As our Director of Marketing Technology Andy Hunt succinctly put it in a blog post he did last July, there is no mobile Internet; there is only the Internet that sometimes people use on their phones.

There are plenty of statistics and information available on the growing trend of smartphone use. According to Nielsen, almost half (49.7%) of U.S. mobile subscribers now own smartphones, as of February 2012. But some of the more recent moves from Google in the mobile space put a greater emphasis on its importance, particularly in the Search and SEO world. Here are five Google announcements worth noting:

1) At the end of last month, Google officially embraced responsive web design and revealed how its guiding principles will work to design sites that are legible at any screen resolution and use one set of content, making it viewable on any device. This is the newest direction that Google seems to be taking to make it easier for users to find content regardless of the device. In December, the company released the Googlebot-Mobile crawler, with the goal of increased indexing of smartphone content and to provide a better search experience for smartphone users.

2) On the paid search side, Google launched a new AdWords ad extension that is specifically designed for the promotion of mobile apps. The Mobile App extension allows advertisers to append a mobile app download link to their search ads. With this extension, advertisers can promote their mobile app right alongside their text ad, and is a great way to alert searchers who may simply be searching for a product brand or service and may not have found the app otherwise.

3) Google wants its advertisers to have mobilefriendly websites so much that it partnered with DudaMobile to offer a free tool that helps build a mobile site “in three easy steps.” Our user experience and software development teams assure me that developing a user-friendly responsive website takes more than three steps, but this service does offer a tool called the GOMO meter to test to see how your site currently looks on a smartphone.

4) Google even upgraded its AdWords community tool to be smartphone-friendly, so PPC Ad Managers like myself can read articles and ask questions while on the go.

5) To summarize a lot of this up, you can check out the “The Busy Executive’s Guide to Winning with Mobile.” This guide is a recent release from Google’s Think Insights group, which offers quick stats and the latest trends and insights for a wide variety of topics. The format of the playbook is to provide guiding questions and suggested strategies that organizations need to address. The conclusion states that Google believes that mobile represents a sociological shift with how users relate with both digital and physical world. Businesses that understand this will win.

I think that statement says exactly where Google is headed. B2B Brands that embrace mobile will be rewarded with satisfied smartphone customers, and better search results.