After Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird, Google’s announcement to integrate a website’s “Mobile-Friendliness” into its search algorithm (and, therefore, their SERPs) on April 21st 2015, has caused the biggest stir seen in the community in a long time.
A surprise despite the fact that Google has been sending out Webmaster notifications for quite a while, alerting webmasters of Mobile Usability issues, details of the errors and even started providing a guide with helpful links on how to fix them and – more recently – a “Mobile Friendly Test Page“, which allows users to perform a mobile-friendliness check on any given URL.
Needless to say that all these efforts are in vain, if nobody ever reads the webmaster messages, or if you don’t even have a webmaster account for your website.
Why You Should Optimize Your Site Now
In short: Because otherwise you’re providing a really crappy experience for a very large (and still growing!) part of your audience. And since Google wants to provide the best possible experience for their users, your site gets left out; period.
How do you know how many users access your site on a mobile device?
Hint: It helps if you have Google Analytics properly installed.
Let’s look at the growth of the mobile audience on a client’s website over the past few years (Q1 2011 – Q1 2015):
Currently, almost 50% of all website visits on this client’s website come from some kind of mobile device. Can you really afford to shut those visitors out?
An Even Bigger Impact
But even more important than the fact that your site might get pushed to the dreaded “Page 2” on Google’s list of results, is the fact that you are literally leaving money on the table of you do not provide an optimized experience for your mobile users.
This is the impact an e-commerce client saw after we optimized his website (and parts of the adwords account) for mobile use:
Before mobile optimization:
After mobile optimization:
Takeaway
– While Google won’t completely delete your website from its index, your customers might drop you.
– Talk to your webmaster, and if you don’t have one, get one today.
– If your webmaster/designer/developer is unable to help you, get one who can – talk to us.