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Why Every Business Wants Mobile Optimized Websites?

The good news: If you have a website, then you have a site that can be accessed by anymobile device with any browser. Now, the bad: Chances are, that site looks pretty crappyon said mobile device.

If you're concernedabout this, you're notone. Just as companiesrealized, circa 1996,that they needed tocreate a website toremain relevant toconsumers, history isrepeating itself inmobile. By 2013, morepeople will use mobilephones than PCs toget online, accordingto Gartner. In

mid-2011, we also reached the point at which consumers were spending more time ontheir mobile devices than on their PCs.

In such an environment, a site designed to be viewed on a desktop PC comes across aswoefully lacking. Say you're accessing such a site from the Safari browser on your iPhone.The first thing you're likely to notice is that it takes a relatively long time to load. Thesecond thing is that the type on the page is pretty small. It might take a lot of zoomingand pinching to navigate the site as well. If you have Flash on your site, it's not going tocome across at all on an iPhone.

At that point, your potential customer may start looking around. According to a recentsurvey from Compuware, 40% of users have turned to a competitor's site after a badmobile experience.

Yet currently, most businesses haven't optimized their sites for mobile. Jesse Haines,group marketing manager for Google Mobile Ads, says the company canvassed its largeadvertisers early in 2011 and found only 21% have launched a mobile site.

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Why and What’s behind on that?

Forecasting SEO trends for local is quite difficult – primarily because I know in my heart of heartsthat local SEO isn't a trend,phenomenon or fad. Local – alongwith personalized search – is anecessary evolution to trulyoptimize the search experience forusers across the globe. It is amindset that SEO professionalscan't "arrive to" late.

Early adoption of best practices,voraciously reading case studiesand experimenting on your own ismission critical to surviving thisnew era of marketing. Join me on apalatable overview on what'shappened already, and what'scoming up next.

When the Hummingbird algorithm dropped, the majority of SEO professionals hardly noticed adifference. While Google itself said that the algorithm affected upwards of 90 percent of thequeries, many rankings across keywords stayed the same.

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Due to the interaction between Hummingbird and the Venice update – a tweak that lead to morelocalized organic results for unbranded, non-geo-modified keywords keywords – local SEO prosshould celebrate this new algorithm. What this means is that there are even more opportunities tocapture local traffic, for both queries such as [seo agency London] and [seo agency], as morekeywords now trigger local results.

Meet the Parents: Mobility and LocalityOne of my favorite "year in review" posts for digital marketing came from Karen McGrane, abrilliant content strategist. She compiled a list of mobile web statistics (sources found within) thatare sure to knock the socks off of digital marketing managers across the globe. A sample:

91 percent of American adults own a mobile phone. 56 percent of American adults own a smartphone. 63 percent of mobile phone owners use their phones to access the Internet. Amazon, Wikipedia, and Facebook all see about 20 percent mobile traffic. 77 percent of mobile searches take place at home or at work.

Mobile Trends and Stories of 2013In August 2012, Googlepublished its famousMultiscreen Study, which statedthat for the average user, cyclingbetween smartphone, tablet, anddesktop throughout the day isthe norm. In hindsight thisseems obvious, but at the end of2012 it was a revelation; thislandmark publication made usrealize it's really about multiplescreens, lots of them, and oftenseveral at once.

A little over a year later, we'veaccepted that we live in amulti-screen world and thatmobile means more than

smartphones. Marketers are actually planning their strategies for smart watches, social machines,and Google Glass, and thinking a lot more about content in context across multiple interfaces.

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2012 wasn't a bad year for mobile itself – data traffic from smartphones and tablets grew 69percent over the previous year, and mobile data hit 13 percent of all global Internet traffic,according to Stat Counter. Without question, 2013 will prove to be much, much bigger than 2012.It might take a little more time for us to get the full picture of how this year played out, but we stillhave a few data points to work with, such as:

Global smartphone data hit 20 percent of all Internet traffic as of December 2013.(ComputerWorld)

Tablets are only 5 percent of global traffic but given adoption rates, are likely toaccount for a significantly bigger share next year. (StatCounter)

One out of 5 global citizens owns a smartphone and one out of 17 owns a tablet(Business Insider)

64.7 percent of U.S. wireless subscribers own a smartphone (Nielsen), 35 percent of U.S.consumers over 16 own a tablet, and 24 percent own an eReader. (Pew)

Mobile devices accounted for 40 percent of all online traffic on Black Friday andone-third of all online traffic on Cyber Monday. Those numbers are all the moreimpressive when you consider that it was 4 percent in 2010, making for an increase of 700percent in just three years. (IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark).

So mobile accounts for at least 20 percent of our online time (for now). But the reallyimportant point is how fast it all happened; according to NPD tablets are expected tooutsell laptops and desktops in Q4 2013. That's 46 percent year-over-year growth in theU.S. Tablets aren't expected to outsell laptops and desktops globally until 2015 (IDC). Ofcourse, smartphones overtook feature phone sales in the US a long time ago (Q1 2013 tobe precise) and with 17 million smartphones and tablets unboxed last Christmas, it's safeto say we'll be ending this year an even higher note.

AdWords Enhanced Campaigns Forced Us to go All-in on Mobile

In February, Google confirmed a bold move that had been rumored to be coming for sometime – mobile was to become an integral part of all AdWords campaigns.

The announcement wasn't enthusiastically received by everyone – many brands felt thatenhanced campaigns would through their finely tuned strategies off-course. Others thathad shied away from mobile in the past due to poor ROI or lack of mobile readinessbemoaned being forced into something they weren't prepared for. But like it or not, bythe end of July, all advertisers were opted in for smartphones, desktops, and tablets acrossthe board.

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Statistics on mobile usage and adoption

“Mobile to overtake fixed Internet access by 2014” was the big headline from the widelyshared infographic at the end of this post summarising the bold prediction from 2008 byMary Meeker, an analyst at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (see latest KPCB technologytrends).

To help you keep up-to-date with the rise in consumer and company adoption of mobileand its impact on mobile marketing, Dave Chaffey, Rob Thurner and I will be keepingthis post updated throughout 2013 as the new stats come through to support our New 120page Expert members Ebook explaining how to create a mobile marketing strategy. Wealso have a free summary mobile briefing for Basic members.

June 2013 update: new data on mobile device visit share and conversion rates

This source is useful since it’s a regular survey showing the growth in use of mobile sitevisitors. You can see that tablet and smartphone use nearly doubled in the year based on500 million visits for these retail clients (see link above for methodology). Mobile share isnow around 25% on average.

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This data also enables you to drill down to see usage by device type, for example iPad isstill the dominant tablet, but Kindle Fire and Android tablets now account for 10% oftablets.

If you’re creating a business case for mobile optimised sites as explained in our mobilemarketing strategy guide, this data is also valuable since it shows the variation inconversion rate by mobile type. In Q1 2013 tablets exceeded traditional desktop devicesfor conversion rates for the first time suggesting people are increasingly comfortable withthe experience of buying on tablets.

However, it’s a different story for Smartphones since these convert at one third of therate of traditional or tablet devices.

This suggests smartphones are more of browse or research platform rather than a buyplatform since many of the large retailers featured in this survey will have mobileoptimised sites.

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Time frame between devices

The report also has useful summary of dayparts of different device behaviour, similar toothers published.

Image courtesy of : smartinsights

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Retail mobile use

Mobile was again the focus of the section on retail statistics. Audience growth rate is 80%+ on mobile in these UK sites, but lower on grocer sites for obvious reasons.

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In 3 years mobile “should” take over desktop internet usage

What do you think? Either way – this info-graphic from Microsoft Tag provides someserious food for thought and it’s great to see this data together to help with futuremarketing planning.