What small businesses need to know about “mobilegeddon”

What’s happening?

Having a mobile friendly website is no longer optional as of today, April 21^st 2015.

As Google announced in February, the (somewhat dramatically-named) “Mobilegeddon” update to the Google search algorithm will take into account how mobile-friendly sites are, with the goal of making it easier for users to get “relevant, high-quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”

The algorithm will rank sites with features such as large text and easy to click links higher in mobile search. Websites that aren’t mobile-friendly will be penalised.

Since Google is all about user experience and relevancy of sites, this update comes as no surprise – it’s estimated that as much as 60% of online traffic now comes from mobiles.

Certainly, when it comes to Google, Yahoo, and Bing, the increasing significance of searches from mobile devices is undeniable:

This update reinforces Google’s mobile-focus: search results have already been labelled as mobile friendly for some time, and this latest development is expected to impact up to 40% of top websites.

Let’s put that into context: Panda and Penguin are reported to have affected 12% and over 3% of search results respectively; it is therefore not unreasonable to expect “Mobilegeddon” to have a significant impact on search results.

What should small businesses do?

The quickest and simplest way to assess your site’s mobile credentials is to perform a search for it:

Google already labels mobile-friendly sites as such – if your site has this label, that’s a good sign. At Sage it’s something that they are currently improving.

Use the mobile-friendly testing tool to show in more detail if you pass the mobile test.

The tool is useful for checking your mobile responsiveness and usability. Make sure your most important pages (if not all) look good from a mobile device, that your links are easily clickable, and check that images show up correctly.

Finally, make sure to submit your mobile sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools so your changes are taken into account sooner rather than later.

If you are running any AdWords PPC campaigns, make sure you are running mobile preferred ads; consider using offers and calls to action specifically targeted to mobile users, and make full use of features that can be tailored to mobile, such as call extensions, and mobile sitelinks.

Smartphones and tablets now account for about 32% of paid search clicks and 25% of all PPC spend, so taking the time to optimise your campaigns for mobile truly is key to improve performance overall.

The future is looking very mobile-oriented and Google is unlikely to yield in its efforts to reflect better usability in this area. Creating the best user experience possible and ensuring your search campaigns are mobile optimised, means being better-prepared for any future changes in the Google algorithm.

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