This Google Stat Has Major Implications For Your Site

In May, Google casually noted in a blog post that mobile searches have overtaken desktop searches in ten countries including the United States and Japan. It didn’t elaborate on what the other countr...
This Google Stat Has Major Implications For Your Site
Written by Chris Crum
  • In May, Google casually noted in a blog post that mobile searches have overtaken desktop searches in ten countries including the United States and Japan. It didn’t elaborate on what the other countries were.

    Do you get more mobile traffic than desktop traffic? What’s the split like? Discuss.

    The following month, Google mentioned another country by name, adding the United Kingdom to the list. Matt Jackson at SocialMediaToday reported at the time:

    During a presentation at London Tech Week, Google’s Eileen Naughton said that not only are more searches conducted on UK mobile devices than on UK desktops, but that more UK YouTube searches were also conducted on mobile devices.

    The YouTube part is interesting as well, as Google hadn’t mentioned that before when talking about this subject, at least to my knowledge.

    The growing mobile search trend obviously illustrates why Google has put so much emphasis on websites being mobile-friendly and begun taking app indexing into account when ranking search results.

    The world is going mobile, and websites that don’t follow are going to be left behind. A recent study found that the mobile-friendly update bumped down about half of pages it threatened to, but it’s still early days. It’s not as if mobile-friendliness is going to become less of a factor going forward.

    Last week, Search Engine Land spoke with Google, and was told that mobile searches have now exceeded desktop searches worldwide. In other words, more than 50% of Google’s searches happen on mobile.

    Danny Sullivan wrote, “It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean that desktop searches have diminished. Stats on desktop search from comScore routinely show the overall amount has risen from month to month. Rather, it’s that mobile searches have been a growing new segment that have caught up and now overtaken desktop search. On the whole, desktop search has grown. As a percentage, it has dropped.”

    Google’s John Mueller said in a Google+ post (via Search Engine Roundtable), “More than half of Google’s searches are now coming from mobile. If you haven’t made your site (or your client’s sites) mobile-friendly, you’re ignoring a lot of potential users.”

    On the app indexing front, Google has also indexed over 100 billion pages within apps so far, and it’s only really getting started with this on iOS.

    Yahoo’s Flurry recently released a report looking at people’s addiction to their mobile devices. In short, addiction is on the rise.

    “On June 29th Bank of America released the findings of its second annual report on Consumer Mobility,” said Simon Khalaf, SVP of Publisher Products at Flurry. “The report showed that the US population is perpetually plugged-in with 71% of those surveyed disclosing they actually sleep with their smartphones. This prompted us to revisit the study we conducted in Q2 of 2014 in which we first uncovered the rise of a new breed of mobile users: the Mobile Addicts.”

    According to the report, worldwide mobile addicts grew 59% over the last year.

    Year over year, the total population of smart devices measured by Flurry grew from by 38% from 1.3B to 1.8B. Regular Users (those who use apps between once and sixteen times daily) grew by 25% from 784 million to 985 million. Super Users (those who use apps between 16 and 60 times daily) grew 34% from 440 million to 590 million. Mobile addicts (those who launch applications 60 times or more per day) grew 59% from from 176 million to 280 million.

    According to Flurry, if the amount of mobile addicts were the population of a country, it would be the fourth largest just behind the United States.

    Flurry shares more analysis on its findings here.

    Related Reading: Will ‘Accelerated Mobile Pages’ Help Google Rankings?

    Is your site in good shape when it comes to reaching mobile users or do you have some work to do? Let us know in the comments.

    Images via Google, Flurry

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