mobile-webFast-growing, Internet marketing and SEO firm, Best Rank, Inc. (http://www.bestrank.com), recently conducted research on top-rated mobile websites and collected some important points regarding the significance of businesses implementing mobile sites in 2011.

“With smartphone and mobile device use on a drastic rise, mobile sites are becoming a necessity for many businesses,” states Best Rank SEO Analyst, Ryan Frank, in his blog post. “While a mobile site won’t benefit every business, these sites can both increase leads as well as convert directly to sales for many businesses.”

Some of the more common types of businesses that can benefit from mobile sites include:
• Content Driven News Sites/Blogs
• Professional Services Sites (example: lawyers, dentists, doctors)
• e-Commerce Stores
• Impulse Purchases (example: pizza delivery)
• On Demand Services (example: taxis)
• Local Businesses (example: restaurants)
• Emergency Services (example: tow trucks)

Lawyer Sites
Lawyers cannot afford not to have a mobile site. People often need legal advice in an emergency, and people would use mobile phones to seek information about lawyers. Having an existing website which has a goMobi mobile site makes sense – since the mobile site would automatically appear on the mobile phone and offer the potential client all the information they would need, including an easy method of contacting the law firm

Key Facts and Figures
Frank discovered a post on Search Engine Land (http://searchengineland.com/) by Joshua Odmark entitled, “Top 10 Reasons Your Website Should Go Mobile.” This post includes a few facts and figures that speak volumes about mobile website development. Listed are a few of the main points from his article:

Google has a separate index for mobile content
Google currently has separate indexes for both traditional web content and mobile content. If you have added your mobile site to Google’s mobile index, you should generally have a better chance at showing up in search results than a site without a mobile version (all things being equal). With less competition than Google’s primary index, now is a great time to develop a mobile site and add it to Google’s mobile index. On another note, these two separate indexes should alleviate any concerns of possible duplicate content issues.

Your regular website is not going to cut it
Plain and simple, sites that are designed for traditional web browsers are not going to cut it on mobile browsers. The screen sizes on mobile devices are obviously much smaller and also come in a number of different shapes; some more vertical, some square, and some horizontal. Your mobile site should be a highly simplified version of your primary site with no unnecessary information.

1/5 of Americans access the mobile web each day, the figure is similar in South Africa
This number is absolutely astounding and should only continue to grow. Cell phone technology has grown at a rapid rate and will continue to do so. In addition to the added functionality of cell phones and mobile web browsing, the prices of smartphones and data plans are decreasing every year and thus more and more people are able to afford them.

$1.6 billion purchased from mobile devices in 2009
Mobile commerce seems to be yet another aspect of mobile web browsing that has barely begun to surface. This number, which is already quite significant, may skyrocket over the next five years. People are making more and more purchases on mobile devices when they are on the go. Whether they are purchasing a new album directly from an iPhone, an Amazon book on a Kindle, or a Pizza from Papa John’s mobile site; the convenience factor of these types of impulse purchases will continue to add to the $1.6 billion spent on mobile-based purchases in 2009.

Mobile advertising spending will surpass $6.5 billion in 2012
Advertising spending is often a great indicator of where a certain technology or industry is headed and the drastic increases over the past five years in mobile advertising spend make it quite clear that the mobile web has just began to boom.

“Anything mobile online is obviously very popular right now; its convenience is almost becoming the norm,” states Best Rank CEO, Matt Walker. “Those consumer-driven companies that can ‘go mobile’ these days will benefit now and well into the future. For the types of businesses mentioned above, it’s now becoming a necessity to have a mobile site to compete and succeed.”

Contributed by:
goMobi
http://www.gomobi.co.za

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