As we discussed in our previous blog post, Google recently updated its algorithm for mobile searches to give a significant preference to sites that it considers “mobile friendly”. That update has officially been rolled out by Google starting on April 21, 2015.
Has the updated impacted your site?
If you’re not sure, I’d suggest taking a look at your Analytics (hopefully you have it setup) and see if your website traffic has taken a plummet over the past day. Given that over 50% of all local-related searches are conducted on a mobile phone, a good portion of your website visitors are coming to you in a manner that is likely impacted by this algorithm change.
At the very least, Google has made it easy for us to determine if they would consider your site to be mobile friendly. Just go to their mobile friendly test and put in the address of your website. Be sure to check out not just your home page but each of your important inner pages as well. The test is performed on a “per URL” basis which means some pages might be mobile friendly whereas others are not.
If you failed that test, feel free to get in touch with us and we’ll let you know what it will take to get your site current and looking great on mobile devices.
The good news is that if your site (and pages) is in fact mobile friendly, this update might benefit you by increasing your website traffic. There are essentially the same number of people searching on mobile devices today (after the update) as there was a couple of days ago (before the update). So if any of your competitors have failed to get their site current, and yours is, you could benefit by capturing some of the traffic that they are now losing.
Now, early reports and our own experience suggests that this is a rollout that might happen over a period of time – perhaps over the next week. We’re definitely seeing some changes in search results and those changes are gradually getting larger over the past 24 hours. But it wasn’t like we woke up on rollout day and it was the mobilegeddon people have been talking about.
Still, the most important point to get out of all this is that Google is very interested in delivering quality search results. And by quality, we don’t simply mean great content (although that’s incredibly important) but also a quality experience for the user. We fully expect these types of user experience algorithm changes to continue going forward – and well beyond just mobile results.
