landing page quality' as one of the criteria to display Adwords on mobile devices. And Google has historical data that suggests a chaotic and poor user experience if a mobile searcher reaches a landing page that is not optimized for mobile experience.
It is amply clear that a flawed mobile user experience means lost business and lost visitors with some studies indicating that up to 50% of visitors never return to a site once they have had a terrible experience on the first visit. Remember, a mobile website needs to take into account the limitations of screen size of a mobile device and try to bridge the gap between a desktop-website and mobile-website by offering more meaningful content, without the time and bandwidth overlays. So, a site that has extensive images or flash components or scripting issues are a potential nightmare for a mobile searcher.
Some businesses already realize the need of a mobile website and are taking steps to develop one. However, in what could be considered a surprise vacuum as far as search engine optimization is concerned, there does not seem to be any focus on the branch of Mobile SEO. Common-sense suggests that for a mobile website that is normally hosted on the sub-domain of the main website, there would be a need for ensuring that the mobile website is optimized for better search engine placement. I do realize that at this point of time, Google displays the same results on mobile devices as it would on a normal desktop. However, I tend to look forward rather than backwards and I am sure that it is a matter of time before we have an optimized version of mobile Google search engine for better user experience. They have already taken steps to improve user satisfaction when they visit Google.com using smartphones. Without getting into the discussion of when this will happen, I do realize that there is a need to target mobile websites for professional Mobile SEO.
Thankfully, as of now, not many mobile websites are there. For the few enterprising entrepreneurs, this also means that with a lot less effort they can establish their mobile websites as leaders in their own domain and grab a pie of the mobile commerce traffic at a fraction of the cost. Practically speaking, since the Mobile SEO is pretty nascent, and there does not seem to be credible competition within a particular niche, we can easily conclude that a lot less effort will be needed to rank mobile websites. In other words, the pains of link building are pretty much non-existent as far as mobile SEO is concerned. Which brings us to the fact that a proper content ratio on the mobile website that is optimally optimized for the on-page factors would be quite a content to dominate mobile search rankings.
Also, it would be fair to point out that going forward, a business that runs on online marketing campaigns will need to focus on creating and maintaining two websites. While the traditional desktop-enduser websites will continue to send larger number of visitors, a stripped down version of mobile websites will also contribute a fair share to the overall number of visitors.
In hindsight, every business will need to have a mobile website in the next few years. It is just that the time may be right on your side as of now. And the ones who enter this territory now will have a lead over others over a period of coming years.
Finally, this also means that the Mobile SEO specialists could be sitting on a potential opportunity that could be too big for the future.