Emarketer recently posted a great article about how smartphone users are accessing the Internet. Research from Google and the Mobile Marketing Association shows that consumers are almost as likely to use a smartphone as a computer to get to your website. The eMarketer article states that:
“In the US, the survey found, 58% of smartphone owners had used their phone to go online every day during the week before polling, vs. 78% who said the same of their PC. When asked about usage the day before polling, 53% said they used the mobile internet multiple times, compared with 67% who said the same of their PC.”
The differences between computer and smartphone usage is even less in accessing social networks. Here’s a chart comparing computer and smartphone social network use in various countries.
The study also looked at smartphone use for watching videos and again, the differences between computer use and smartphone use were relatively small. Here are the survey results for selected countries.
So in the US, about a third of smartphone users watch video on their computers every day and about a fifth use their phones to watch video. While that might seem like a small section of your target market, imagine how the percentages might grow if the question had been “how many had watched video in the last week.” Videos are becoming a much more important factor in improving your search engine performance and it’s growing more likely that your potential customers will watch some of your video on their smartphones.
You should be looking for opportunities to create content on your website or blog that will appeal to smartphone users. For example, we enjoyed Wharton County Freedom Fest, our version of the 4th of July celebration, here in Wharton last weekend — yes, we celebrate the 4th a week early. We posted a schedule for Freedom Fest a couple of days before the event and it received a ton of traffic before and during the event as folks checked their smartphones for the latest schedule.
One lesson here is that you should look for ways to appeal to those smartphone users by adding website pages or blog posts that respond to likely smartphone searches. If you’re planning an event for your business, you should think about creating a mobile phone friendly directions page and schedule page so that people can access this information from the road or from the event venue.
The other lesson is that you should think about ways to add interesting video to your website. People are searching for and watching online video more than ever before and they’re doing it from their smartphones in greater numbers than ever before. Why hide from the trend? Create some informational, product, and testimonial videos for your business to make this trend work for you!
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Related articles
- Small Business Tips for Better Google Rankings (houstontexasseo.com)
- Search Engine Optimization in Houston, TX (houstontexasseo.com)
- Smartphones to Claim 25% of All Google Paid Search Ad Clicks By 2013 (mobilemarketingwatch.com)
- Make sure that your website appears correctly on smartphones and other devices (marketing.yell.com)
