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Mobile SEO Growing

Mobile SEO Growing in Importance as Web Economy set to Double by 2016

New research carried out by the Boston Consulting Group and commissioned by Google has predicted that the value of the global Internet economy to G20 countries will double by the year 2016, from the equivalent of £1.5tn to £2.7tn. That?s trillion. Yes, you read that right.

Amongst the bold predictions made by the report, the researchers say that the Internet will:

• Move from being a luxury to an ordinary good (half of G20 population will use the Internet by 2016)
• Become more widely used in ?emerging? markets than in developed ones (70% of Internet users will be from emerging markets such as China)
• Move ?from passive to participatory? ? a sign that businesses need to stay focused on social media
• Be transformed from being a PC-based activity to a mobile one. The report suggests that by 2016, mobile devices such as smart phones will account for about 80% of all broadband connections in the G-20 nations.

What the research shows is that the potential for businesses to capitalise on the Internet is set to grow over the next four years, particularly for any businesses involved with overseas e-commerce. But it is also a warning sign for all businesses with an online presence that they need to check their online marketing strategies, to prevent them from falling behind as we go into the next phase of the Internet?s growth.

Perhaps the most startling statistic is that 80% of all Internet connections will be mobile by 2016. From an SEO perspective, this means that all businesses need to get to work optimising their sites for mobile users.

Despite their surface similarities of screens and buttons, mobile devices work in very different ways from desktop or laptop computers. Screens are much smaller, and control devices work differently than the standard mouse-keyboard configuration (sometimes the control device is the screen itself). The way people use mobile devices ? often on the go ? also differs from traditional Internet use, which has up until now been a static activity.

In order to provide the best results for their users, mobile-orientated search engines are constantly improving their abilities to recognise which content is optimised for viewing on a mobile device. In essence, what this means is that if businesses don?t want their websites to be rendered virtually invisible to the growing number of mobile Internet users, they need to take steps to optimise them for such devices.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jon Celeste .