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Why you Need a Mobile Site for Mobile Search

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So I’ve been lingering around with mobile search optimization lately and found out a couple of resources stating that Google will rank websites with mobile versions higher – in mobile search. If this is the case, then we should all be grabbing mobile versions of our sites. You won’t want your competitor to outrank you just because he has a mobile website and you don’t, don’t you?

Let’s go Over the Stats, shall we?

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  • spacer Mobile Web is growing 8x faster than pc based web
  • 70% of the world’s population now has a mobile phone
  • In 2010, mobile subscribers surpassed 5 billion
  • 85% of children own a phone while only 73% own books at home
  • Since 2008 mobile data traffic is up 3000% and is expected to increase 40 fold over the next 5 years
  • spacer January to march 2010, 314.7 million phones were activated
  • Android is growing at a rate of 886% – 160,000 android phones are being activated everyday
  • There are Twice as many web-enabled mobile devices today as there are internet connected PCs
  • spacer Mobile Internet is growing faster than desktop internet ever did.
  • 1,000,000 smart phones are activated every week
  • Google reports that mobile search volume is up 130% year-over-year
  • 65% online search market share is eclipsed in mobile…where Google owns 95% of search.
  • spacer A whopping 53% of Bing mobile queries are targeted on local. Meaning searchers in mobile devices are searching for local stuff like restaurants, tourist spots, the best bars, etc…
  • Ad CTRs on mobile devices were 37% more than desktop
  • spacer Consumers are 51% more likely to purchase from retailers that have mobile-specific websites.
  • By 2014, it’s predicted that mobile Internet usage will overtake desktop Internet usage.
  • One half of all local searches are performed on mobile devices
  • Reports have shown an increase of 29% of all mobile searches from the first quarter of 2011. The same rise was measured in mobile retail search traffic that saw a whopping increase of 181%; compared to last year’s figures.

 

So how do you Optimize for Mobile Search?

spacer Knowing these stats, we can conclude that mobile is going to be the next big thing. It’s not a matter of ‘IF’ anymore but a matter of ‘WHEN’. And if you’re ahead of the game, you’re almost always going to get a bigger piece of the pie. The question now is, how are you going to be able to optimize for mobile search?

There are some suggestions that Google came up with. And being the one who owns 95% of the entire mobile search market (they own android and Apple doesn’t have a search engine), they declare the