Jenny Halasz, SEO Manager for Acronym Media, provided some good best practices tips for how to manage a local mobile ad campaign yesterday at SMX Local. Without further ado, here they are:

1. Use tel tags on your phone numbers so that mobile users can click on them to make a call

2. Make sure your pages are XTHM compliant

3. Put your business address on a single line. It’s more likely to be recognized as an address this way when transposed by a robot.

4. All pages should be no more than 3 clicks away from the home page

5. Minimize the use of flash and images

6. Minimize file sizes

7. Use external CSS to reduce the amount of code on the page

8. Make sure you have clear navigation. Use CSS or Javascript to put the navigation below the content in the code so users can get to the content right away without having to scroll through the navigation.

9. If you have a low budget consider cheap ways to get your content mobile – Create a RSS feed, submit to Google Local Business Center (and you’re more likely to show up on GOOG411).

10. If you have a bigger budget, create a mobile-specific site on a new subdomain (e.g. m.yoursite.com. Target local-specific searches as these are a popular form of mobile search. Advertise on paid mobile networks like1-800-Free-411.

Share This Story!

About Author

5 Response Comments

  • Jenny Halasz  October 2, 2007 at 8:54 am

    Thanks for the great recap, Andrew. One comment: It’s actually not possible to submit to GOOG411- they use the top eight results from web search. But you can – and should! – submit to G Local Business Center. 🙂

  • Michael Dorausch  October 2, 2007 at 8:56 am

    Thanks for keeping us up to date on what’s going on in Denver Andrew.

    A subdomain for a mobile version of a site sounds like a great idea. While I haven’t launched it yet, I’m leaning towards m.yoursite.com instead of mobile.yoursite.com since its easier to peck out on my handheld.

  • Andrew Shotland  October 2, 2007 at 9:03 am

    Thanks for clarifying Jenny. I have made the change.

    Michael, m.site.com is definitely better. I lost a little something in the transposing. I’ll change it.

  • Michael Sharon  October 8, 2007 at 12:30 pm

    Andrew,

    Great site! Just wanted to point out a couple of things:

    1. For mobile web – your sites should be XHTML-MP or Basic compliant. Check out Luca Passani’s Global Authoring Practices document for more details – http://www.passani.it/gap/

    2. Using the “tel://” syntax on a phone number will not work in the majority of phones out there. Only the recently released iPhone supports this syntax. Most other devices support the slightly more painful (and obscure) WTAI syntax – which is usually used in this form: href=”wtai://wp/mc;8015551212″ – to dial 801-555-1212 for example.

    Check out this site for more details:
    http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2007/06/14/make-phone-numbers-clickable-to-dial-on-mobile-phones/

    Cheers

    Michael

  • Andrew Shotland  October 8, 2007 at 12:50 pm

    Thanks for the tips Michael.