Mobile technology, more specifically mobile apps have hit the market by storm. Top mobile apps have over a hundred million downloads. The mobile industry has essentially become the second internet. Instead of searching for your web browser for services, you can search through your phone. The Google Play Store sells hundreds of thousands of mobile applications each providing a unique service. Hundreds of new ones are released each day. This type of traffic cannot be overlooked.

Mobile technologies have reshaped the search engine landscape. For example, your website must be mobile optimized otherwise it will not be ranked high by Google. This is because Google recognizes the high volumes of traffic from mobile users every day. It will not allow you to simply run a website that runs on desktop only if you want high rankings.

Millions use the Google search app for their news feed. Mobile users simply click Google to search for something, and they are immediately shown a list of the highest searched words at that given moment. Millions click on this multiplying the effect. This can double the amount of traffic sent to your website if you go viral.

Local listings are far more prevalent with mobile users. Most phone users have their address recorded in the Google GPS. Anything they type or search in automatically is filtered first to see if anything related to their search is around them. This is extremely important when it comes to optimizing your SEO for certain locations. If Google recognizes your business as something useful even for a small town, it will show up first. Lots of traffic can be generated by optimizing your local SEO.

Here is something interesting. If your business / website has the words “download” or “app” involved in it, it will not be the first thing that always comes up. Mobile apps will be. The competition is much higher here. You are competing with the entire mobile app market.

Lastly, we have altered search results due to the differences in how people search for things on mobile vs desktop. On mobile, people are looking for on the go answers so they will type things out differently. On the desktop, people will search for things in more detail. The mobile users will find many ways to shorten their search inquiries in efforts to spend less time manually typing for things on the phone screen.

These are just a few important examples of how mobile apps are changing search engine optimization.