Top Free Essential SEO Tools For Mobiles

Top Free Essential SEO Tools For Mobiles 

by Mina Adly Younan 

The growth in mobile browsing has been incredible over the past year. With nearly half of UK smartphone owners using their mobiles to browse and research products and Mobile Search accounting for an impressive 12% of all UK search clicks in December 2011 (Marin Software, 2012). Morgan Stanley Corp. have also found in a recent study that Mobile traffic is expected to surpass desktop traffic by 2015 as shown in the graph below.  For a website to remain its high ranking on search engines (Google) should do all needed efforts to make their mobile versions as friendly and functional as possible.

In doing so, webmasters will need the following Top Free Essential SEO Tools for Mobiles:

1- Mobilize your Site () : see how your current site looks in mobile, and find resources for building your mobile site.

2- Our Mobile Planet ():  View data about mobile users that Google has gathered. Select your key demographic and other potential customers, and view key differences.

3- Mobile Meter () gives an overview of how your site looks and performs on a mobile.

4- Google Adwords for Mobiles:  It is the same Adwords tool used for desktop searches. It gives a guideline on the monthly volume in searches. The tool can also show data for searches on mobile devices.  To do so, select ‘advanced options’ > ‘show ideas and statistics for’ > and select ‘mobile’.

Local search trends can be added to see seasonal fluctuations or if keyword searches are increasing in volume. Select columns and ‘local search trends’. This will show a simple bar graph, but if you download the data it will give some figures over time.

5-PageSpeed Insights (): test speed from both a desktop and mobile perspective. Very useful to see where the easiest performance improvements can be gained in terms of download speed. As site speed is considered part of Google’s algorithm, fixing issues could result in a real impact on mobile search positions.

6- Google Webmaster Tools for Mobiles:  It is the same Google Webmaster tool as it can also check mobile sites setup and investigate any performance issues or poor search results. Additionally, if you redirect mobile users to specific mobile versions of your URLs, then Mobile Sitemaps can be added in Google Webmaster Tools.

7- Mobilize your Business with Google Sites (): Build a test or mock up and see how it performs. The tool have different templates for several types of landing pages.

8- Google Mobile Ads (http://www.google.com/ads/mobile/): Although it is a PPC tool, it can be used to find a lot of potential methods to look at that can drive traffic to your mobile landing pages using mobile ads like:

·         Phone numbers in ads using ‘click-to-call’,
·         click-to-download
·         Mobile Ad Sitelinks
·         Seller Ratings
·         Location Extensions (Multiple Addresses too!)
·         Location Targeting

9- Speeking of PPC, there is of course there the AdMob that is now owned by Google 

10- Google Analytics for Mobiles (): The same Google Analytics for Desktop could be used for mobile browsers so that you can easily find out which mobile devices are working well, and which need optimization by asking the right questions like: Is some content getting a lot of mobile traffic but performing relatively badly? Can a page be optimized to generate more phone call leads? Which content drives more local mobile users? It is even possible to hook Analytics up to track downloads of mobile apps.