Video Transcript – Why Your Mobile SEO May Need PPC

Why Your Mobile SEO May Need PPC – original post here

Welcome back Rankers. Not long now until the big fat man in the red suit comes. Wow, I don’t know how he does it. It’s a miracle. Google has been doing something recently. It’s sort of, been a little bit by little bit but if I was to Google the phrase ‘SEO’ on a mobile device now, that’s the screen real estate I get. So we get two ads. That’s it. There’s no organic. Then if I was to scroll down, then there’s another ad. So this guy, he’s wasting his money right here. This #3 ad. And then we get, I think it’s Wikipedia. Oops. Wikipedia and then, and then only then, after the Wikipedia entry, do we get the Google Maps Places entry.

Now why is this significant? Because Google is confirmed as testing. And this is from SEO Round Table and also Jennifer Slegg over at, the SEM post, which is an awesome site. Both these sites are great. This is Barry’s report but what people are starting to see now are four ads on the top of desktop. Now, organic has already disappeared for many searchers from mobile devices. So if you’re getting a lot of mobile traffic to your site, organically, direct, whatever, if that’s the way people choose to use your site and you ranked really well in mobile, that’s awesome. But you might want to start thinking about now for mobile users, “Should I have an ad?”

Because, you know, the desktop is getting more and more crowded at the top for some searchers, for popular searches. “Should I be focusing on a featured snippet or a featured answer?” That you know, as we’ve talked about it before. And one of the overlooked places, I think, that you could look, ironically, is Google Places. So Google Places for…I’ll just show you. Just going to do that search again. So, we’re doing SEO as the search. Incidentally, that last story that just was on the screen and disappeared. That was a story that kids don’t know the difference between ads and organic. So, if you’re in a sector, this is a study that came out last week. 12 to 15 year old’s wouldn’t have a clue.

So if you’re in a sector where you’re doing a lot of paid advertising, possibly, there are a lot of kids clicking on your ads for the searches that they’re doing if you’re in a sector or a vertical but they might be searching for something like toys or whatever, sports or whatever okay? Something to be aware of. They don’t know the difference.

So this is a search for SEO. You can see we have all the advertisers. Then we have Places. What we know about Places now and this is from another story from Barry actually at Search Engine Round Table is that Google recently made a public statement that what effects your places listing, one of the three things is, basically, how many times people click on it.

They’ve reinterpreted that to or used a euphemism, if you like, to say that, “What we meant was, if you’re popular.” So, how do they work out popularity? How many times people click on you. And Google knows when people click on your site obviously. They have many tools out there and they’re watching many things. And I’m going to show you something else before this video ends too, which might surprise you. But let’s just go and have a look at…Okay, this is a client. Been doing AdWords with us for years. You can see there I’m looking at audience mobile overview. And we have desktop and we have mobile, mobile, tablet, tablet and what I’m looking at is where the traffic’s coming from.

So you can see here with desktop, the traffic for this particular client in organic, this is year on year. The last 30 days compared to the previous year. You can see here, for this client, he’s up 51% on his organic from desktop users, which is awesome. 51% and then you can see down here in mobile organic, he’s also up 56%.

So you can say, “Okay well organic traffic is up.” So certainly you would say His organic traffic’s up and it’s all organic traffic, so it’s not affecting his spend on Google AdWords. But then you look down here and you can see that his mobile traffic via AdWords is up 190% and we’re not spending any more on his AdWords.

So that to me is…and you’ve got to allow for more mobile devices, more people using mobile. But 190%, that indicates to me that the only real state on the mobile device right now is AdWords and Places if there was only, say one ad or one advertiser. So you have to get your Places right, you have to get your click throughs happening or I should say, you have to be popular. And you also need those stars because one of the ways to get your click throughs up without you having to go and manipulate Google, is by having an attractive offering in your Places. Now you can only put your address and hours of business but what will really help is if you get reviews. Those stars that you saw on the review here, they will only appear once you have five reviews.

One of the things that we did years ago was say, “Hey, if you like the show, can you just leave a review on Our Places, please?” And that will help you get up and get those click throughs that you so desperately need. Because will see the stars and go, “Okay, this one looks legit.” And then we’re going to have a look at another one. You can see from this one. We can see here our desktop cost-per-click is up 79% because this client is spending more this year on AdWords.

But then you’ll see down here on mobile, it’s up 513% for the same period. Both of those numbers are incredibly significant. So mobile device traffic is, a lot of it is coming in from ads and I would go and have a look. If you see that your traffic from mobile organic is down, and this client, his mobile organic is slightly up 4%. Not as much as the other client, this client has only just started with us in the last month or so.

But the other client was up 56% on mobile organic and he is up a lot more on CPC organic. So this is where Google’s heading, right? So if it does it to the desktop, if does actually put four ads on top of the desktop then that takes a lot of thinking about. You know people say SEO is dead for years but SEO is not dead. But what you need to have to think about is, especially with mobile these days, should you be doing AdWords for the searches that you want to appear in?

Look, there are still a lot of savvy people out there that, for whatever reason, don’t like clicking on ads. I click on ads. I never used to but I click on ads now certainly if I’m looking to buy something. But on a mobile device, what it’s all about making quick, easy and not having people sit around trying to figure out which URL they should click on. It’s about speed and that speed comes in with clarity of message and matching the relevance of your ad to the search that was done. So a lot more Google AdWords traffic coming from mobile devices these days and there’s going to be a lot more in the future and if Google does do four ads on the desktop at the top of the page, I don’t think it’s…Certainly I don’t think it’s the death of SEO. There’s always as you can just see from that other client, their organic traffic is up 56% even on mobile devices and they’re advertising as well. But just be aware, this is where Google is heading next year.

It’s giving us as Courtney here said; they’ve just given themselves a pay rise with a 25% more real estate on the screen. Hopefully, that’s helpful. Sorry, I forgot to show you that thing. Let me bring it up. This is really interesting and this guy is too what I’m talking about with popularity and brand and all those sorts of things. Have a look at this. Now this client has an event every Wednesday and his traffic graph every Wednesday looks like that and I’ll show you we search traffic graph. Just keep that one in mind, have a look at this. So the pulse that you will see here in this wave, this is a Wednesday, these are Wednesdays. Tuesday nights and Wednesdays and if we then go and have a look at the crawl stats and this is pages crawled per day.

You can see that it’s happening on or around the same day. So Google is coming in to the site, crawling it, and indexing when it is most popular. So there are a number of ways that Google could be doing that but I think the message for me here is be popular because Google knows that you’re popular. I switched the lights off and everything. Anyway, it’s all I wanted to say. See you next week for the final show for the year. Thanks guys. Bye.