In this article I've mentioned why responsive web design is not always the best option. The popular buzz of 2012, responsive design does not always offer the best mobile experience, increase conversions, and often is not the route that the big consumer brands take.
With Google noting that responsive design is the "preferred" method for developing smartphone sites, there's been a popular assumption that the "preferred" is turning into a "must" for mobile SEO.
A separate mobile site (on its own m. or .mobi URL) creates a couple of challenges for Google:
- duplicate content, and
- consolidating link authority. If there are two different sets of links going to the mobile and desktop sites, the link equity is split (meaning that each site would get less "authority" than if there was just one set of links going to the same site).
However, the above issues can be solved if you give Google a little help in making it clear that the mobile and the desktop sites or pages are part of the same online entity. And you do that by adding "rel=canonical" to the mobile pages, and "rel=alternate" - to the desktop pages.
From Google's guide to Building Smartphone-Optimized Websites:
1. To the desktop site, add this to the header section of the pages that have a corresponding mobile page with the same (or almost the same) content:
<link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://m.example.com/page-1"/>
This tells Google that there is an alternative page with the same content for screens with the resolution 640px or less, and that the URL of that alternative page is "http://m.example.com/page-1".
And add this to the header section of the mobile pages:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/page-1"/>
where "http://www.example.com/page-1" is the corresponding desktop page.
(Note, on piJnz you can add this attribute to the SEO and Access section on your page edit screen).
The above needs to be added to every desktop page that has a corresponding mobile page (or vice versa) with the same content. For a typical neighborhood business website this should not be a lot of work (considering that if the business does have a blog or a site section with lots of frequently updated content, you would probably want to use the responsive design for that section, while implementing a custom site for the home page and conversion pages).