Mobile website strategy

[echo1]

Hello all! This question is about mobile websites. Any suggestions are welcomed.

The facts: We have recently built a mobile website for our business using the separate mobile urls (parallel mobile website on a m. sub-domain). We are in the service industry and while our customers are most of the time on the go, it is important for them to find the price and order the service as fast and easy as possible. The redirect from desktop to mobile happens when customers are accessing the website with a mobile devices and it's done automatically. The mobile version does not have any content and serves only as a search and order function. The SEO has been made for the desktop website only and we are ranking really well for all competitive keywords in our niche. We want to keep the mobile website simple and clean so we are not planning to add any content on it.The questions:

• Since we are not planning to have much content on the mobile website, do we need to do any SEO for it? If yes, why? What are the benefits?
• Should we add content on the mobile website and why?
• Is there any down-side from an SEO perspective due to the fact that the website redirects to the mobile version? How are the inbound links going to behave in this case?
• Do we need to link these two websites although there is no risk about duplicate content? (links, canonical tags, sitemaps)
• Will the mobile website take advantage of the link building made for the desktop version?
• Should we allow the mobile website to be indexed having the fact that this is just a search & book tool? (at the moment it is blocked via robots.txt)

Thanks for reading, looking forward to your answers.

[KyleJack]

Hello Echo,

If you are finding that there is demand for a mobile version of your website you should definitely reconsider your approach and think about adding mobile specific content. If your customers are buying on the move, they're certainly browsing on the move. While you shouldn't shift focus on directing your customers to your products you could also provide a secondary avenue for them by a way of content to engage them and increase the overall profile of your site. Of course, this comes at an expense so that is for you to judge.

If you are using client user-agent detection (and it sounds like you are) to direct visitors to your m.site there should be no down-site in terms of SEO because of the redirect. Inbound links won't redirect as they are not detected by the user-agent.

If you are sure there is no duplicate content (you might want to double check your product pages etc for this) then it shouldn't be _necessary _to "link" them.

The m.site won't benefit in any significant way from linkbuilding you make to the desktop site as the m.site sits on a subdomain. Without any content, however, it's unlikely your m.site will ever rank anyway so this point is moot.

Given the above, I would keep the m.site blocked unless you want to seek an improvement to it.

K