Here’s something you have probably heard a lot in 2013: Mobile is here to stay, and it’s important to know why.

After all, smartphones made up 50 percent of the mobile landscape in 2012, while tablet use grew rapidly. There are 52.4 million tablet owners in the U.S., and mobile alone counts for 13 percent of all global web traffic, according to Search Engine Watch.

Search’s future depends on how consumers behave on mobile.

Once audiences change the way they search for content, marketers and advertisers need to change the way they read their audiences. Here’s what you need to know for now.

The search trends: By understanding how your audience finds and reads content, you can create a strategy geared toward them. According to a recent survey, almost 90 percent of  marketers regard mobile and tablet search as more important or much more important compared with 2012. They also said optimizing their site for mobile or tablet search is more than twice as important in 2013 than last year.

“The growth of local search and social media has fueled the need to optimize for mobile, and the increased production and usage of tablet devices has offered more and more ways to utilize these channels in some similar, but also different, approaches to mobile search,” writes Jim Yu of Search Engine Watch.

The tools: Google has been preparing for this. At the moment, it holds 95 percent of worldwide mobile search queries. However, its update of the search-focused product AdWords moves away from device analytics, “essentially forcing advertisers to design campaigns around context rather than specific device types,” says Business Insider.

Google Webmaster Tools are useful for checking the functionality of mobile content, and Google Analytics  compares mobile with desktop traffic.

The future: Right now there isn’t a one-way approach to search via mobile devices—and that confuses metrics. Mobile users access content via apps, web searches, newsletters, and other platforms. They use location services for social media and other applications that require geolocators. “Search’s future depends on how consumers behave on mobile,” Business Insider points out. “Will browsers and search engines continue to funnel search behavior? Or will apps tend to mediate search experiences?”

How has your association been measuring mobile activity?

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