Mobile Search Is a Major Motivation

Does your business really need to have a website that’s mobile-friendly, or perhaps even a separate version of the site that’s dedicated to mobile device users? That’s a question that a lot of business owners are wrestling with as they watch the mobile operating system (OS) market continue to grow at an amazing rate.

There’s no big secret to understanding the utility of a mobile-friendly website. When mobile device users search for goods or services in your market and find your website, you want to provide them with the information they need to do business with you. If you don’t help them out with pages that work for their mobile device, it will take them about two seconds to move along to one of your competitors who does.

While the expense of a mobile website isn’t that hefty, it still boils down to the bottom line. How much search traffic do mobile devices really generate?

According to a recent study by the advertising and data analytics company Chitika, the answer is “a lot.” The study,  which you can find here, looks at search traffic from a broad range of operating systems. What they’ve found is that mobile operating systems generate search traffic that’s significantly above average.

Chitika found that search queries consume 54 percent of iOS web traffic, and 43 percent of Android OS web traffic. The Internet average across all operating systems is 36 percent.

Mobile operating systems account for around 11 percent of total web traffic. The exact percentage is open to debate and varies according to which company’s report you read — but the one constant among all of them is that mobile traffic is growing at a rate of at least 30 percent each year.

Something to think about when you sit down to consider that mobile-friendly website.