Google’s Mobilegeddon: Should you care?

It’s all over tech news: the dreaded 04.21.15 deadline.

The search giant announced in late February that starting April 21st, it will unleash a new algorithm that will favor webpages that are “mobile-friendly.” You can test if a webpage on your site meets Google’s criteria of mobile-friendliness by using theirmobile-friendly test.

So, what does this mean? Everyone should panic and run to find the best developer to upgrade their site to a responsive design? Not necessarily, and here is why:

1. Unless you have large enough mobile traffic numbers, your site is unlikely to be drastically rocked by this change
2. You may only need to change parts of your website, to still be ‘safe’ from a drop in mobile rankings

In an SEO audit, I always advise clients to first tackle the issues that are: a) the easiest to handle and b) will provide the biggest bang for their buck. If you want to make an informed decision on whether or not to take the mobile plunge, here are some areas of your analytics that can guide you.

Check your traffic sources

In true Google fashion, the somewhat vague Mobilegeddon announcement stated that the “change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.” What this really means is you need to take a look at your organic traffic. Even though the announcement implies that it will only affect mobile searches, I am quite skeptical. If your business largely relies on organic traffic for its business, make sure to monitor your traffic carefully in the coming weeks and make appropriate changes.

Check your mobile traffic

When I begin an analysis of a website, I always look at the big scale view of the traffic to start. To do this, log in to your Google Analytics account and:

1. Set the date range to view a full calendar year
2. Go to Audience > Mobile > Overview

Here you can see how much of your traffic comes from mobile devices. In our case, mobile traffic accounts for less than 12% of the total. This would indicate to me that mobile is probably not much of a priority to fix, at least not on an urgent basis and I would check to see what types of prospects are coming from organic mobile searches. For this we go to Webmaster Tools.

Check your top webpages

I suggest you run an analysis on your top performing webpages to see what types of traffic they acquire and how that traffic handles each page. To do this, log in to your Webmaster Tools account and:

1. Go to Search Traffic > Search Queries
2. Set the date range to the max (the last 90 days)
3. Click the tab Top pages

Here you will see a list of all of the top performing webpages on your site, pre-sorted by number of clicks.

TIP: if there is an arrow next to the page, click it to see the keyword terms that rank for the webpage.

Now go back to your Analytics account and check to see if each webpage has large mobile traffic volume.

1. Go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages
2. Add Device Category to the data table
   1. Click Secondary dimension button
   2. Search for and select Device Category

Now you can see how each webpage performs on different size screens. Look at your top webpages from Webmaster Tools. Do your top pages have a large percentage of traffic on mobile devices? If a webpage is generating a large number of clicks on mobile, it is a good idea to check its mobile-friendliness.

TIP: If your mobile traffic and your bounce rate are both high you should work to improve the mobile-friendliness of that webpage.

The silver lining of Mobilegeddon is that it is on a page-by-page basis, not site-wide. What this means for you is that you can gradually improve your website instead of paying loads of money for a full overhaul. If you see that a particular webpage has a lot of mobile traffic and a high bounce rate, contact your developer to see if you can make that webpage responsive. If it can, work on that first and once it is mobile-friendly, resubmit it to be crawled again.

Keep checking your data

The SEO world is buzzing about this update, saying 40% of the leading sites failed Google’s mobile-friendly test. The update is projected to have a bigger impact on search rankings than Panda and Penguin, which affected nearly 12% of sites and over 3% of search results respectively. This could result in a large shift in traffic, but it will likely not happen overnight. Keeping an eye on your traffic, using the methods outlined above monitoring your pages and rankings weekly. If you see a drastic shift and are losing traffic, you know where to look to find the problem area and what pages to fix first.

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