Mobile web usage is growing. Are you ready?

For many small businesses, creating a website that functions decently on mobile browsers is the last thing on their mind.

And it’s easy for people to tell themselves it doesn’t matter. After all, isn’t mobile web traffic just 1% of all web traffic?

I can definitely understand this perspective. Particularly when you think about how hard it can be to solve the mobile website problem. I’ve often noticed that when you don’t see a viable solution to a problem, it’s really hard to keep that problem top of mind.

But mobile web traffic is not going away. In fact, it’s growing steadily. For details, check out the article, Mobile Web traffic grows, not slows, during summer, on Mobile Marketer Daily.

Here are a few highlights:

• According to Nielsen, “the number of consumers accessing the mobile Internet in the United States has jumped from 54 million in May 2009 to 72 million in May 2010, a year-over-year increase of 34 percent.”
• The mobile analytics firm Ground Truth has found that mobile users are on the web for an average of 3 hours a month and view an average of 1,000 pages a month.

Traditional web traffic dips in the summer as people are outside playing instead of stuck at home in front of their computers.

But web traffic through handhelds is not dropping. And if you think about it, it makes sense. When we’re out and about, our phones are right there with us. I recently drove to California and back with my family, and we used the mobile web constantly throughout the trip, whether to get maps, find interesting places to eat, or find things to do. In contrast, I opened my laptop only a couple of times.

So what’s a small business owner to do?

Well, you can invest the time and money to create a website that works on mobile phones (but check first — your existing site may be perfectly decent). But while you’re pondering that (and putting it off), there are plenty of other actions you can take.

For example, make sure to update your listing on Google Local and on Yelp. Find out how people are searching for businesses on their phones and make sure you’re part of the results. (Don’t have a phone? Don’t know what apps people are using? Ask them!)

Where are the good coffee shops?

Don’t think this effort will matter? Check out this search I just did on Yelp’s iPhone app for coffee shops near me. Where is Enzo’s? Straight Shots? Teezers? KT Chocolates? Those are 4 excellent and distinctly different places to get a cup of coffee within half a mile of my location, but none of them show up. It would take less than 20 minutes for any of those businesses to get listed on Yelp, and that could result in hundreds of dollars of additional income over the summer tourist season.

(The only listing that’s there is a misplaced pin for a fine dining establishment.)

Photo credit: iphonepics via Flickr creative commons

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