Updating mobile friendly use from Google arrived this April, but should you rush to make your site mobile friendly? The columnist Bryson Meunier explains how to estimate the impact on your site.
21 2015 of April It's the day Google started using mobile-friendly compliance as a ranking factor for smartphone searches, and if you haven't adapted your site yet, you really should.
For most of us, mobile compliance is no longer optional. At SMX West this month, seoClarity's Mitul Gandhi reported that mobile search currently accounts for around 30% of total traffic, regardless of the industry. For some of us, it's more than half of all search traffic and growth at times.
Converting a mobile responsive site is now necessary for many sites, and is a good long-term investment, even if it doesn't affect your traffic in the short term.
What if you're in an industry where at least 30% of your traffic comes from mobile devices? Should making your site mobile friendly still be a priority? Will you really lose that amount of traffic if you don't?
Recently on Google+, Rand Fishkin shared the device breakdown for various sections of Moz.com, and the numbers are pretty low – so low that Justin Briggs estimates the traffic you could lose as a result of not being mobile friendly could be as low as “less than 1%.”
Moz made their site mobile friendly. But for other businesses, knowing how to calculate the effect of the mobile-friendly update could help you decide the timeframe in which these changes should be made. If there isn't a lot of mobile traffic to lose, maybe April 21 wasn't the end of the world for your online business.
Estimation of Potential Traffic Lost by the Google Update
To show how to calculate lost traffic to your business, we are going to use moz.com as an example.
First, we used SEMRush to find the best non-brand name keywords for the site, removing keywords that Moz placed off-navigation to create a list of qualified keywords that may be important to the site. Moz business.
If you are doing this for your own site, uses a list of the most qualified keywords, along with ratings for smartphones and computers. If you don't have the smartphone ranking for a site you don't own, you can do what we did: we used SEMRush's position tracking to find the missing smartphone ranking, spot check, and ranking with Chrome in incognito mode on a smartphone.
Once we had this, we took only keywords that had page one rankings on the desktop, which reduced the list 87 keywords.
Using AdWords Search Volume, we manually selected smartphone volume and estimated desktop and smartphone traffic based on device-specific position and search volume, using seoClarity click-through rate (CTR) data. ) desktop and smartphones based on position:
We end up with a spreadsheet that looks like this, with smartphone penalty rankings based on click-through rate decline based on seoClarity data.
We can see that “less than 1%” was based on a very slight penalty, where the ranking of keywords without mobile-friendly content changes only by one position. In industries where mobile-friendly content is a norm, this could be much more serious, resulting in a loss of several positions.
A change in five positions could mean a loss of up to 41% of smartphone traffic on Moz and 3% of total traffic.
It's worth noting that this number might actually be a little lower, since some of the URLs we used in this study are already mobile-friendly.
This number will be different for each site. Moz is lucky because these days, its audience isn't generally using smartphones to access the type of content it provides.
However, since the norm is approximately 30% access to search by smartphones (according to seoClarity) and that some sites have much more than half of their traffic coming from smartphones, this mobile algorithm could be very detrimental for many businesses.
With smartphone access increasing (and faster than computer access), companies would do well to follow Moz's lead and make their sites mobile-friendly, even if the percentage of total traffic they could lose in this moment is less than 5%.
Source: Search Engine Land