Optimize Your Mobile Search as Google Rolling Out New Mobile-Friendliness Update on April 2015

It seems that Google is now focusing on enhancing the user search experience on mobile devices and as a start, Google will roll out an update that consider mobile-friendliness as an SEO ranking factor. At the recently concluded SMX West Conference, a representative from seo Clarity reported that mobile internet search currently makes up about 30 percent of total web traffic, regardless of industry. It means that mobile search is growing thanks to the popularity of smartphones and tablets.

So, it is time for you to make your website more mobile-friendly and avoid being left behind in mobile after the Google update roll out in April 2015. According to industry experts, it is a good long-term investment even if it doesn’t affect your short-term web traffic. Recently, Moz.com founder Rand Fishkin shared via Google+ about the device breakdown for different sections of Moz.com, and the numbers are not very impressive. It is so low that Justin Briggs of Briggs by estimated the traffic that Rand might lose as a result of not being mobile-friendly might be as low as below one percent.

Even though Moz is optimizing its website to make it mobile SEO friendly, but for other businesses, knowing how to determine the impact of the mobile-friendly update could help them decide the time frame in which these changes need to be done.

How Google’s New Update Impacts Your Overall Website Traffic

To determine how much amount of traffic you lose after the April 2015 update rollout, we will use moz.com as an example. First, we utilized SEMRush to search for the top keywords in the non-branded category for the website, deleting any keywords that Moz ranked for that were directional, so as to create a list of qualified keywords that may be important to the company’s business.

If you are doing this for your own website, then use a list of your most qualified keywords, along with mobile and desktop rankings for each. If you do not have mobile device rankings for a website you do not own, and to find a smartphone / tablet ranking use the SEMRush position tracking, and the spot check suspect and missing rankings with Chrome web browser incognito on a smartphone. Once we had that, we took only keywords that had a web page one ranking on the desktop, which narrowed the list down to eighty seven keywords.

Using Google Adwords search volume, we entered the smartphone volume manually, and estimated desktop and smartphone traffic on device-specific position and search volume, using data from seo Clarity around desktop and mobile click-through-rates based on position. When you do it the same way, you will get a spreadsheet that consists of smartphone ranking penalties based on decreased click-through rate according to the seo Clarity data.

We won’t know until Google rollout its update on April and the impact it would make on the search engine results that matter to your business. But a shift in five positions could mean a loss of as much as 41 percent of Moz’s smartphone traffic and 3 percent of total Moz web traffic. It is worth noting that this number could be a little lower in reality, as some of the URLs that we used in this study are already mobile-friendly.

This number will be different for every website, and Moz is lucky because at present, its audience is not generally using smartphones to access the type of content it provides. However, given that the norm is about 30 percent search access from mobile devices and that some websites have much more than half of their web traffic coming from smartphones/tablets, this mobile-friendly algorithm update could make not-so-positive impact on many businesses.

Given that smartphone access is only increasing which is faster than its desktop counterpart, businesses would be wise to follow Moz.com’s lead and make their websites, mobile compatible, even if the total web traffic that they might lose right now is less than five percent.

You can use this template and your own data to find out how much traffic your website might lose as a result of the mobile-friendly update on this April. Then use these resources to make your site mobile-friendly at a pace that works for your business.