Coca-Cola and FedEx took the lead in The Search Agency's report on the Fortune 100 companies' mobile sites, with a score of 4.49 out of 5. 

Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association and Walgreens tied for third place with a score of 4.24, and Liberty Mutual ranked in fifth place with a score of 4.19. While those companies performed well, a surprising number of Fortune 100 companies do not have a mobile-optimized site.

?If I had to make my best guess, I'd say that many may be focusing on the desktop Web site without considering that many of their customers, prospects or information seekers are on mobile devices,? said Grant Simmons, director of SEO and social product at The Search Agency, Los Angeles.

?This is especially true for large B2B companies, who tend to move and adopt technology slowly, but yet may still be their vertical leaders,? he said. ?Mobile strategies in this instance take longer to plan and longer to implement.?

The Fortune 100 is an annual list of the 100 largest public and privately-held companies in the United States. The list is compiled using gross revenue figures and is published by Fortune Magazine.

Fortune failure
The report analyzed the companies based on industry best practices and Google along with some qualitative factors. The Search Agency scored the companies? mobile sites based on five factors: Load speed, site format, calculated download speed, social media presence and application presence.

The report found that only nine companies used responsive design, 47 used a dedicated mobile site and 44 did not provide a separate mobile experience from the desktop version at all.

According to Google, responsive design is the best practice for serving the same HTML across devices, and yet only nine of the Fortune 100 companies use responsive design.

Additionally, Google recommends that a mobile site should load within one second, but the average page load time for the companies was about five seconds.

All responsive sites took an average of 8.42 seconds to load, mobile-specific sites took an average of 2.9 seconds and desktop sites took an average of 6.57 seconds.

Only 16 of the sites followed Google?s advice and loaded within one second.

When a page takes a long time to load, consumers get frustrated and are more likely to spend less time engaging with the site or even leave the site altogether. Marketers definitely need to consider this when designing a site, be it responsive or mobile-specific.

Not one of the Fortune 100 companies met all of the set criteria, and none scored a perfect score of five out of five. The average score for all of the companies was 2.31.

None of the industrial, consumer package goods, food/beverage, or oil and gas companies linked to an app on their home page. Telecom companies took the lead with 75 percent linking to an app, and 63 percent of retail companies linked to an app.

All of the Telecom companies had a dedicated mobile site, 88 percent of retail had one, 75 percent of logistics and industrial had and 64 percent of insurance had.

Mobile winners

As an industry, telecom led with an average score of 3.26. Logistics came in second with 2.97, retail in third with 2.89 and insurance in fourth with 2.85.

Wholesalers and aerospace companies scored the lowest with 1.16 and 1.17 respectively.

By not catering to the mobile audience, the Fortune 100 companies may be hurting themselves for the future.

?Short term they may face visibility challenges, especially in Google for terms other than their core brand terms,? Mr. Simmons said.

?Longer term, mobile is one channel that is grabbing more market share,? he said. ?As a great mobile experience becomes the de facto expectation, I think they face customer and prospect alienation.

?Certainly for transactional based sites, where usability often equates to increases in their bottom line, a mobile site can create a significant opportunity, by the same token, in a social connected and peer review world, a bad site experience can often spread virally, create bad PR and stick around for a while. Companies should invest to continuously improve their mobile experience.?

Final Take
Rebecca Borison is editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York