David Roth - SearchFest 2015 SpeakerDavid Roth will be speaking on “Mobile Search” at SearchFest 2015 which will take place Friday, February 27, 2015 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’m the CEO of Emergent Digital. We’re a digital marketing agency for good, meaning we seek to serve clients who are in business to improve the world around us. We work for nonprofits, educational institutions and purpose-driven companies in verticals like sustainable energy and social change. My background extends to the very early days of search marketing in 1999, and more recently I’ve gained experience in the emerging digital channels like social, mobile, and content marketing. I’ve been fortunate to work in-house at companies like Yahoo and at realtor.com, and I’m fascinated by analytics and emerging media.

2) How does a poor mobile site experience impact mobile search engine rankings?
In general, poor site experience hurts search engine rankings. This has really taken hold since google released the chrome browser and could then see actual user behavior on the website. We’ve seen a surge of UX-related algorithm factors pop up over there past few years as a result. Things like site speed, time on site, return visits, all these play a role in rankings. So now that mobile plays such a big role on the web, think about it like these factors also applying to mobile. Poor mobile user experience means poor mobile search rankings, all other things being equal.

3) Are the companies that have a separate mobile website hurting themselves in search rankings?
Not necessarily. All the buzz is around responsive design these days and yes, it’s great if you can design a truly responsive site because a) you only have to maintain a single code base and b) search engines only have to crawl and index a single site. That said, there are plenty of examples out there of brands that have separate desktop and mobile sites that aren’t hurting themselves. Some sites lend themselves more naturally to responsive design than others. For example, data-rich sites like realtor.com (my previous employer) have a much harder time delivering the same dataset to users on desktop and mobile, simply because of the sheer volume of information they’re promising to deliver to the user. The bst rule of thumb here is to strive to deliver the best experience to users on all devices, and based on your own technological and resource constraints, choose the mobile web development strategy that works best for you.

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