At this week’s ad:tech New York, search experts spoke about SEO for mobile as a strategy for the evolving search market and the validity of these ideas is confirmed by the latest mobile marketing news. According to comScore’s Mobile Subscriber Market Share report, released on Wednesday, surfing the web from mobile phones is becoming increasingly common.
The report shows that the most common mobile activity is still texting – and, notably, Brafton has told marketers it’s best not to underestimate the value of simple texts. In September 2010, 67 percent of mobile users sent texts, demonstrating an increase of 1.4 percent over July.
Using a browser was the second-leading mobile activity, and it proves to be growing at a fast rate. More than one-third (35.1 percent) of mobile users searched the web via their devices in September – a 2.2 percent increase over July. This data gives credence to Morgan Stanley’s prediction that mobile internet users will exceed desktop users by 2015.
Mobile marketers planning search campaigns should consider another finding of the comScore study that showing that Google is the fastest-growing smartphone platform. Google rose 6.4 percentage points from July to September, and now accounts for nearly one-quarter (24.3 percent) of the mobile market.
Additionally, mobile marketers should remember the value of optimizing their content with local leanings to catch the interests of nearby, on-the-go consumers looking for places to shop. Pew Research’s geosocial study released yesterday shows that 7 percent of adults who go online with mobile devices use location-based services, suggesting that finding nearby businesses is increasingly becoming a priority among shoppers.
