Google has always been about creating the best user experience on mobile devices and has taken broad steps to encourage publishers to optimize effectively for mobile users as well.

For AdWords advertisers wanting to reach mobile screens, how you optimize your site or landing page plays a huge role in how and where your ads are displayed.  Last year, for example, Google started limiting ad serving on high-end mobile devices if they pointed to landing pages with Flash-heavy content.  Likewise, the search giant announced today via its “GoogleMobileAds” blog that it will introducing the mobile optimization of a Website as a new “ad-quality” factor for AdWords campaigns that are driving mobile search traffic.

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It was announced today that Google will begin adding +1 buttons to their Web and mobile display ads in early October, adding user photos and recommendations to the ads themselves.  The buttons were recently added in the same way to Google search results.

On its “Inside AdWords” blog today, Google said that +1 buttons have been installed on over a million Websites across the Web with more than 4 billion daily impressions.  By adding the buttons to display ads across both the Web and mobile, advertisers have the ability to run social-enabled ad campaigns that work across millions of sites on over 40 countries around the world.  The new feature is being added to display ads by default, though users can opt-out manually via their AdWords account.

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A new survey and report published recently by SEMPO indicates companies are spending more on paid mobile search than ever before, actually doubling from this time last year.

Localized paid search is becoming the most popular, with the study finding that 22 percent of  respondents’ budgets were spent locally on targeted paid search.  In the US the same question was asked to companies and it found that a greater proportion of company’s' pay per click marketing budgets were being allocated to local search, with actual figures being 37 percent for agency respondents and 23 percent for clients.

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The following is a guest post from Andrew Hudson, PPC Analyst at Epiphany Solutions.

As I’m sure we are all aware, the market for high end mobile devices is huge and is an important growth sector with an enormous potential and target audience for Mobile Ads.  We all, as search marketers, need to be right on top of this sector and need to ensure we are maximising the potential of this channel.

By 2015, it’s been estimated that  shopping via mobile devices will account for in excess of $163 billion in sales worldwide, 12% of global ecommerce turnover (ABI Research, 2010), with 59% of consumers using their smart phones to perform mobile shopping activities from home (Experian Study, 2011).

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Research firm “Research and Markets” has published a new report predicting that mobile search revenues will reach $8 billion by 2015, representing 11 percent of total search revenue.

While Google dominates desktop search, the mobile arena is still anyone’s game really.  Growth in mobile search is being driven by two standout trends, according to the research, which include voice-based and local search.  ”While voice is becoming an important trend driving mobile search, language differences are likely to benefit local or first movers in different regions,” the research suggests.  ”The development of voice recognition into a personal digital assistant offers new opportunities and is being integrated into platforms and devices.”

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A new survey from digital agency Covario shows the integration of search with social media to be the number one priority among U.S. advertisers in the coming year, especially when it comes to mobile.

According to Covario’s “2011 The Year of Facebook” report, the top SEO priority for advertisers in the U.S. next year will be social media program integration (36%), yet surprisingly, mobile SEO was the number one priority for just 1% of respondents.  There’s a lot of movement in terms of the intersection of Online marketing and social marketing, yet it’s not translating to the mobile channel like it should.

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With the evolution of mobile devices and mobile search, there’s already been a steady shift in SEO techniques to help keep Websites relevant in search engines, but a new industry-agnostic emphasis on location is again changing the face of SEO and re-writing the rules once again.

Location-based social media from the likes of Foursquare, Gowalla and numerous others have placed heavy emphasis on location information, and as search engines index that information, more weight is placed on location than anything else, especially now that it’s been revealed that nearly one-third of mobile searches have a local intent.  Still, how does this effect SEO?

In an excellent post on PromotionWorld.com, a site was referenced in saying apps like Foursquare are “making it way easier for searchers to find great deals from their mobile phones, kicking up the need for excellent SEO services geared towards mobile search.”  The same site revealed interesting statistics that looked at business profile pages indexed in Google over the past 24 hours,  coming from the following sources:

• Yellowpages.com: 219
• Superpages.com: 553
• Yelp.com: 928
• Foursquare.com: 11,300

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