Comment on SEO AdSense WordPress Theme by Erik.

AdSense Publisher ID I’ve been off this message board for many months now, but I thought I’d chime in on this topic. Mobile readiness is something I’ve been wondering about too. I had not paid much attention to treating mobile visitors any differently. However I recently checked via analytics how many of my monthly visits are from mobile devices. I was surprised to find that it was tens of thousands of visits, roughly 1/3 of my total visits (I had suspected it might be in the 10-15% range…). It seems this is the wave of things to come…even for traffic to my decidedly non-techie site.

One thing I notice in my analytics stats is that the mobile visitors to my site have a significantly lower pageview average and time on site, and a significantly higher bounce rate.

I do not know if this reflects the type of visitor (ie, mobile users perhaps being more impatient), or the experience they are having. The next question is whether the experience would be improved and thus result in higher on-site time if I had a mobile version of my site. I have heard anecdotally from a few visitors that they don’t mind accessing my site via the traditional view on their mobile devices. Still, I wonder if it would be more conducive to user experience to have a mobile version and thus improve these metrics (I suspect yes).

I also am not sure what effect this would have on ad performance. I recently received correspondence from the Big G encouraging designing a mobile-ready site, along with suggested ad placements. So that’s another unknown.

I too have seen mobile plugins available for WordPress but have hesitated to use them. The main reason is that I don’t want to lose the great SEO that Stallion offers over 1/3 of my traffic (which I am assuming is what would happen, as these plugins seem to work by serving a totally different theme–though perhaps I am wrong on the SEO impact–not sure how a search engine “reads” a site and serves mobile results–based on the “base version” of the site or the mobile version, if that makes sense).

Kind of a rambling message covering a lot of bases, but I guess it’s my way of asking what you think about mobile Dave, and whether any plug-in you know of would suffice, or if we’d need something more integrated with the Stallion architecture.

I’m really satisfied with the theme, but just trying to think ahead a bit (although it seems my thinking ahead is not really that much “ahead”, with mobile seeming to have arrived in a pretty big way already :) ).

Anyway, hope you are doing well, and thanks for all your hard work.

Erik