The Truth and the Rumors About Mobile Web Usage
You will see a lot of statistics and figures out there about mobile web usage. Mobile marketing companies are infamous for cherry-picking statistics about the popularity of mobile web usage; many claiming that half of all internet users are accessing it with a mobile handheld device.
According to both ComScore and Forrester Research, the latest estimate of US mobile subscribers who access the mobile web is more like 22%. Of that 22%, only 25% are mobile-only web users. Cherry-picking various figures in order to mislead consumers is not only unethical, its harmful to businesses and even advertisers who fall into the hype, and over-spend on mobile web campaigns, when the current usage and audience of the mobile web fails to be what they expect.
However – the mobile web is by far the most rapidly developing source of digital communication. Market research sources widely agree that in the next 3 years, mobile web usage will overtake traditional PC access. It goes far beyond that, however. Both ComScore and Forrester also showed that the majority of US mobile consumers (73%) conducted local info searches, including various retailers, restaurants, and consumer services. B2B mobile users focus on financial and news/information sources. There is unending research data that makes the importance of a mobile website undeniable.
Why Do I Need a Mobile Website?
The two biggest differences between a desktop website and a mobile website is size and bandwidth. The user experience on a web page that is not optimized for mobile access is unpleasant, cumbersome and sometimes just unusable. Because of the difference in screen size, a desktop website displayed on a mobile device screen – no matter how large the mobile screen – requires tedious amounts of scrolling. A lot of site functionality can also be lost.
Bandwidth is severely reduced on a mobile device, even on 4G networks. If a website is not optimized for mobile browsing, the site will take forever to download on a mobile device – longer than it would on even a lot of dial-up connections. Many less sophisticated mobile devices are altogether unable to download certain types of desktop sites with a lot of heavy graphics. Creating a mobile-optimized website is a little bit of a retrograded project. Mobile websites are simplified, streamlined, and greatly decreased in size and bandwidth.
There are many free tools available to help you design a mobile website. Google’s mobile website creator tool is simple, free and fast. It does not create incredibly unique or customizable mobile sites, but it does offer an extremely quick, convenient and easy way to publish a mobile website, with an m.example or example.com/mobile domain and URL.
While a fast, easy and free mobile website tool is obviously very appealing, especially for small businesses, registering a paid domain name for a .mobi URL should be seriously considered. As the next few years of web usage continue to gravitate to the mobile web, dotmobi websites will become more and more valuable. Content development is much easier with dotmobi sites, because they deliver content and layout exactly as expected, without transcoding interference or sizing problems. mDot and /mobile domain sites will likely rather quickly become outdated, as mobile web usage becomes mainstream, and mobile-only sites will be entirely preferred by mobile web users because they provide a much better user experience.
Most importantly, websites with a .mobi domain perform far better on mobile search engines, than other mobile website domain options. Dotmobi sites have their own zone, and because dotmobi sites are mobile-only, mobile browsers prioritize them in search results. A mobile search engine ranks dotmobi sites ahead of mDot or /mobile sites, even if regular PC search results rank them the other way around. For reassurance that your business website is mobile web and mobile search optimized, a registered .mobi domain is a good start, but should be followed by professional web marketing services to help your mobile web visibility, brand reputation, consumer reach, and ultimately, maximized conversion potential.
Any business, that has a website, must stay up-to-date with any new technology involving website design and development. A terrific and popular way for people to access the internet today is through their mobile devices including mobile phones and PDA’s. This method of accessing the internet has grown dramatically just within the past few years.
Website optimization is one of the most common ways of getting exposure to a website. This is also the most important and cost effective forms of marketing as well. When a site owner first puts up a website they will have to do a number of things in order to get their site maximum exposure. This includes such things as blogs, social media, using keywords, using phrases and link exchanges. This is quite common on regular PC’s and laptops. However, optimizing a website is also done on mobile devices. Due to the fact that accessing the internet on mobile devices is increasingly more common it is important to make a website easy to access through mobile devices. As a result a site owner will need to optimize their website for mobile devices.
When it comes to marketing a business, owners and managers will find that times have changed significantly. The days of simply posting advertisements in the newspaper, television or radio is not nearly as effective. People simply skip through most of these advertisements, which makes them a waste of money for the most part. In fact, even when people paid close attention to these advertisements, they still were not the most effective sources. Businesses need a way to spend their money advertising to their target market and not an entire city. Fortunately, times have changed, which eliminated the effectiveness of some forms of advertising; however, new, more effective, ones have appeared. One of the new concepts is to use mobile marketing and there are several ways a business can use this technology.
Search has found a hot new destination. The destination is none other than your pocket. Yes, the mobile phone in your pocket. No need to go to any cyber café or bring your laptop to search a string online. It can be now easily done from any multimedia mobile phone, more swiftly than from any other devices. Now, one can search from every nook and corner of the world and that to in an incredibly fast speed. The advent of multimedia phone and 3G technology has made it incredibly easy to search anything and browse internet from the mobile phones.
Since the release of numerous Smart Phones, a lot of mobile websites have been created to promote and sell different phone models. A lot of people visit these sites every time a new model from a line of mobile phones comes out. That is why if you are planning to create your own mobile phone website, you have to ensure that you incorporate the right innovative marketing solutions since competition is thick. SEO techniques are also helpful in getting the desired traffic you need for a mobile website. You may wonder why traffic is needed to be driven in a mobile website. This is because rankings are actually based on the amount of traffic that is generated through the number of visitors that visit your page.
With the rapidly growing and changing technological world, smart phones are quickly becoming a powerful tool for both internet searches and communication. The number of mobile users accessing the web through their mobile phones is increasing at a rapid rate. People are keeping abreast of the advances in technology that smart phones are providing. However, using a mobile phone to search the internet is a bit different from using a personal computer or laptop. The phone’s screen is much smaller and the input device makes entering information rather difficult.
Websites are big help in promoting any business, product or service. This is because a website can be accessed by a lot of people from any part of the world. A lot of products are made known since the innovation of the internet that can generate possible profits from prospect clients. Since websites have been proven to aid in the promotion of products or services, mobile phones have been setting up sites for people to see new phone models as well have a brief idea on when these phones will come out. As a matter of fact, it has been projected that mobile phone websites will dominate the internet platform for advertising by 2014.
Till now, when a person wants to search anything over the web space, he or she generally goes to his PC or laptop to carry out the search; but the scenario is changing rapidly. People don’t have time to go to the PC to search anything and they are requiring the search, anytime and anywhere. So, now most of the people are performing the search from their mobile phones, instead of PC.