We all know that more and more people are using phones and tablets to access the Internet. We’re told time after time that mobile is growing fast.
Here are some recent statistics:
- Smartphone and tablet growth is on a trajectory where, instead of having 1b global PC’s, we’ll have 10b global mobile internet devices
- Mobile data traffic growth has accelerated 81%
- There are now 1.6b Smartphones and 439m Tablets globally
- Global internet traffic is now 25% mobile, up from 14% year on year
- 30% of global mobiles are now Smartphones
- Tablets are growing faster than PC’s ever did, at 52% growth in 2013
Information courtesy of BBH Labs.
How many of my visitors are mobile?
I wondered if Writing For SEO was seeing an explosion in traffic from mobile devices.
A few clicks in Google Analytics took me to this set of statistics.
They’re not that much different from last year. I’m getting a greater percentage of mobile visitors, but not by much.
I get round about 10% of visits from people using phones or tablets.
The surprise to me is that number tablet-based visitors is under half of the phone-based visitors. Personally, I use my tablet a lot for reading blogs.
Writing For SEO is Responsive
This site is Responsive – as it has been right from the beginning – which means it adjusts itself to work on a whole range of screen sizes and devices, so it looks as good on my iPhone as my 27″ iMac.
This is what it looks like on my iPhone:
It means I don’t have to worry about mobile users not being able to read my content.
You should be inclusive
But why bother for such small numbers?
I believe, while I’m not seeing anywhere near the number of visitors expected from mobile devices, 10% is still a significant number of readers. You’d be happy if you saw a 10% rise in engagement, wouldn’t you?
Go ahead at get Responsive
Aside from what’s happening on the site now, I’d expect to see more tablet visitors over time – the nature of this blog, with a lot of copy, is unlikely to attract phone users – again, do you pick up the phone when you want to read, rather than grab an address or a phone number?
Catering for mobile users wasn’t a problem either at launch or when I changed the theme. I just made sure I found one that would appear right on most devices. If you use a developer to take care of your site, they should be able to make your site Responsive, too.
Is the mobile Internet important to you?
What have you done to cater for the mobile Internet? Is your site Responsive? And, if it isn’t, why? (I’m interested).
Finally, if there’s enough interest, I’ll possibly do a follow-up in a few months to see if mobile has take a greater share of the visits to Writing For SEO.
Thanks to Martin Voltri for his tablets.