As an entrepreneur with some guerilla marketing experience, I started to build an e-commerce store for my coffee business. After some research, I found out about a wearable future. I learned that a mobile SEO future means using Google Voice on wearables now.
I’m a beginner when it comes to online advertising and I quickly learned Google mobile ads is the best place to start. Mobile is becoming the way most people use the internet and that will soon turn into using Google Voice and wearables. I learned that 80% of social media use is on mobile. Mobile is the natural entry point for online advertising for small businesses.
A 2015 eMarketer study states that mobile ad spend will represent 72.2% of total U.S. digital ad spend by 2019. Taking advantage of this increase will be key for small business owners like myself. Mobile ads are an easy and affordable way to build a marketing campaign since they use the Google search engine. For most people it’s already very easy to type things like “Movies near me”, “Food near me” or “Restaurants near me” into my Google search bar.
My question of “What is SEO?” turned into an understanding of the future of wearable technology. I found that in the wearable technology market, wearable technology trends predict a growth in the wearables market of 35% by 2019. And if you are targeting a young audience like my coffee company is, most people who use wearable tech are young; 48% are between 18 and 342. This is good news for companies seeking millennial customers.
A mobile SEO future means using Google Voice on wearables. What is a wearable? In its simplest term, it’s “an item that can be worn”.
SEO for mobile is super important if you want to be a first mover into the smartwatch market or try to get part of users of the Fitbit market share. Mobile will be the transition point that will lead to wearable SEO optimization.
Mobile web at the basic level must be:
Fast
Functional
Finger-friendly
Free from redirects and errors
Use responsive web design and dynamic serving
MOBILE SITES MUST BE FAST:
Google cares about how fast your site is and ranks it accordingly. Pick the right hosting provider and test your upload and download speeds on as many devices as you can, in as many locations as you can. Test your home Wi-Fi, a public Wi-Fi or use your mobile devices cellular network. Mobile site speed is a crucial component of mobile SEO success, a point that has been driven home by Google for a number of years now. You can test download and upload speeds with network hosting tools. It’s useful to try it yourself and see how it actually feels for your customers if it’s slow.
MOBILE SITES MUST BE FUNCTIONAL:
Make sure your mobile site actually works, like no 404 errors (web page not found). This may sound like a simple thing that isn’t worth paying much attention to. But, you’d be surprised how often a random unlinked and non-working html page gets put in a public site directory. Google crawls your site and your customers can find broken pages. An error page for a growing business can be the kiss of death. And don’t, don’t publish non-mobile friendly content (bye-bye Flash videos).
MOBILE SITES MUST BE FINGER FRIENDLY:
Phones come in different shapes and sizes, just like humans and human fingers do. Make links easy to click. Use button links instead of text. Make it easy for bigger hands and fingers to move around your site easily.
MOBILE SITES MUST HAVE RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN AND DYNAMIC SERVING:
This is where things get a little more complicated. You can find many easy to customize templates that use technology like Bootstrap HTML that are responsive. Responsive sites will automatically adjust to the user’s device so it displays correctly on desktop or mobile devices. These responsive designs use the same site.com for all pages and the magic happens in the CSS code. However, this could slow down the site if it loads unnecessary files on mobile.
If you have the resources (meaning building the equivalent of two sites), you can build your site.com and also mobile.site.com. Redirecting mobile users to a custom mobile site that’s optimized for mobile devices will give you better SEO results. But if you are a small business, building two sites can be too costly in time and money to be worth it.
An easy thing to do for your mobile site’s SEO is to include a mobile sitemap using current search engine guidelines. Google’s search engine guidelines can be found here: and Bing’s search engine guidelines can be found here.
Google even has a tool to test your site for mobile optimization.
Once you’ve got your mobile SEO strategy figured out, I found one easy way for small businesses to enter the wearable market space. Small businesses can differentiate early by capitalizing on Google Voice.
For your customers that use a wearable and have access to Google Assistant, it’s really just a window into Google: “anything you might want to type into a search engine works here, and works especially well when the answer is going to be a simple one.” according to Wareable.
This is where your customers could say “movie theaters near me” instead of typing it in their search engine bar. It’s called proximity marketing and it’s hyper-local for customers.
According to Forbes, Super-mobile technology will “demand hyper-local content, such as content that changes based on your current location, and local optimization down to the street or block level (rather than focusing on a city or region).”
Warren Kay, the Austin, Texas-based vice president of advertising at Under Armour Connected Fitness says “while today’s U.S. consumers might own one wearable device, by 2020, the typical U.S. consumer will have eight”.
And wearables aren’t just for the Pokemon Go younger crowd. Accenture data shows 17% of Americans over the age of 65 use wearables to use biosensing to track fitness or vitals such as blood pressure or heart rate. And, about half of Americans over 65 and half of those under 65 are willing to wear them.
My company’s mobile SEO future means using Google Voice like this: When people search for coffee, I want them to talk to their wearable and say “Coffee Pops near me” instead of “Starbucks near me”.
From desktop, to mobile, to wearables – small businesses that want to transition to wearables can take advantage of mobile SEO to get there. Mobile SEO will continue to be one of the most valuable marketing tools in the small business toolkit.
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As of June 2017, there is a course offered on Udemy to demystify wearable technologies, so you can begin utilizing wearables now, as part of your small business product or marketing strategy.
https://www.udemy.com/wearable-technology/