Steve Jobs introduced the newest version of the iPhone to open Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco earlier today. The iPhone 3G, will be released in 22 major countries on July 11. According to reports from the conference and on Apple’s website, the new iPhone will be twice as fast as the previous version and come at half the cost.
The most interesting thing, from a search marketer’s perspective, about the iPhone 3G hasn’t actually happened yet. With a far more powerful signal and much speedier data transfer rates, the iPhone 3G is poised to be the device that pushes a critical mass of North American consumers to regularly access the web via their mobile devices. At the same time, the absurdly exorbitant data-rates charged by North American mobile providers are coming down rapidly; faster in the US than in Canada.
Less expensive products and services plus faster, more reliable connectivity should equal greater user adoption rates. In other words, if the reality lives up to even half the hype, the advent of the iPhone 3G and its RIM built counterpart the 3G BlackBerry, might be disruptive enough to redefine our personal relationships with computing.
What would that mean for search marketers and SEOs? For one thing, it means more work. How much that extra work will change the nature of SEO as a service is probably the better question. Local search and mobile search are soon to be synonymous.
Hand-held search is a fantastic innovation. Ever been lost in a strange city needing to be somewhere very soon? I can’t think of the number of times truly functional hand-held local search and mapping features would have saved a lot of frustration in my life.
Even better… have you ever been in a busy shopping mall in a strange city at 3PM on December 23rd? Imagine you’re spending the holidays at your in-laws’ place and you have absolutely no idea what to get your mother-in-law, much less where to get it. Literally tens of millions of techno-consumers in North America are waiting for something to such moments infinitely easier.
Information is most useful if you can get it when you need it. Maps attached to search results and explicit directions offered by social networked gift registries will combine in a hand-held world to push SEOs to focus on optimizing local search listings. In the shopping mall example above, a small business operation could easily compete for attention with the big-box store, a benefit most small shops don’t see at 3PM on the 23rd of December.
Interestingly, more work will be done to bring information to a much smaller screen. The design and placement of calls to action such as links, images and buttons will be rethought as hand-held users demonstrate their preferences. Odd as this might seem, hand-held devices make the design and conversion process simpler.
Local search is most often about research and physical purchase. Somebody needs something or another and want to know where to get it. They don’t want to wait for a courier to show up and deliver the item, they want it now. Designers and SEOs simply need to let the consumer know that they can get said (and similar) items within 10Km of their present location. That means making information about unique product items available along with general information about the local business.
Local search, from the point of view of the searcher, is about products, planning and purchase. Local search makes finding specific stuff faster. When enough hand-held users take advantage of that convenience, every small business with brains will jump on-board.
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