HubShout | Online Marketing Solutions

Given that we were chatting about mobile search in one of our meetings this morning, I thought you'd all find this interesting.

Forbes posted 5 Eye-Opening Stats That Show the World Is Going Mobile yesterday. And here they are:

1.) According to a Nielsen survey, 48% of US kids between the age of 6 and 12 want an iPad for Christmas (so, that leaves out the other kids who don't celebrate Christmas but still want an iPad).

2.) Mobile traffic is 13% of all internet traffic globally (compared to 4% in 2010).

3.) 30% of adults in the US own a tablet device (compared to 2% in 2009).

4.) The number of smartphone users is growing by over 40% a year.

5.) The Android platform has grown 6 times faster than the iPhone.

No reason to argue with those facts BUT we did talk about some of these stats today. 87% is still desktop so if you haven't maximized desktop then don't jump to mobile.

You are correct, Chad. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and that people can find you when they search via mobile (hello, Local SEO). But don't forget that most searches are still via desktop AND that the benefits of your SEO efforts aren't exclusive to desktop.

Oh, and read more via my blog post from October: Is Mobile Search Killing Traditional SEO?

The rate of growth is the issue. Mobile traffic is up 225% (13% up from 4% in three years). The other important takeaway....40% growth in smartphone use per year. Obviously that will become less pronounced over time. If I was an actuary, I could try to estimate where that would put us in 10 years, but I would think we would be close to 30-40%.

I hesitate to call a tablet a mobile device. They are in many ways a lap top replacement.

Tablets have definitely blurred the lines between desktop and phone. That is why the newest way to handle your site is responsive design. Responsive design is still being refined but this is where I see sites headed.

The untapped area, at least in aesthetic appeal, has to be the graphic potential of the newer mobile devices. The displays on these are just amazing. An iPad or Nexus has more pixel landscape than most people's desktop computer, yet mobile versions of sites generally don't come close to full utilization of these device's graphic potential. That is where I see the advancement over the next 6-18 months.

I have a feeling that mobile is one of those things that is taking off so fast that we are simply going to have to hang on for dear life. i agree with you Chris on the impact on website design, but as we have discussed in other threads, the ability to monetize mobile is less clear for many companies.

Though we have numbers showing that mobile is accounting for more and more "searches each month" i feel that specifically in the USA it will take a lot longer. This is because unlike many other countries who have 1 slandered network (3g and the transition to 4g) is the slandered in most of Europe,the US has way to many networks of varying functionality (Boost, virgin, sprint, verizon, att ect) to give a consistent experience across the entire mobile platform. I wonder how many of those mobile abandonment are from bad networks as apposed to bad sites.