Update, 2/21/2009:
- This post was nominated for a SEMMY in 2009!:
- The JumpTap keyword tool no longer exists, but marketers looking to improve their visibility to mobile searchers through mobile keyword research may find these related posts helpful:Mobile SEO’s Guide to Mobile Keyword Research, 11/3/2008
In my attempt to understand how mobile keyword research differs from keyword research for the World Wide Web, I took a look at the top mobile queries in AT&T’s Beyond MEdia Net search engine
from September 07 as displayed in the public JumpTap Mobile Keyword Tool at AT&T
devCentral. What follows are those top 100 mobile keywords by volume, followed by breakdowns by subject and query intent. Analysis of these mobile queries led to a few surprising learnings, and
some best practices for marketers doing mobile keyword research.
Mobile Web Versus WWWeb Queries
The JumpTap Mobile Keyword Tool on AT&T’s Mobile Developer platform shows mobile
searches from AT&T’s Beyond MediaNet mobile search engine. When a character is put into the
keyword tool it returns the ten mobile queries with the highest search volume during the month of September 2007 that contain that character. Inputting the alphabet and the numbers 0-9 produces, if
not an exact representation of the most popular queries in the index, then certainly a close approximation. Duplicates were removed before the data was categorized with the Live Search ad intelligence tool, and web search volume was added for the sake of comparison. When the Ad Intelligence tool
did not return a category or returned an obviously inaccurate category, the keyword was categorized using ODP categories. Query intent was defined using the method
set forth in Determining the User Intent of Web Search Engine Queries.
According to the classification, the mobile queries were overwhelmingly navigational in nature, with almost three quarters of the queries coming from users who already knew what they were
looking for:
| query intent | percent of queries |
| informational | 12% |
| navigational | 73% |
| transactional | 15% |
What’s remarkable about this is that the results differ greatly from most studies of computer-based queries in that navigational queries are in the minority for most computer-based searchers.
Early studies by Rose and Levinson and Broder put navigational queries at 24.5% of the sample at most.
The disparity could be the result of a number of things, including the fact that the sample size consists entirely of head terms, which could be primarily navigational in nature. However, the
abundance of navigational queries is consistent with a hypothesis put forth by Google researchers Kamvar and Baluja in Deciphering Trends in Mobile Search (2007) about the lack of diversity in mobile queries that searchers are using
queries that they know return “usable” sites. By entering a query for a site or a subject that they know exists on the World Wide Web, mobile searchers could be hoping to find usable sites.
Best practices for marketers:
- Using navigational queries such as branded terms, competitor terms and names of known products as core keywords could lead to increased visibility in mobile search engines.
- Since this and the Kamvar/Baluja research seem to show that users are looking for usable sites, developing a mobile web site and including the term “mobile” in the copy as a secondary keyword
could lead to increased visibility in mobile search engines.
There have been a couple of interesting studies on subjects of mobile queries, including the aforementioned Google research and an iCrossing panel study. One of the striking differences between this categorization of mobile queries and the Google
research is the near absence of adult queries. Of the nearly 3 million searches in the AT&T mobile search index, only 25,000 could be considered adult in nature, and the query itself (“hot
girls”) is too benign to be considered adult by most definitions of the word. It’s possible that adult queries were filtered from the index, or that AT&T’s mobile subscribers are more genteel
than the average Google user. However, given the huge disparity between the more than 25% adult queries in the Google study and the less than 1% in the AT&T top 100, it’s likely something else
is at play.
The overwhelming majority of searches in the AT&T index were in the Computers & Electronics category, followed by Sports & Recreation and Arts & Entertainment:
Within the category with the highest search volume, keywords related to search engines/portals were the most popular by far, followed by keywords related to social networking. This is surprising
given the prominence of the search box on the MEdia Net and Beyond MEdia Net portal pages. These searchers could be looking for popular webmail services, or simply prefer Google and Yahoo! search
to MEdia Net’s alternative. This last point would contradict the notion of users searching for “usable” sites, however.
The Sports & Recreation category was dominated by general sports searches like “espn”, which isn’t surprising given Ad Age’s recent revelation that the ESPN mobile site sometimes gets more
traffic than the web site.
In the Arts & Entertainment category, celebrity queries were the clear winner, followed by the photography category. It should be noted that “photography” as categorized by the Live Search
Excel add-in includes words like “images” and “pictures”, which could be images of just about anything, including celebrities.
The following graphs represent the remaining broad categories with more than one subject within.
What the Ad Intelligence tool classifies as Science, Social Sciences & Humanities consists of exactly two keywords: “horoscope” and “weather”. Of these, weather is the most popular, with
over 120,000 searches during the month of September.
Half of what is here classified as Education & Instruction– keywords related to maps– could also be classified as pertaining to local information, which is a category used in the
aforementioned iCrossing mobile search study. Taxonomy notwithstanding, maps dominated this category, with less than 10,000 searches related to the keyword “dictionary”.
In the shopping category the transactional query “free” dominated, besting both ebay and the popular home improvement retailer Home Depot.
Finally, in the Families & Relationships category, Kids & Teens was the most popular category, followed by Romance, represented by the query “love”.
For the full breakdown of queries by category, see the complete mobile query data.
Best practices for marketers:
- Understanding what categories mobile users are searching for most can help when developing mobile content, as high volume categories will likely drive more organic traffic.
- Though local and mobile are often synonymous when discussing mobile search marketing, it’s clear that users of AT&T’s mobile search engine have interests beyond their own city limits.
Marketers should stop thinking of the two as one and the same and consider the mobile searcher as having more diverse needs.
Any keyword tool on the market is only able to give relative search volume, and the Ad Intelligence tool provides impression data for an engine with roughly 13% market share, so the following
should be taken for what it’s worth.
Nonetheless, comparing web search volume to mobile web search volume gives marketers some insight into the difference between computer-based queries and mobile search queries.
| Query | Sept 07 Mobile Searches | Sept 07 Web Searches MSN | % of MSN Web Searches |
| cool talk | 8485 | 138 | 6148.55% |
| cooltalk | 8477 | 165 | 5137.58% |
| Wap.phonezoo.com | 6942 | 1288 | 538.98% |
| myspace mobile | 3323 | 2416 | 137.54% |
| Funformobile | 6880 | 5340 | 128.84% |
| spider-man 3 | 4337 | 4320 | 100.39% |
| Scarlet johansson | 2970 | 3010 | 98.67% |
| answer | 9776 | 10872 | 89.92% |
| Mocospace | 16390 | 23390 | 70.07% |
| sports | 214940 | 331572 | 64.82% |
| funformobile.com | 7302 | 11825 | 61.75% |
| Www.funformobile.com | 4077 | 7162 | 56.93% |
| Viewmymessage.com | 6447 | 12052 | 53.49% |
| Joke | 10297 | 24375 | 42.24% |
| ring tones | 11847 | 32888 | 36.02% |
| www.3gforfree.com | 7642 | 22740 | 33.61% |
Of the queries with more than 30% of the MSN monthly search volume, nearly 70% are related to mobile content.
Of those that aren’t mobile-specific, the queries “scarlet johansson” and “spider-man 3” are unconventional spellings of popular entertainment keywords with almost as much volume as MSN Live
Search.
The query “sports” has almost 65% of the total web search volume with nearly 215k impressions in the month of September on AT&T’s proprietary engine alone. With other non-mobile-specific
queries like “answer”, mobile search volume for the month of September nearly equals its total web search volume.
Best Practices for Marketers
- Popular keyword tools like WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery should always be taken with a grain of salt when used to represent absolute search volume, but this is especially true with mobile
keywords, which can differ in volume estimates by as much as 6149% from their web counterparts. When doing mobile keyword research and using web keyword tools, it is recommended that the
researcher filter the keyword list by characteristics of mobile queries. - Not only can popular mobile subjects pull as much or more traffic in the mobile space as on the Web in general, but much of the traffic appears to be coming from mobile search. Optimizing a
relevant site for high traffic keywords will likely lead to an increase in mobile search traffic.
Though not intended to be the last word on mobile keyword research, this study should provide marketers with a few best practices related to mobile search keywords that can lead to increased
visibility in the mobile engines.
In the near future I’ll be posting an overview of various methods for mobile keyword research, which should provide additional tactics for aligning mobile queries with mobile content.
Wow, that is great! It’s really cool to finally have some information on how users behave in terms of mobile search. It helps with keyword researching focused in mobile search. Many thanks!
The link to the tool seems to be redirecting. Is that tool still available? GREAT post, btw.
Thanks! I’m glad that people are finding it useful.
The link to the JumpTap tool does redirect to AT&T’s devCentral, where the tool is located. If you sign up for a free account you can get access through the tool in the Beyond MEdia Net section. Once you’re logged in, the tool is located at the URL that I posted. It’s not indexed in the engines, and somewhat difficult to find for an SEO tool. Ah, the irony. Great tool once you find it, though. Hopefully the major keyword tools will one day follow suit.
This is a cool breakdown, but one point must be stressed:
Adult queries have obviously been stripped from this list. Having worked in both the mobile and web search industry (on the search engine side in both) I know that publicly published lists tend to strip out sex related queries. The lack of even the tamest adult queries (that I see every day in query aggregations), suggests a bit of editorial postprocessing. Mobile phones are more personal than a PC, which may be shared by multiple family members – this makes it a much safer place to do discreet porn surfing. Adult terms are often in the top 10 and are definitely in the top 20 most common searches every day, Christmas and Easter, in Europe and the US.
@HJ, I tend to agree with you, which is why I noted that at the beginning of the Subjects of Mobile Queries section. The huge disparity between the Google data and the AT&T data is alarming, and probably indicates tampered data. Thanks for your perspective.
You might be interested in the Kamvar/Baluja study if you haven’t read it already, as it discusses the presence of adult queries in mobile searches in detail. According to it, though, adult queries on the web have actually declined 50% from 1997 to 2001, and they speculate that the difference between adult desktop queries (10%) and adult mobile queries (25%) might be due to the nascent state of the mobile web. If you’d care to comment on the differences you’ve seen on the search engine side, I’m sure people here would be interested.
Great information Bryson…thanks for the post. I think the fundamental differences between desktop web and mobile web currently show that the mobile web market is going to have a massive impact on communication, the way media is consumed, and who ultimately comes out on top in the overall web market share race. If we compare the mobile data today to the data kicked out 10 years ago on the web, I think we would find strong similarities. Case in point with the observation on mobile adult content queries today. Adult content companies were early adopters of the Web because it was an easy and somewhat private way (at the time at least) to distribute/consume the content. If we are seeing the same patterns today, it shows early adopter status with mobile adult content and if the same pattern holds, an enormous wave of users will be joining the ecosystem in the next 2-5 years for more mainstream usage of the mobile web. This could be BIG!
Great point, Kurt; and one that’s supported by most analysts’ predictions. This is likely one of the reasons why it’s on the radar of the Google chief and Matt Cutts, and why all of the major search engines seem to be trying to outdo each other to win the mobile search space.
While focusing on the future, however, let’s not forget about the opportunity inherent today. I’ve mentioned these figures on current and predicted mobile usage before, but it seems like a good time to reiterate:
* Projected 844.9 million worldwide mobile-search users in 2011 from 219.2 million in 2006 (eMarketer)
* Mobile search ad revenue projected to grow to 2.4 billion in 2011 from $6.8 million in 2006 (eMarketer)
*Mobile advertising categories and supporting user behavior, will generate
combined revenues of roughly $5 billion by 2012, across North America and Western Europe (Kelsey Group)
* Over 4 million iPhones sold since Jun 29, 2007
* 2.7 billion mobile phones in the world in 2006. This is twice as many as mobile phones in the world as fixed landline phones; twice as many people with mobile phones as people with a credit card; twice as many people with a mobile phone as people with a television set, and three times as many mobile phones in the world as there are computers (desktops, servers and laptops combined) (Communities Dominate Brands)
* More mobile Internet users than Web Internet users by 2017 (Yahoo!)
Nice study Bryson. I’d agree it’s a good time to start getting a first generation mobile search strategy in place, although I have generally felt 2010 is when it will beging to really take off. I think most network providers have got to sort out their tarrifs first.
The dilemma raised by Googles recent iPhone user stats though, is what actually constitutes a good mobile strategy, when mobile searchers are searching for normal web results?
Thanks for taking the time to do this research and sharing these extremely interesting insights.
I signed up fro the at&t dev central but still cannot find the keyword tool. has it gone missing? also, are there any other mobile search keyword research tools that you know of?
thanks for putting all of this together…it has been very helpful!!
Rick
Rick, ask and ye shall receive: http://www.brysonmeunier.com/how-to-find-the-jumptap-mobile-keyword-tool
There aren’t any mobile specific keyword tools that I know of, but there are a number of ways of doing mobile keyword research. I’ll detail them all in a future post.
I am in Roboo mobile search, a top mobile search engine in China. It seems the queries are very different with the above postings. In China, users tend to search for ringtones, pop songs, MP3 music, pictures, games, themes, stories, jokes, etc. And users usually use Roboo mobile search while on buses, trains, etc. In USA, people go to work by driving, so they cannot use phones to do mobile search.
Wherever is the rss?
In the top right corner of every page. You can also access it here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/NSEOMSEOBlog