Despite the impressive growth and success of mobile device advertising, there still remain marketers who have yet to recognize the increasing importance of reaching consumers when they’re on the go. It wasn’t until the recent back to school season that retailers started to more heavily pursue customers through the device on which they spend the majority of their time.

Retailers such as Target, Kmart, JCPenny, Kohl’s, Best Buy and Sears rolled out mobile marketing initiatives in time to reach their customer prior to the busy back to school shopping season. These retailers are just a handful of those who have begun to offer mobile coupons, send text promotion alerts and promote their mobile sites all in an effort to gain more visibility and revenue.

Mobile coupons can help to increase the frequency of current customers using your product or service.  In order for customers to receive current coupons, they must first voluntarily opt-in to receiving promotions. Mobile coupons will allow you to get loyal customers to purchase from you more frequently. Rewarding current customers for their faithfulness by sending special mobile promotions gives them more of a reason to maintain a relationship with you and keep you at the forefront for future purchases. 

According to Borrell Associates, the 2010 U.S. Local Mobile Advertising & Promotions Forecast estimates that mobile coupon spending will grow from $90 million in 2009 to $6.52 billion in the next four years. It is expected that customers will buy $2.1 billion worth of goods and services using their mobile phones this year, which is a huge jump from $400 million in sales via mobile phone in 2008. Now more then ever is the time to tap into the ever emerging mobile promotion world.

If gaining or maintaining a strong Natural Search presence for your website is in part your responsibility, then it’s essential to understand the additional elements that drive SEO results today.

The best way I can think of to describe the evolution of SEO is that the playing field has gone from singularly to multi-dimensional. The basics of intelligent site architecture and navigation still matter, as do keywords, content, meta data and alt tags, but there are so many other factors.

Google’s clear-cut direction for their search engine results pages is all-inclusive. Content is encouraged, be it blog posts, images, video, tweets, etc. The more relevant and frequent the content that a website contributes, the greater the likelihood that Google & Bing (Yahoo) will rank your site favorably.

That said, quality content is not self generating, which is the gotcha. It requires a roadmap and accountability for execution. Take your eye off the ball and you’ll go weeks or months without any meaningful addition to the breadth of your website.  Identify and prioritize the content you are intending to develop, assign responsibility for creating it to multiple team members and hold them accountable to due dates.

Lastly, another new aspect that needs to be taken seriously is the fact that Google is now evaluating your page “load time” as a component of their algorithm. So it’s imperative that the page be constructed in a proper way.  Otherwise, the content I am encouraging you to incorporate may hold you back more than it helps you.

Those familiar with the search engine landscape have probably noticed that in most cases only one or two lines per website will display in the search engine results pages of Google.  Well, the days of having only one or two listing per website has come to an end… for specific keyword phrases at least.

Google recently announced on their Webmaster Central blog that they will now be showing more results per domain.  Google has always stated that their goal is to provide relevant results as quickly as possible to a searcher.  With this recent update, they hope that users will now be able to find what they are looking for faster than before.

A handful of listings for one domain will appear for a single search query when the user searches for a keyword or phrase that indicates that they have a strong interest in a particular domain. For example, if you conduct a search for “Search Engine Land”, you will likely see a results page similar to the one below.  (Notice how many listings lead you to the Search Engine Land website.)

This change has some pros and cons for marketers.  If you want to capture traffic from a competitor and someone specifies in a search your competitor’s name, it could possibly be harder than before to capture visits to your website via organic search from these types of search queries.  This could be good, on the other hand, when users are searching for keywords that are specific to your website.  In this case, you have even greater potential to capture this traffic, as your domain will be able to practically own the first page of listings! 

We’ll be keeping an eye on how this impacts clients and we encourage you to do the same for you own website!