Google Mobile App Search and Keyword Tool!

We’ve spent the last week or so playing around with the mobile element of the Google keyword tool. For anyone who’s not yet had a look, essentially, under the advanced settings you can now filter to show searches only by people using mobile devices.

Of course, we’ve carried out a host of random searches on some keywords you would expect to be particularly “mobile friendly,” and on a host of others as well. My inner geek is a fan of the keyword tool…and the pretty graphs in Analytics and a host of similar things, so I was rather pleased to see something new added to Google’s rather useful (though sometimes questionable) tool.

It’s a really great addition and without doubt provides an excellent insight into searching habits based on whether users are on their phones or at their computers.

It won’t come as any surprise that the quantity of searches coming from mobile devices is now around 10% in some areas. That’s no major shock to us. We’ve been monitoring the proportion of traffic that comes from mobile for over a year now and the increase in 2010 (not just in certain industries, but across the board) has been phenomenal.

And as the number of Smartphone users grows, Google’s attention has certainly been turned to catering for them. More recently, you’ve been able to find apps results within the organic results for certain searches from a mobile. I searched “penguin app,” in Google through Safari on my iPhone. The results returned put 2 apps right at the top of the screen.

It displays a fair amount of information about the apps as well, given the size of space! It tells you their title, their average rating, price and the developer. And more conveniently than anything, clicking one of these results open the App Store on your handset so you can download them instantly. Repeat relevant searches on an Android device and it will open the relevant Android app store. Nifty!

At present, this seems to only be app specific searches, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this enter organic for a whole host of searches, not necessarily app specific. When searching on a mobile, it certainly makes sense that, if there is an app relating to your search, you should be shown this app within the results. And that takes SEO mobile….