Thinks to consider about the rise of traffic over smartphones and tablets
Mobile search statistics are showing that searching over smartphones and tablet computers are growing in their importance as an increasing number of people are using their devices to locate the best nearby restaurant, the closest sporting goods store, or simply to find contact information for a business.
There has been a tremendous amount of growth over the last year, illustrating how rapidly it is all happening.
In May 2011, for example, mobile search statistics showed that the share for smartphones and tablets was 5.75 percent, when compared to the whopping 94.25 percent for desktops and laptops. However, this year, the May stats showed that there was a share of 10.11 percent for smartphones and tablets, compared to 89.89 for traditional computers.
The majority of all of those searches – 96 percent – were conducted over Google.
As you consider the importance of this technology, it is important to keep a few things in mind:
• The results of searching on a smartphone screen are different due to the different display and the smaller screen size.
• The transcoding by the search engine may be different as a site may not render the same way on a smartphone as it does on a laptop, for example.
• Different user goals. Mobile search statistics have shown that people use their smartphone and tablet devices for different forms of searching than are performed on a desktop. Content immediacy and keyword use are tremendously important.
• There are different bots for smartphone searching, for example there is the Smartphone Googlebot-Mobile for Google.
With this understood, it is exceptionally important for businesses and organization to track their analytics very closely to begin to pay attention to the trends that are occurring with their own sites. Are users able to successfully discover your site over their smartphones and use it properly?
The mobile search statistics that you can obtain about your own site could be the key to making sure that it is performing properly and that it will continue to generate positive results regardless of the change in the technology that is being used to locate and use it.
