This report highlights the explosive growth of mobile internet searching and the critical need for businesses of all sizes to have a mobile optimised website designed. With the internet continuing to advance and more and more people searching online using their smart phones, if your business hasn’t got a mobile optimised website, then the chances are you are losing customers to more shrewd forward thinking competitors who are already onboard with the important of mobile websites.
Why are mobile websites so essential and what’s the significance of all of this?
Well in 2002 the Americans said that the mobile phone was the least important of the 4 main technologies they use, rating it behind the internet, television and the landline phone.
However just 5 years later in 2007 they said the mobile phone was the number one device they could not live without. The fact is 60% of all mobile phone users even take them to bed with them.
Statistics – Proof you must have an Optimised Mobile website designed for your business.
Fact – “local search volume” is growing exponentially at a whopping 50% each year
In 2009 there were 1 billion local searches
In 2010 there are currently 1.5 billion local searches
2011 is predicted to go to 2.3 billion local searches
2012 is predicted to go to 3.45 billion local searches
The number one access method for local information is the mobile browser with 20.7 million users searching per month. Local searches are growing on mobile devices.
Google’s Director of Emerging Platforms Mike Steib was quoted as saying “Google has seen a 500% growth in local mobile search from 2008 to 2010 and a 67% increase in mobile queries in the last quarter alone.”
If your business is not showing in local searches with a mobile optimised website you are at a distinct disadvantage. 80% of people actually research online before purchasing, even when they ultimately purchase offline.
Technical Aspects
Easy To Read
If you were to view a standard website on a mobile you would need to scroll up and down and left to right, and in most cases the text will be too small to even read. And zooming in and out makes it difficult if not impossible to follow what you are looking at and hardly makes for a good customer experience does it.
Mobile websites however are specifically designed so the information is displayed in an easy to display format so your customers can easily view your site using their Smartphone.
Mobile Redirect
When you add a mobile website to your marketing arsenal, a simple piece of coding behind the scenes will direct the visitor to the website appropriate to the platform that they are visiting from.
This coding will automatically pick up whether the user is on a mobile device or on a traditional connection and direct them accordingly to either your mobile optimised website or your full website. This technology provides for a seamless professional experience for your customers.
Nowadays you can have a domain extension a.mobi just for your mobile website. So your main website may be justanexample.com and your mobile optimised website maybe justanexamlpe.mobi
Usability and Future Proofing Your Mobilised Website
It is essential to ensure that your mobile website works with all types of smart phones and internet browsers. There is a danger if you are trying to do the website yourself that this becomes impossible to manage. When you do it yourself you have to ask yourself the question; what will happen next month when a whole bunch more phones come out? By using a professional company they can make sure your content is optimized in a way to cover you now and in the future. Most will offer a monthly service to cover all updates.
Useful Features
Click to Dial is just one quick example of a useful feature of a mobile website. As the name suggests, your customer can ring you straight from their mobile phone. Only recently I was in the car with a business partner and we decided we wanted a coffee. We put the name of my favourite brand of coffee shops into our mobile device and the local searches immediately presented back the details including map of the nearest coffee shop.
Conclusions
Local searches are growing at a phenomenal rate and your business must have the technology to benefit. Mobile website design is now essential as you can’t rely on a standard website as your customers will not stay on your website if it is not easy to read. The whole purpose of a mobile optimised website is to provide your customers with an excellent user experience.
A mobile website is a must have to ensure your customers can find you instead of your competition. So get your business mobilised.
Discover why your business needs a Mobile Website and how you can beat your competition to the millions of Mobile Users Searching for Your Business on Mobile Devices. Get your copy of the FREE report “The 7 Myths About Mobile and The Truth That Can Jet-Fuel Your Business”: www.MobileWebsiteDesign.me
The purpose of this short article is to explore the massive growth of mobile internet usage and why every business large or small simply must have a mobile website.
The fact is there are now more mobile internet devices than PC internet connections. 29% of users only access the internet via their mobiles. If your customers can’t see your website properly on their mobile devices they will just click onto one of your customer’s site that is already mobile optimised.
Mobile is the 7th Mass Media
The term “7th Mass Media” was coined by industry expert Tony Ahonen
The very first mass media was Books which have been around since the 1500′s
Recordings occurred at the turn of the 20th century
In 1910 the 3rd mass media, Cinema brought us stars like Charlie Chaplin
10 short years later in the 1920′s saw the advert of Radio
The next mass media to affect the world was within the 50′s with Television
It wasn’t for a further 40 years, taking us into the 1990 that the next mass media arrived – The Internet , with Google coming along later within the century
The 7th mass media in the 2000 being the Mobile Phone. And what a development we have seen from those earlier chucky phones that looked like bricks to the intelligent smart phones we have today.
What Does This All Mean For Your Business?
The importance of the mobile is it basically replaces all of the previous 6 mass Medias.
Records, well we are able to listen to music on our mobile phones
Radio, we are able to listen to radio on our mobile phones, and we now have pod casts too
We are able to receive Newspapers and magazines onto our mobile phones now
TV is watched on smart phone. And we are actually seeing the first subscriptions programme for on demand movies, and of course it goes to mention that anything we do on the internet we can do on their mobile phones.
And if you are thinking there are some things that won’t ever get transferred across towards the mobile phone, i.e. books, well we have already see them migrate across to the likes of Kindle, and in Japan the mobile phone book industry is worth half a billion dollars a year
The Mobile Phone Has 8 Unique Abilities
It is the first truly personal medium, which means 63% of us won’t even share our mobiles with our spouse
We have our mobile phone almost everywhere. Indeed 60 % of people take them to bed with us
A mobile is always on!!
It’s has an in-built payment mechanism. Actually some gaming and chat TV channels earn the majority of the revenues from mobile payments
A mobile is constantly available, and with its built in microphone, camera and video we can create content at any time. This allows for massive creativity wherever we happen to be.
Mobile has by far the most accurate audience data. Fact is 90% of the audience on mobile can be identified
Mobile captures the social context of media consumption. How many of us check in on those location based apps, or tweet a message saying we are having coffee with friends
Mobiles enable augmented reality which you will think of by way of the visual overlay in Arnie’s terminator movie
Don’t be fooled by thinking the mobile is small and has limitations, nowadays many mobile phones use a qwerty keyboard, video cameras, microphone, bar code scanners, motion sensor which can be used for gaming, and GPS which can be used for navigation, which can even replace the sat nav’s we have in our cars.
What’s the significance of all of this?
In 2002 the Americans said that the mobile phone was the least important of the 4 main technologies, behind the internet, television and the landline phone, as the most important technologies they use.
Just 5 short years later in 2007 they said the mobile phone was the number one device they could not live without.
Statistics
29% of all internet access comes from just Mobile, compared to only 18% coming via a pc. 53% of people browsing use both. That means 82% of all people search via mobile devices. That is a phenomenal statistic, and unless your business is set up with a mobile optimised website, you will be left behind.
Local search volume” is growing at an amazing rate, 50% year on year. From1billion local searches in 2009 to an estimated 3.45 billion local searches in 2012.
80% of people research online before purchasing, even when they purchase offline.
Mobile browsers accounts for 20.7 million searches per month and is the number one method to find local information.
Why your business must go mobile with a mobilised website
Current estimates show…that there are approximately 124 billion websites on the internet today, while the number of mobile websites is only around the 10 million mark…10 million = 0.008% of total websites. That is like Citrus Park, in Florida which has a population of 25,000 having a mobile website and nowhere else in the whole of the USA having one.
I’m sure you would agree Goggle is a world leader, they know where it’s at, yes.
Well this is what Google Thinks of Mobile. In February 2010 at the Mobile World Congress, Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed… That Google will be adopting a ‘Mobile First’ policy
Conclusion
There is a big opportunity right now for those companies that take the imitative and obtain themselves a mobile website. It doesn’t matter if your customers are looking for you through local search, whether they are looking through organic search, whether they are searching through the paid for listings, for instance PPC ads or even through the numerous video channels such as YouTube.
A normal website cannot be viewed satisfactorily on a mobile device, so to maintain a positive experience for your customers you need to get mobilised. The Truth is, that the early adopters of websites that work on mobile phones will have a huge advantage, especially small, local businesses.
Remember what Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said “Mobile First” .
Discover why your business needs a Mobile Website and how you can beat your competition to the millions of Mobile Users Searching for Your Business on Mobile Devices. Get your copy of the FREE report “The 7 Myths About Mobile and The Truth That Can Jet-Fuel Your Business”: www.MobileWebsiteDesign.me