A handy guide to content marketing for mobile

A responsive website is not a mobile strategy.

There has been a lot of re­cent articles on mobile and more and more of us are getting on-board but how can you, from a people-centric content marketing perspective, optimise your website for mobile? Let’s begin…

Technical change

Google has strengthened its mobile-friendly ranking signal to include site speed, so should you. This also helps with UX and general engagement. This is the first technical change you need to do and by far the last thing you need to do for mobile.

Micro-moments

“When consumers don’t have a lot of time to make a decision, they tend to focus on a few key criteria or product attributes” – Think With Google

We need to start optimising content to reflect mobile behaviour.

Now I’m not talking about Responsive Content Marketing, but I am saying that we should now make content layout 3D based on devices.

To begin a mobile content marketing strategy, you should think about a time schedule and match this time to the days of the week based on traffic. So that you can say “at 8pm, 25% of my traffic comes from smartphone, I need to write a more mobile-focused blog post,” for example.

Once you know your peak mobile times you need to publish your mobile content during this time. This content needs to be written with the mobile, short time frame, in mind.

Here is a checklist:

Attention span

• Write with bullet points and use a lot of headings to make your content more scanable. This is also positive for UX as well as for optimising for Google Hummingbird (which is essentially a thesaurus so you need to include synonyms of your targeted keywords in your text and the headings are great places to start to do this, as well as, optimise for voice search — more below).
• Include a short sentence summary of your content at the top of your article to help to grab attention and encourage readership and engagement.

Real life thinking (I can’t wait, I’m busy… waiting for the bus, or kettle to boil)

• Mobile content, especially, needs to be written as concisely as possible. Aid reading time by making content as short and with concise as possible.

Social media

• Integrate social media icons. Remember mobile is going to kill links, so make it easy to spread your authority and hard work by making it easily shareable.

Mobile keyword research

• Think about revenue and conversion. Where does most of your revenue come from, desktop? If so, it is clear that your mobile content marketing strategy should be more focused on the early stages of the buying cycle (more informational queries).
• Make sure you carry out mobile keyword research and do not just have a unified, one-size-fits-all keyword strategy for all devices. Mobile queries are more informational and often the only conversion is knowledge acquisition so do keyword research thinking just like this – education and inspire with keywords to build your brand’s trust. Your brand’s trust will then make you money.

Content formats

• Including multiple formats of content (e.g. compressed images, embedded videos that do not auto-play) allows you to optimise for more people. We have different learning styles and interact with content differently as a result, this is also true on mobile. It may be that your mobile searcher has their headphones in, so they may be more likely to interact with a nice, short video a lot quicker than they would in an open-floor office space.
• Engage your user by strategically selecting and placing the right formatted content on your website.

Optimise for voice search

• We speak in natural language. So carry out voice keyword research. See below…

A quick guide to optimising for voice search

20% of all Google searches on Android devices are now voice search queries. You need to get in on this increasingly popular market. How?

Log onto Google Search Console, then:

1. Go to ‘Search Analytics’ then ‘Search Queries’
2. Apply a filter with a natural language targeted keyword (e.g. ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘how’)

You now have a list of long tail, voice search keywords. You can also use other tools and platforms to help you with your long tail, voice search, and keyword research.

Then, just as you would for ‘normal’ SEO, put these queries, naturally in your content and most importantly answer them, with well-researched and concise content. You are now optimising for voice search.

So there you have it, a mobile content strategy needs to be person-centric by thinking about the searcher at every touch point. Your content needs to be optimised for mobile but you also need to have a mobile and desktop content-based approach which is directed by data on when and what devices your audience is coming onto your website.

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