Staying ahead with the right SEO for Mobile

The use of mobile devices is, as everybody knows, in a stunning rampant growth, New devices are launched by giants as Apple, Samsung, HTC and others and users are avid buyers of fresh technology. But users want the right content displayed in their fancy and expensive mobiles, if they do not find the right content or service they are always eager to switch for the service provider that fulfill their needs.

Users are looking for information in internet before buying or signing for services, they use more and more its current location to searching for physical places or to reach services (taxis for example). Back in 2010, Google started to offer Places, by using such service local business can be present in internet even without a web page. If small business can be present and be able to be reached by thousands of web navigators, what is happening with banks? Even the Rockies can use internet tools to sell services or products at low cost,  so are doing stablished brands too. But there are some customers’ requirements that are yet to be fulfilled, for instance enable your position sharing in your mobile and ask for your bank agencies near you. What happened? Did you got a flat results page or maps with flags to identify the nearest branch?

Searching from mobiles?

Yes, you search from your mobile and what the heck!  A lot of searching comes from such devices and revenue from mobile searching is increasing.  At this point in the life, a lot of banks have changed their web sites interfaces to be mobile friendly. But there are still web pages using Flash and Jscript in ways that are not usable in mobile phones. Content is sometimes impossible to reach, other there are pages that offer a frustrating user experience and this list of problems is lengthy.

Anyway, other factor to consider when you think about mobiles and your site is the possibility that web search engines can find your mobile site formatting useful.  I am talking about SEO for mobiles, specifically for banks. No doubt that this is also applicable to other business as well.  Think that if you already have a good positioning for traditional search you should be good at mobile searches.

Have you heard about transcoding from mobile search engines, if not this one is for you. Mobile Robots are quite specifics to search “mobile sites” , such spiders do additional analysis to be sure that the found site behaves adaptively to mobile devices. If engine find that the site’s content is not very trustful at showing its content they transcode the site when users click or tap on the link. Transcoding means that the site is shown using a formatting that is “guaranteed” to be displayed at mobiles. I have included in this link the test for nba.com, using Google Mobilizer for you to see how a good transcoded page looks like, or just point to http://www.google.com/gwt/n enter your web address and check to see if you like how you site looks.

Sadly, I found that a lot of banks are years behind top technical directives, they should check that their sites are “Mobile”, that is sites that are completely viewable from mobile devices.  New mobile applications like Square Cash use minimalist interfaces, but that is not always the case of institutional web sites.  There are heavy tasks to execute to assure that your mobile site is really mobile, luckily we can have a short list of them: 

1.       Try using just HTML5. Get rid of JavaScript , Flash or other proprietary formats that can be showed in mobile devices

2.       If your pages are slow at loading or have those automatic refreshing features, do extensive optimization.

You have a growing number of mobile users

Probably starting from you, you check for web content that comes from different sources, one of them is your bank.  Do you know what are looking for your mobile customers? What is the star product in your mobile world?