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She suggested there were three things on which to focus:

• A mobile optimised website.
• Search and discovery.
• Reaching your customers where they are.

And here’s a run through of those three main points in more detail…

Mobile optimised site

The argument over whether small businesses should opt for a mobile site or an app is fairly irrelevant as if you can only afford one or the other then a mobile site will almost definitely provide more value to your business.

There’s possibly an exception if your business is heavily reliant on repeat trade, but in the vast majority of cases a mobile site is the best option.

Unfortunately the situation is complicated further by the fact that there are three possible methods of creating a mobile optimised site:

• Responsive design. This rearranges the layout of the page depending on the screen size.
• Dynamic serving. This method serves different HTML using the same URL.
• Separate mobile subdomain. For example, an m.domain.com site. 

In a perfect world businesses should make a decision on which option to go for based on their goals, technical capabilities and the user’s needs.

However for most SMEs with small websites Randolph recommended using a responsive template and a CMS like Wordpress. Site owners can then buy individual Wordpress themes, such as:

• Designfolio (from Presscoders): free, or $79 with a support licence.
• Responsive (from CyberChimps): free.

Alternatively, there are also premium Wordpress theme providers:

• Elegant themes: $40 per year with full support.
• WooThemes: prices range from free up to $70.

However, for business owners that don’t wish to use Wordpress there are a few other options: 

• SquareSpace: from $8 per month
• Wix: from $10 per month.

Obviously budget is often an issue for SMEs so a mobile site might not be an option in the short term. In which case Randolph recommended instead focusing on maintaining business pages on Facebook and Google+ as those are already mobile optimised.

It’s also important to remember that a mobile optimised site isn’t a mobile strategy in itself, it’s merely the starting point.

Search and discovery

Step two of the process requires small businesses to optimise for mobile SEO and local search.

Mobile SEO 

If a business has used responsive design then it doesn’t need to take any additional action. But site owners using dynamic serving need to vary the HTTP header in order to tell search engines that mobile visitors should be shown a different version of the site.

Finally, for separate URLs there are several different areas to look at, details of which are covered in a blog post by Randolph.

Local search

Brick-and-mortar stores and businesses that serve a specific geographic location or city cannot afford to ignore local search, as local listings are given far more prominence in mobile SERPs.

Furthermore, statistics from Google show that 40% of mobile searches have local intent and more than half (55%) of conversions from mobile search take place within the hour.

Ranking factors for local search include on-page optimisation for location (e.g. naming the business location prominently on the page) and whether or not a business appears in respectable local listing sites, such as Bing Local or Yelp.

Google+ Local is also an important consideration and shouldn’t be confused with a basic Google+ profile page. Businesses need to create profiles on both platforms and merge them.

Other local search factors include:

• Linkbuilding from local sites, such as news organisations, government sites or blogs.
• Consistent citations on other sites, so consider using Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder Tool to ensure that all references include the same business name, address and phone number.
• Quality, useful images to illustrate local listings.
• Structured data. Use the hCard markup and a KML file for Google Maps.
• Reviews and recommendations in Yelp, Google+ Local, Foursquare, TripAdvisor or Zagat.

Reaching your customers

The third and final part of Randolph’s talk focused on how SMEs can actively target their customers using mobile, rather just waiting to be found.

There are three potential methods of doing this – apps, exclusive mobile content and email.

Apps

As previously mentioned, it’s highly unlikely that small businesses will require a dedicated mobile app unless they rely on frequent return visits. But for those considering building an app there are two main options to choose between:

• Native app: such as an iOS or Android app
• Web app: built in HTML5.

There are various pros and cons for each method (covered in more detail in Randolph’s Slideshare presentation) but in general native apps are more expensive but are faster with better functionality, while web apps are cheaper and easier to maintain but can’t be accessed offline and don’t feature in the various app stores.

Randolph also highlighted several cost effective methods for creating apps:

• Bizness Apps: from $59 per month for native apps.
• ViziApps: from £29 per month for web apps or £99 per month for native apps.
• AppMakr: free native Android apps (with ads) or ad-free iPhone and Android apps for $9 per month.
• RedFoundry: contact for a quote.

Exclusive mobile content

Offering customers unique mobile content involves tactics such as exclusive offers or a loyalty app.

This is a route we’ve seen many major retailers go down, with both Game and B&Q launching loyalty apps that help to drive footfall to brick-and-mortar stores and also help to join up the offline and in-store experience.

Apps also allow brands to send push notifications to target customers with special offers, however very few brands take advantage of this tool. I have a number of retail apps on my phone but only Debenhams and B&Q have ever sent a push notification.

Email

Mobile email is a hugely important consideration for all size businesses as studies show that 41% of all email is opened on mobile devices.

As such, if your business uses email marketing then it’s important to use mobile optimised email templates. There are a number of email services that provide these templates, including:

• MailChimp: from $10 per month.
• Campaign Monitor: from $10 per month or $5 per campaign.

And if you don’t want to use their full service then it’s possible to use these providers to build an email and then export the HTML.

CSR’s important to us, but instead of spreading our charity across many different avenues, we choose to support just one: the Hannah Memorial Academy.

Developing the microsite

The first stage was to create the Vuelta a Hotwire y 33 Digital microsite. Rather than just offering an opportunity to find the same information as stored on our event’s JustGiving page, we wanted to ensure that it was something worth visiting, engaging with and sharing.

We put simplicity at the heart of design of the microsite. We used a Creative Commons-sourced image for the background image to save on costs of image rights, and used our internal designer to create a logo, which was used as the main branding for the project.

The idea was to create something that engaged the audience while the cyclists were embarking on their journey. There were four elements of the page for the audience to engage and interact with. 

1. The livestream. By hosting a livestream of the cyclists in action, it allowed for followers, friends and family to watch the cyclists as they embarked on the journey.

   We opted to use Google Hangouts for any extra level of engagement through conversation as the bike rides went on.

2. The map. It was important to show the distance travelled throughout the journey. The initial plan, had we had a larger budget, was to have a bike that updated in real time for each kilometre pedalled.

   Given the lack of API on the exercise bikes and the limited budget to develop server-side scripting, we opted for the ‘light’ approach, which was to update the coordinates regularly throughout the day. 

   With each update to the coordinates, we provided visitors with fun facts about where we were staying that night.

3. Tweet your support. In our office; next to the bikes was a large TV screen connected to a laptop, displaying a Twitter wall (we used Twitter Fontana) of the hashtag #HotwireFit.

   The ‘Tweet your support’ button at the bottom of the microsite provided a pre-written tweet using the hashtag to offer messages of support to the cyclists on their route.

    

4. The cyclists’ Spotify playlist. The final idea was to put together the team’s perfect mix to exercise to. While the Hotwire radio played throughout the office, many took on their gym routine of putting earphones in and cycling away.

   So we polled the cyclists for their favourite songs to work out to, compiled them in a Spotify playlist and shared it on the site.

The microsite was hosted on a subdirectory of the UK Hotwire website, so from an SEO perspective, any links gained throughout the project would be beneficial to the main Hotwire website.

Social strategy

With the microsite established, we then promoted it and the event through Twitter and Facebook by regularly sharing photographs of the cycling teams, as well as status updates on both the distance travelled and the sponsorship received.

The results

• By Wednesday, half way through the project, we hit our target of £1,000. The vast majority of this had been gained since the official microsite launch at the start of the week. Total donations reached over 50% higher by deadline.
• Direct correlation between peak times visiting microsite and donating.
   
• The most engaged users came from the JustGiving page, who at peak days would on average stay on the site for 13 minutes, compared to a microsite-wide average of 10.
• There was a 220% increase in post reach on Facebook, along with an 81% increase week-to-week in engagement, with 83 photo likes.
• 385 total tweets to the #HotwireFit hashtag, resulting in 287,398 impressions, 486 unique visitors, with 958 visits in total across the week.
• Coverage in PRWeek, Gorkana and AMEC, which all mentioned the digital elements.

What we’ve learned

What could have been a very traditional charity approach, where people relied only on asking friends and family for sponsorship, became an engaging and highly successful digital project.

The microsite provided a level of interaction after the donation stage. These visitors were the most engaged users the site received, were more likely to remain on the site for longer, and more likely to tweet messages of support. 

For small projects, especially small-scale charity projects, where budget is limited, digital marketing can be incredibly beneficial.

We were able to dramatically improve the experience for those involved, exceed our donation target by 50%, and find a direct relationship between our digital marketing efforts and the all important outcomes and metrics of success: donations and engagement.

Posted by Aleyda

One of the challenges that International SEOs face is correctly targeting the right web presence to the appropriate search audience. Let’s start with a couple of scenarios with these challenges so you can see clearly what I’m talking about.

If I search from a Mexican IP (using a Proxy service, to simulate being in Mexico) in Google Mexico for “comprar zapatos en linea,” which in English means “buy shoes online” I get the following results:

As you can see, Dafiti has a Mexican website version that is ranking no. 1, which is relevant in this case; but also has a Colombian version ranking no. 3 and an Argentinian version ranking no. 7. All of them are using ccTLDs, which should “ideally” give geolocation signals to Google. Additionally, there’s a Spain site ranking no. 2 called Sarenza, also using a ccTLD.

Here’s another example, this time for a couple of branded searches, first only for the brand, “edreams” in this case, which is a popular travel site with a strong international presence and then for “vuelos edreams,” which in English means “edreams flights:”

In the previous image you can see how:

1. For its brand name results, despite being searched from Google Mexico with a Mexican IP, the first result is actually the Spain web version and the second is the American one! The Mexican web version—the relevant one for this location—is ranked third.
2. For the “vuelos edreams” branded search, the Mexican web page version ranks first (yay!) but the second result shows a webpage that belongs to their Spain site.

How can you identify that you have an international search results alignment issue like the ones shown above?

The easiest way is to take a look in Google Analytics at which countries your organic search traffic is coming from, by going to the “Audience > Demographics > Location” report (along the appropriate organic search segment) and identifying which landing pages and keywords are bringing those visitors. You can do something similar with the language, with the “Audience > Demographics > Language” report.

You can also verify potential misalignment issues of any website, by checking their top rankings in the different Google international search results (not only your own but any site, which is great if you want to analyze the competition) by using Search Metrics and SEMRush. For example, checking the rankings of the Spain version of eDreams in Google Mexico:

What can we do to prevent those issues? How can we avoid ranking with the incorrect web version in some international search results, or cannibalizing them with many non-relevant Web versions? How can we provide a relevantly targeted web version to the right international audience?

The rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” annotation came to the rescue, initially released at the end of 2011 and updated in April of this year to support the x-default value. It’s used by Google (and Yandex too) to correctly identify the language and the country targeting of web pages, that can include them as a link element in the HTML head area, in the HTTP header or XML sitemap.

So why can we still see the misalignment issues in international search results, as the ones shown in the previous examples?

From my experience, most of the time Google does a good job in these scenarios when the hreflang annotations are correctly included. You can take a look at:

• The hreflang case study (and success story) that was shared by Saurav, a SEER coworker
• The success story published by Pete from the MediaFlow
• The test developed by Grosen and featured on the State of Search blog

Nonetheless, many sites are still not making use of the hreflang annotations. Some of the issues I’ve seen come from the fact that sometimes we don’t correctly use the hreflang annotations.

Take a look at the number of questions about hreflang in the Moz Q&A Forum and Google’s Internationalization Webmaster Forum; there are still clearly many doubts about how to use it.

One of the error scenarios is the misuse of the hreflang link element by including non-supported values, especially for the region, in the HTML’s <head> area. Google specifies in its official documentation that they support the ISO 639-1 format for the language, and optionally the ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format for the region.

Let’s use the web code search engine Nerdy Data to find sites that, instead of including the “en-gb” value to specify that a page is in English targeting the UK (since the ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 code for the UK is “GB”), are mistakenly including “en-uk”:

Or, as another example, pages that are including “en-eu” to specify they’re in English and targeting to the European Union (the “EU” code in this case is not supported, since regions are limited to countries):

You can see more specifically the case of Hollister—that was shown in both of the previous cases in the Nerdy Data results—how they’re targeting the UK with the “en-uk” value and also, for their general English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish versions targeting to the European Union, they add the “eu” value for the region, which is not supported:

As you can see, although we already have a couple of tools that facilitate the hreflang validation and its inclusion in sitemaps (check out the hreflang validator from DejanSEO and the hreflang sitemap tool from the Media Flow) it would be useful to have another, even simpler tool, that would serve to generate the required hreflang tags according to the languages and countries, thus helping us to avoid the previous issues.

To fill this need, I’ve published the hreflang tags generator tool:

The tool’s goal is to assist you in the generation of the correct hreflang annotations for the different language or country versions of a specific page. You will need to place these in the HTML <head> area of each of its URLs, and that will serve as a reference to generate the rest of the hreflang tags for all of your site pages, with the correct syntax and formats.

When you generate the hreflang annotations the tool allows you to copy/paste the results or download them as a CSV file, so it’s easier to use than other tools, too:

This is only the first version of the tool, and I’m already planning to include more functionality to assist with hreflang annotation generation on a massive scale. If you find any issues with it, or any feedback or ideas, please contact me via Twitter or send me an email at aleydasolis at gmail.

I hope the tool, although very simple, can be helpful to clarify the doubts about how to generate the correct hreflang annotations in your specific case. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments!

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