Less Than 10% Of The Web In 2012 Is Mobile Ready

Mobile’s overall share of Web traffic in the United States has increased to about 9% (according to StatCounter) which is also the same percentage of Quantcast’s Top Million sites that are deemed ready for mobile in 2012 according to data from the Mongoose Metrics Data Series. Since there wasn’t the same data pull last year, it could […]

Chat with SearchBot

Mobile’s overall share of Web traffic in the United States has increased to about 9% (according to StatCounter) which is also the same percentage of Quantcast’s Top Million sites that are deemed ready for mobile in 2012 according to data from the Mongoose Metrics Data Series.

Since there wasn’t the same data pull last year, it could be compared loosely to data from Brand Anymore in late 2010, which determined that of 7,000 retail websites only 4.8% were mobile ready – a nearly doubling of the Web’s mobile readiness in a year.

In the Mongoose Metrics data set, 118,000 of the 1,000,000 sites could not be crawled for a variety of reasons, resulting in approximately 882,000 sites that could be used for this data.

As 79,133 sites either rendered a mobile version on the same URL or redirected to a mobile version of the site under a different URL when a smartphone user agent was detected, this number dropped to 76,241 when a feature phone user agent was used.

Interestingly, these sites used a JavaScript mobile redirect more often for feature phones than smartphones.

The two user agent types being used were the same that Google uses to determine a site’s rendering for the two mobile phone types.

Why this is important is due to consumers preferring a mobile website over an app for price comparisons, reviews and actual purchases on their mobile device, according to the results of Adobe’s Mobile Experience Survey in 2011, which means they are most likely to use a search engine.

mobile matters

When a consumer does click on your site in the search results, over half of these potential customers would not recommend a business with a bad mobile site and furthermore, 40% would then visit a competitor site after a bad mobile experience on yours.

Some tips were provided here at Search Engine Land to understand and prepare for mobile search in 2012.

Is you site ready for the estimated 1 out every 4 searches in 2012 coming from a mobile device, or are you part of the 91% of sites that aren’t?


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Michael Martin
Contributor
Michael Martin is a digital strategist at Ignite Visibility and recognized throughout the search marketing industry as one of the leading authorities on mobile SEO. Michael has a degree in computer engineering from UMass Dartmouth and a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI), Michael has also taught accredited SEO courses at San Diego State University, wrote for Search Engine Land, has been a speaker at SMX and most major digital marketing conferences while being a contributor to The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization published by O’Reilly.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.