Companies in Singapore are still missing the digital opportunity

GOOGLE recently rolled out its mobile-friendly update, which will boost the rankings of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. Its definition of mobile-friendly is a website that "can be read without tapping or zooming, with tap targets spaced appropriately and that the page avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling".

I put the websites of the Straits Times Index (STI) companies to Google's "mobile-friendly test" - and the results are telling: The majority of them will be punished by this new algorithm, with just 10 of them (or 33 per cent) having mobile-compatible websites. Google itself says that if a site's pages are not mobile friendly, there may be a "significant decrease in mobile traffic from Google Search".

This low level of mobile compatible sites in Singapore is despite the fact that key stakeholders are becoming increasingly mobile, with two billion people expected to be using smartphones by 2016 according to eMarketer. This trend is fundamentally changing the way in which we all consume information on a daily basis, and it should be driving the way that corporates share information with audiences including customers, investors, employees and other stakeholders.