How to survive Mobilegeddon?

On the 21st of April 2015, Google released a major update that might have a huge impact on the mobile visibility of your website. This update has now been renamed in ‘Mobilegeddon’. If your website receives a lot of mobile search traffic via Google search and your site is not suitable for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, this search traffic could decrease.

What is a mobile friendly website?

Your website is ‘mobile friendly’, when your pages are easy to read and easy to navigate, without a need to zoom in or to flip your device.

How important are these visitors who visit your site via a mobile device?

Of course, as owner of the website, you are the only one who can give the right answer. But there is a clear trend that mobile usage is substantially growing.

In the Netherlands there are as many smartphone as laptop users and the number of people with a tablet equals the number of people with a desktop computer. In the United States 94% of the people search via the smartphone. And 77% of all mobile searches is carried out at home or at work, thus in places where probably also desktop computers are present.

Google rates ‘mobile’ so important, that ‘mobile friendly’ is now included in the search results.

What should you do now?

Step 1 Test your website on mobile friendliness

If you want to be sure your website is mobile friendly, check your site with the mobile-friendly test of Google.

Step 2 Determine the impact of the “Mobilegeddon” update on your mobile traffic.

If your website doesn’t pass this test, determine how big the impact is on the number of visitors to your website.

Google Analytics lets you see the impact of organic search traffic via mobile devices in the period before and after the 21st of April. Now you can determine if this impact justifies an investment in for example a responsive website.

NOTE: If you want to know how to generate this insight via Google Analytics, contact QBS group.

Step 3: Make your website mobile friendly

If you decide that you should invest in a mobile friendly website, you can choose from four strategies, depending on your budget and degree of urgency:

1. Convert your existing desktop website into a responsive version.
2. Launch a mobile site next to your existing desktop website.
3. Replace your existing website entirely with a new, sustainable, adaptive or responsive website.
4. Make your most important pages responsive first.

Decide how your organisation and your visitors experience a mobile site.
Do they see mobile as an extension of the regular website or is mobile an important starting point?
Is it all about sales and conversion or do you just want to inform your visitors?

Probably, you are already informed about this by your web builder and maybe you have already received several offers for the development of a new website.

Important in determining the right choices, decide what you want to achieve with your mobile site. What is your primary goal and how will this mobile website contribute to achieving this goal?