April 2015 | Digital8

Google’s “Mobilegeddon” Is Upon Us!

Unlike some other Armageddon I could mention, Google’s “Mobilegeddon” has arrived, rest assured you’ll be seeing the effect in no uncertain terms as this happens.

So what does this mean to you? Well, if your website isn’t mobile friendly, it could mean a considerable chunk of your hard earned cash! If your website has been getting away with ranking well despite not being mobile friendly, then that time is over and you will no longer reap the benefits of those rankings.

Google Ranking

Google is not being evil here, the rise of mobile devices is undeniable so for them to continue serving non-mobile friendly websites to users on mobile devices would be insanity. They have to keep up with the times and if you haven’t done the same yourself then you’re about to pay the price!

Responsiveness is preferable as your site then works on any device and is future-proofed against any similar such updates, but for now a mobile site will do, provided that it is set up correctly.

In the meantime, here are a few key things we know that you don’t have to worry about…. for now at least. Plus some other handy stuff.

  1. This update does not affect tablet search results. For now it only affects smartphones.
     
  2. AdWords results will not change. This is only for organic search results
     
  3. Here is where you can test your site’s mobile friendliness with an official Google tool.
     
  4. Contrary to some other claims (about halfway down the page) that a separate mobile site doesn’t class as mobile friendly, Google Developers seem to contradict this given that they’re offering advice on how to correctly set one up to be mobile friendly.
     
  5. From all accounts, this update appears to be superior to Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird and Pigeon because it doesn’t take months to refresh. It runs as you go and so if you take a hit but rectify the problem, you won’t have to wait months to regain at least some position.
Mobile Friendly

So there you have it, perhaps not quite the end of the world it’s being touted as.

Still, if you’re a business who sees a lot of smartphone traffic, or in particular smartphone purchases and you aren’t mobile friendly?……wait, no, we highly doubt that.

To be blunt about it, it’s time to fork out your cash and get mobile! Or you can just reach out and let us do it for you.

Click-Through-Rates & User Experience: Indirect SEO

Not Sure If Direct

Have you ever had a conversation with an SEO that went something like this?

You: “Such and such SEO told me that this is an important element of SEO. I want you to address it.”

SEO: “I don’t know why they told you that, it’s not important. Examples X, Y & Z are all we need to worry about. That doesn’t really have a direct effect on rankings”

To answer the questions this probably had you asking yourself, you were likely both right, as was the previous SEO you’d spoken to prior to that conversation.

Engagement with your website can in fact affect your SEO, most noticeably via click-through-rate, however this is not a direct effect.

Let’s take your meta description for example:

Depending on who you speak to, you might be told that meta descriptions don’t affect your rankings and so they’re unimportant. This is only half right. While meta descriptions don’t directly affect your SEO, your click-through-rate does.

There is plenty of material to support this proposition online, such as you’ll find here and here and both of which are actually backed up by experimentation data.

For this reason, having an attractive meta description to encourage click-through from the search results is definitely important. By proxy, this also makes your Title Tags important for indirect reasons as well as the direct effect they’re known to have on SEO. A great catchy title with an attractive meta description (containing keywords to draw the eye when they’re bolded in those results) will positively impact your chances at getting a click.

Which speaks to the larger point here: Google cares about user experience. Always have, always will. Good results to search queries are what keeps them in business. You need to keep the user in mind every single time you touch your website because it doesn’t end there. The user experience from beginning to end is very likely to impact your SEO at least indirectly in some form or another.

Internal contextual link placement is important for this exact reason.

Let’s say you have a piece of content onsite with links to other relevant pages on your site, this is known to spread authority across the site. Why would the algorithm very deliberately do such a thing? Because this shows that you are being helpful to the end user and deserve to be rewarded as such.

If you’re having trouble thinking of further examples of what Google might care about which could indirectly affect your SEO, ponder the following for a bit:

Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate

Abandonment Rate

Interaction Via Social Media

Memes

I could explain further, but I think it’s important that you have a think about this in the context of your own website and in the context of everything to do with user experience. Go on. Get to it! Just be sure to confirm your thoughts before acting on any rash decisions.

Happy lead hunting!

Leads

 

Website Not Mobile Friendly? You’ve got 14 days to innovate or die!

Okay, slightly dramatic statement perhaps, but it’s not at all untrue. The SEO Community is awash right now with conversations around Google’s as yet unnamed (an animal name at least) “Mobile Friendly Algorithm update” set to be released exactly 2 weeks from today.

Not to overstate the weight of the situation, it has been touted even by Google staff themselves as bigger than both Penguin & Panda.

So what does this mean for the average business? To put it simply, that mobile redesign you’ve been putting off for your website?

Mobile-Friendly Importance 

Things are about to get pretty terrible for anyone lagging behind in this respect and to be fair to Google they’ve been talking about the importance of mobile for a very long time. I guess they feel that enough is enough and businesses that can’t step up are going to have to be left in the innovators’ dust.

It’s definitely not as though they’re doing this for no reason either. Last year for the first time ever, mobile access overtook desktop access as has been an inevitability for quite a few years now as better smartphones & tablets continue to kill off the PC (and lately even Laptop) markets worldwide. Mobile search is also due to overtake desktop search this year, hence the move from Google.

Mobile-Friendly Importance

Mobile Trending 

Let’s be honest here, if you’re not mobile friendly by now then you’ve likely only got yourself to blame. Starting on a mobile website even today probably wouldn’t have you ready in time, but at the very least you should be able to minimise the amount of time this affects you by getting mobile friendly as soon as humanly possible!

Remember folks, at the end of the day, Google is just trying to service the end user with relevant, positive experiences. You can’t blame them or allow yourself to fall into the trap of thinking “it’s all just gotten too hard” when they decide to get in front of mobile devices trending. It would be terrible business practice for them not to. 

Plus, why would you as a business not want to follow the lead of arguably one of the most successful businesses of all time and follow consumers into the mobile realm? I’m willing to bet that a good portion of you are reading this blog on a mobile device and if you’re not, you’ll use one before the day is done. Time to wake up and smell the internet!

Mobile-Friendly

You could always talk to your friendly neighbourhood website developer about how to make this happen, but whatever you do, don’t put this off any longer if you value your business and have any reliance whatsoever on your website. It simply isn’t worth the pain.

Contact us to talk about your options.