Cindy Krum will be speaking on Mobile Search at SearchFest 2016, which is being held March 10th, 2016 at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I am the CEO & founder of MobileMoxie, which is based in Denver, CO. We do mobile SEO and App SEO strategy and consulting. We are also developing a set of web tools for SEO’s. Marketers & Developers who need help with ‘mobile’. In addition to working on client projects, over-seeing the tool development projects, delivering in-house mobile training seminars, I speak at domestic and international digital marketing conferences, and write whenever I can.
2) Where is Google going with app indexing and will it change the paradigm of (Mobile) “Web First”?
I just completed a long article that covers a lot of topics that I am passionate on, related to this question, so hopefully we can link to it, and I will try and keep my response here brief! I am very passionate about mobile, and its ability to democratize internet access, even in places where digital technology is scares, and mobile internet connections are slow. Information and communication are empowering – Obviously I am a marketer, and I want to help clients make money, but I also hope to make the web a better over-all experience on mobile.
I am excited about AMP pages and App Streaming, and all the other things on the horizon for mobile. I do think that App Indexing is a game changer, mostly because I think it will disconnect the apps from the OS, so any app that can be streamed over the web will work on any phone. I have a sneaking suspicion that Google will launch App Streaming in Chrome only, in order to gain market share on iOS devices, and because it might just be harder to ensure a good experience on a browser that they don’t control. Also, it would give Android users more access to the iOS catalogue of apps. This is important, since lots of app developers focused on iOS apps first, and some have still not bothered to develop an Android app.
Never the less, even with whatever limitations there are, OS-independent apps will be great for users and developers, great for Google, and great for Deep linking. Once we have streaming apps that will make it a lot easier for Google to surface deep links, knowing that users will be able to access the content (as long as they are on Chrome & WiFi). Google may also begin to preference deep links to apps, at different connection speeds, or if apps appear to be a better user experience than the website – especially important on new connected devices like watches and cars, where apps are often a better/faster experience than Responsive Design websites. At this point, I think the concept of ‘Mobile First’ is even a bit passé, though many companies still have not embraced it. The reality is ‘Cross-Device First.’ People move seamlessly between devices, and between app and web, and successful brands must do the same.
3) How will Google Amp change the mobile landscape?
I see AMP as a mixed blessing. If you have not checked them out, they are SUPER fast, and that is very exciting (Click this link from your phone & test search a news story, to check it out). The less exciting part about AMP is the need to develop and manage another set of mobile-specific pages, and manage attribution, ad pricing and the like accordingly. It feels a bit like a bait and switch, because lots of news sites just recently completed redesigns, to eliminate the mobile-specific ‘mDot’ domains, and go to responsive. From a practical perspective, AMP pages are just a stand-in for a really great mDot site (if that ever existed). The difference is in the back-end technology, which is admittedly, really cool! Still, part of me is already anticipating that Google will use websites that participated in the initial AMP project to develop a machine learning algorithm that compares regular pages with AMP pages, then use that learning to improve the mobile transcoding that is being used in Google Lite Web at the browser level. If that happened, eventually all pages could benefit, and at least have a dash of AMP ‘flavor’ in their rendering process. I also wonder if the active caching and compression used in the AMP page serving was originally developed to be used in the App Streaming project, or if the knowledge in the two projects was actively cross-applied. It is certainly a fascinating time to be in mobile!
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.
