Mobile phones in Europe have reached 110% saturation, with some countries at 120 or 140%. In Asia, Taiwan and Hong Kong are at 140% saturation, and China adds at least 6 million new mobile phones every month. India also adds another 7 million phones each month. In the US, mobile phones are only at 75%. Many other countries have saturations above 90%. Even Iceland, which as the highest per capita mobile phone saturation in the world! Clearly, the mobile phone market is huge and still has much more room to grow. This also means that mobile search around the world is a growing industry, and becoming increasingly more important as people use their phones to access email, the internet, and search engines.

So how can your website take advantage of mobile search, both locally and internationally? Here are some tips:

• Get listed in local directories. You can’t maximize your ability to be found in local searches if you’re not listed as being, well, in your location. Business listings, directories, and local search websites are good places to put your name, website, and a description of your services.
• Build a mobile friendly website or have a site that is friendly to mobile browsers. Some websites can spare the expense and build a separate site that is just for viewing on mobile browsers. If you’re not able to do that, make sure your site is uses 100% valid XHTML and follow WC3’s Accessibility Initiative to ensure that any browser won’t have any issues with your website. (Hat tip to Andy at Mobile Search Marketing for the coding tips.)
• Use good SEO on your website. Good SEO practices will also help you get found in mobile search engines as well as traditional ones. Make sure you’ve got good keywords, with location variations as necessary. Keep your source code as clean as possible, and make sure the design of the page has good usability.

Mobile search is still a very young market, but there’s a lot of growth and activity in the industry. In the next few years it will be a very important part of internet marketing, as more and more consumers have access to the technology. Getting into it now can help you get that all important foot in the door and develop a sold mobile search strategy.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 12:41 pm and is filed under International SEO, Local Search, Mobile Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.