Mobile Searches Aid in Romance on V-Day

by: iCopywriter

This one goes out to all you lovers out there.

According to data released by Google today, 62 percent of searches for popular chain restaurants performed on Valentine’s Day were from a mobile device.

That means two things: For one, it sounds like a lot of you were doing some serious procrastination, and maybe even checking with your restaurant of choice on your way to the restaurant. To that we say, tsk tsk, and no wonder you had to wait an hour and 45 minutes for a table.

But that’s very, very good news for businesses that have put their dollars toward developing their mobile sites and advertising. Consumers are moving more and more toward performing many of their basic Web searches on their smart phones, tablets or other mobile devices. According to Google, searches for the chain restaurants grew, between February 7 and February 14, 2012:

·      359% on mobile devices

·      142% on desktop computers, and

·      135% on tablets

That’s a big leap for mobile devices, especially compared to the more modest growth for the other two categories. Restaurants who invested in strong mobile landing pages and unique mobile content likely saw the bulk of that boost in traffic.

Conversely, there’s a lesson to be learned here for businesses that haven’t jumped on the mobile bandwagon: There’s not much of a choice, at this point. Consumers are going to try and find your business on the go, and if they can’t access your site and learn about what you have to offer via their smart phones, then you’re going to lose their business.

Moreover, it won’t work to simply move the site you already have to a mobile platform. We’ve all tried to navigate sites built for a desktop via our phones. The text is too small, the menus are impossible to find and capabilities like searching are basically unusable. Users will leave a mobile site that doesn’t work well just as quickly (if not faster) as they’ll leave a buggy, slow-loading traditional website.

Instead, these Valentine’s Day stats reveal that businesses who haven’t already made the effort are going to need to develop highly usable, unique mobile landing pages for their companies, whether they sell pasta or packing tape, fine wine or furniture. These days, you simply can’t afford not to have a mobile site, complete with unique, high-qualityon-page content and a user-friendly design.

Have you checked out iCopywriter.com lately?