BrightEdge, a leading global Enterprise SEO platform, tracks billions of keywords and pieces of content for a variety of clients, including about 30 percent of Fortune 100 companies.
When it researches, people listen.
And they’ll listen to the company’s recent research results. Brightedge found that 27 percent of Web sites are not properly optimized for smartphone searches, causing them to blow off an average of 68 percent of traffic to their sites.
Correcting the error, company execs say, could translate into a 212 percent jump in traffic.
Why does this happen?
When a mobile Web site isn’t optimized properly for smartphones, the company’s search query results drop at least two positions in the ranking, according to the Brightedge study. While the drop doesn’t seem precipitous, it unfortunately also negatively influences click-through rates.
Company researchers say even one misstep in optimization can shunt first-page results to the second page — and send profits plummeting.
The company estimates that iPhone and Android devices now hold 23 percent of the organic traffic share and will grow to more than 50 percent this year. Smartphones and tablets currently constitute about a third of organic search traffic.
Marketers should consider the long-term maintenance required, and the funding levels necessary to optimize correctly.
“Think about how difficult it was to follow SEO best practices, and now you have conditional logic for pages that need to point to each other and serve the correct headers,” said Jim Yu, BrightEdge co-founder. “It’s important for marketers to think about this as they develop their Web sites and understand the tradeoffs.”