One of the lesser known debates on the web, yet still hot; why? Because people still want to decide whether to completely separate the marketing of all things mobile at all or not. There is the developmental argument to these sites which is still placed inherently within every digital marketer’s psyche, and then there is the actual dynamic of using a mobile URL. In most cases, the perception of the client is fundamentally important; their brand of reasoning flows with those of major brands – if Amazon has a mobile URL then their online business should have one too.
A brief look back at the reason
Conventionally speaking, the development of mobile websites trended because of the difference in resolution between desktops and smartphones and tablets. Resolution optimization and resizing became a big deal as smartphone marketing picked pace in the last decade. And now almost every business is going with a separate mobile URL.
This makes sense. But now when smartphones have become a commodity even more common than desktops and laptops, the separation of mobile and desktop website development seems unwise and unnecessary, given the time constraints. Just think of this argument in the context that now, any website created whether via HTML conversion or through WordPress will be streamed, scrolled and logged on at with a smartphone. That is just a factual observation so by ad-hoc you have to make the website be scalable in terms of page size and resolution.
The SEO’s vision
The one thing that SEOs want to get done with is their marketing plan for each page and sorting the keywords that they have to target. An additional mobile URL adds more pages and more keywords for the SEOs to target even though the marketing campaign might be the same.
A one URL solution has its own dynamics related to marketing and while SEOs love the challenge of being able to tackle more keywords within more pages, it makes things easier if the marketing is handled within one uniformly framed method of URL delivery.
The separation is a dynamic process and a lot of marketers do enjoy taking the challenge because it means a more diverse traffic if the campaign becomes a success.
On the other hand the mobile URL does give them the ease to target campaigns that specifically cater to an audience that is more likely to use a smartphone. This usually revolves around buyers of a certain niche or clients of a certain subject area who businesses are too flexible to simply be optimized or marketed properly via standard URLs. The ranking dynamics are in place still so the one URL methodology probably appeals to more SEOs because it allows them to focus more on a unified marketing approach.
User’s perspective
Simply put, the user will log onto a site via their mobiles or their tablets. So the site that runs on mobile devices has to exist. Whether this will be achieved through an independent mobile URL is something the developers planning entity has to decide. The user however wants to be able to work with links that are operational across any device. I mean think about it, in your normative business parlance, seldom are people rooted to a spot and just typing away on their keyboards. The decision makers are especially mobile and want to be able to port multiple information sources across many devices so it only makes sense to have a development plan from the very beginning that serves their purpose.
Things such as slow loading and device specific searching are also something which users do not want. That is again just part of the basic psychology of the user; they want to deal with less complexity,
Having framed all that the users still want the site to be displayed perfectly across each device, which again just adds more challenges to the development spectrum. But these are all dynamics we have to master if our business service is to be considered as worthy in today’s market.
Summing it up
There are plenty of development methods available to adopt either methodology. Again the point of this article is not to favor one kind of URL over the other but present an outlook as to what each user and each stakeholder thinks within the website design industry. You can cater to the needs of all within either methodology but it does require more grounding in the subject matter and the dynamics of development when adopting the method. When it is all said and done: your consistency and innovation might actually be the decisive factors in making your business a hit.
