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Last week, USA Today ran a story about “mobile marketing” for small businesses. It encouraged small business owners to begin pursuing smartphone-based marketing solutions that will direct people to their storefronts and websites. The suggestions offered by USA Today also provide insight for mobile app developers.
USA Today reporter Rhonda Abrams encourages small businesses owners to “get found;” in other words, make sure potential customers can find you. Mobile app developers should be thinking about ways to help small businesses expedite the process of registering their businesses on sites like Yelp and Foursquare. Other, business-related, apps could also be marketed on those web pages.
Abrams also suggests that small business owners need to start getting to know their customers. Sites like Twitter and Facebook seem to have cornered the market on social networking, so the idea of creating a new social networking app may be daunting. However, these sites can provide developers with additional opportunities to market their business-related apps directly to those who are most likely to use them.
Small business owners are also encouraged to offer coupons and deals that are formatted for and accessible via smartphones. Apps that are easy to use and require little set-up or maintenance will be most appealing to small business owners, who are often pressed for time and won’t bother with apps that are complicated or require a lot of updating. Apps that allow customers to pay via smartphones are promoted, too.
At the start of a new year, it’s natural to look back on the year gone by and take note of significant trends or topics. Fortunately for mobile app developers, a couple of trends reached important turning points in 2011, and indicate a potential for considerable sales increases in 2012.
The first trend was the the shift from desktop and laptop computers to mobile devices. In 2011, for the first time ever, sales of mobile devices outpaced computers. Increases in mobile devices means increased demand for mobile apps, which brings us to our second trend -
People spent more time in mobile apps than Internet browsers. For example, instead of opening a Safari window to access Facebook, people used apps on their mobile devices. As the graph shows, as of June,people spent 74 minutes a day in Internet browsers, and 81 minutes per day in mobile apps. The number of minutes spent in apps nearly doubled from the previous year, from 43 to 81 minutes.
As these trends continue, people will be looking for mobile apps that entertain, organize, and keep them connected with their friends and family.
This year Google is already pushing out what will be their largest change to search that they have ever done. With such huge changes in effect it’s important for you, as a website owner, to be prepared and have a clear plan of action for 2012.
In this blog post I am not going to be talking about what the latest changes are or show you screen shots of the changes. There are a ton of other websites that have done this over the last day. Instead I am going to be sharing some unique insights on how I see these changes effecting your online business.
Why SEO Is More Important Than Ever.
Let’s firstly examine what the new search results will turn up. When you do a search query the results are going to be far more tailored to you with information from your friends, shares from your social circles, etc.
New search results may include the following:
Listings from the web – (SEO based / Organic)
Listings tailored by your personal shares and actions
Listings shown because of your social connections
More Public Google+ profiles and posts Photos shared on Picasa and Google+ by your social connections
Private, “Limited”, photos that you have shared or have been shared with you privately
Regular Photos off the web
YouTube Videos
AdWord Ads
As you can see the normal SEO results are going to be taking up far less of the search results page. However, does this mean SEO is less important? I would actually say this means SEO is MORE important than ever. It no longer is good enough to rank on page one for a keyword. Page one doesn’t mean anything anymore. What is important is ranking with in the top three positions for your keywords.
On any given search phrase there may only be three organic listings in the SERPs. The rest of the positions on page one of Google could all be taken up by a potential customers social influence. They may see results from their friends, photos their family shared and so on. Which means there aren’t ten slots for organic listings anymore. There may only be a very small handful of organic slots open on the first page of Google for various keyword phrases.
This means the real estate for the first page just got a whole lot smaller. It is more important than ever for you to push forward with your SEO campaigns getting your website into those coveted top three ranking spots. This will ensure that your website will be on the first page of Google no matter how big a potential customers social influence might be. One Social Network Isn’t Enough.
Google’s latest update is called, “Search Plus, Your World” but probably a more appropriate title for it is “Search Plus, Google+”. Because no other major Social Network is working with Google’s latest changes. In fact Google is primarily only highlighting their other services they own such as Picasa, Google+, YouTube, etc..
This doesn’t however mean that you only need to focus your SEO and Market Leadership on Google owned products. That would be a critical mistake. It’s true Google + has become hugely important for SEO and traffic generation with Google’s latest changes.
However, the majority of your customers aren’t on Google + they are on Facebook. Also the popular search engine Bing is incorporating a similar personalized search result based off of Facebook likes not Google +1’s.
So Google and Facebook are critical to a successful SEO and Market Leadership campaign but so are the other top Social Networks like StumbleUpon and LinkedIn with over 100+million registered accounts….Not to mention Twitter, etc.
So to have a truly successful SEO and Market Leadership campaign we need be present in all the platforms our potential customers are hanging out at. This means maintaining a presence on several different locations at once. It almost seems impossible. Let’s look at how we can use a tool to accomplish this task and stay current with Google’s changes.
On Facebook
On Twitter
On Youtube
