Mobilegeddon is here!

Google Turns Its Attention To Mobile User Experience… And So Should You!

Our friends at Jungle-Media give us the low down.

Quality of the searcher experience when using a website should always be an important consideration. Google is renowned for rewarding websites which deliver the best quality results for the searcher. This has always included relevance to the search term, content, on-site security and even page loading speed amongst others. And now how it performs on a mobile phone becomes part of the Google algorithm.

Google estimates that over 50% of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices and this is continually rising. To address this websites are already being given greater ranking when they cater for this growing market.

As early as 2013, Google began to penalize sites which simply redirected all mobile users to a standard homepage instead of their chosen page and these penalties could now become far more severe.

Google is now viewing websites through the eyes of the user.

The Google algorithm bot has traditionally indexed and analysed pages by searching directly through the code on the page.

Since May 2014, these same bots have been uprated and have been rendering pages to see exactly what the end user sees. This is for all devices whether it is a desktop, tablet or mobile phone and this alone presents some serious implications for webmaster and the way sites are constructed.

Websites that do not display well on mobile will lose ranking!

Already Google is tagging websites “Mobile friendly” on mobile phone search result pages. This will immediately reduce click through rate for those websites without the tag. 

However, from the 21^st April Google will give a ranking boost on mobile phone search result pages for websites that are mobile friendly, thereby having a negative impact on ranking for non-mobile friendly websites. 

There are a number of factors which will raise a flag for the Google bot; potentially bringing a ranking  demotion for the website.

Pages which display perfectly on a desktop may render on a mobile device with small or illegible fonts, badly sized page layouts and text blocks. The Google bot will simulate the full mobile user experience and where users have to excessively pan and zoom just to navigate a page Google will mark down the site accordingly.

Test your website here to see if Mobile Friendly

Google Is Doing Everything To Protect Its Reputation.

The search engine giant has always been fiercely protective of its reputation for delivering optimum search results to the end user. At the same time, this brings positive impact and reward to those websites which do everything to follow this quality code of practice.

The positive ranking factors of relevance; quality content and originality are still in place. But these are effectively being reinforced when the actual appearance of the page is also factored in for mobile phones.

Google has calculated that 61% of users will not revisit a site which offers a poor browsing experience on a mobile phone. This alone will have a big impact on how successful your website is on conversions, especially when you consider that the majority of searchers will only engage with a website on their third or fourth visit. 

The early part of browsing on the internet is the short list selection process, if your website does not make it onto the searchers short list then there is no chance of winning the sale! 

The quickest way for Google to encourage webmasters to upgrade their sites for mobile use is with the carrot and the stick or in other words increased and reduced rankings accordingly.

What You Should Do NOW!

The mobile experience for the end user is now factored into the UK search rankings on mobile phones. 

At present it is impacting page by page, not site wide. It is best practice to upgrade all mobile pages now to gain advantage over your competition before more changes are brought into effect.

This way, the experience for your visitors will increase dramatically and you will see an instant increase in user satisfaction and conversions from mobile phone search traffic.

For most websites, becoming mobile friendly can be a simple process. Our Search Marketing experts are here to help. Call us for a chat or drop us a line with your questions. We will be pleased to help!

www.jungle-media.com