Mobile Will Soon Be One-Third of Web Traffic

This is going to be an explosive year for mobile web growth, especially for businesses like restaurants that people are selecting while they are on the go.

A prominent restaurant group in Atlanta reportedly now gets more than 30% of its web traffic from mobile devices. This is more than twice the level of one year ago.

According to another report, mobile browsers now account for 20% of all web traffic in North America. About one-third of that traffic is tablets, so phones represent about 15% of all traffic.

According to Nielsen, two-thirds of Americans aged 24 to 35 own a smartphone — and that was back in January.

A study from Pew Internet reports that nearly half (46%) of American adults are smartphone owners as of February 2012, an increase of 11 percentage points in 9 months. Smartphones are now completely mainstream.

There can be little doubt that these figures will increase dramatically in the next 12 months. The mobile tsunami is growing.

For a restaurant (and most other retail businesses), having a good mobile web site may have been a luxury a year ago. Today, it is an essential element of any serious marketing strategy. When people are looking for someplace to eat, and are researching using their phone, if a restaurant's website isn't mobile optimized, that restaurant is likely to be ignored.