On April 21st 2015 Google will launch a big update called “Mobilegeddon”. According to Google this will be the biggest update they’ve released so far and your website could lose over 50% of its traffic if its not up to date. This is pretty serious stuff! With this article I will explain what this update is all about and how you can prepare your website for it.
It is all about mobile traffic
In the last few years there was a dramatically increase of mobile traffic. By some estimates, over 60% of all Google searches are performed on mobile devices. As many of Googles’s updates are actually tweaks and data refreshes, this update will have more of an impact on search rankings.
With this update your website will be evaluated on mobile-friendliness. There is not much clearance though on what new features will be added or how it will effect the search visibility of a website. Zineb Ait Bahajji, a member of Google’s Webmaster Trends team, said that it is reasonable to guess that the majority of non-optimized sites could see significant decreases in search visibility.
[bctt tweet=”Google Mobilegeddon, that ugly beast just ate some of my website traffic!”]How much traffic can you loose with the Google Mobilegeddon update?
There are a lot of predictions on how much traffic a website can loose after the Armageddon update. You can log in to Google Analytics to see how much mobile traffic you’re receiving. David Kutcher from socialmediatoday.com created a handy tool which you can install on your Analytics. To add David Kutcher’s dashboard to your Google Analytics account, please log into your account and click on this link: Traffic Affected by Mobile Search in Google. This image is an example of the dashboard and as you can see, for this particular website the mobile traffic (mobile and tablet) is 54.7%.
Prepare your website for Mobilegeddon
If your site is already mobile friendly, there is not much to worry about. You should worry though if your website is not responsive or if you don’t have a separate mobile version of your site. Also ensure that Google can crawl your website. If it is not visible, there is actually no point of having it online at all. So how do you know if your website qualifies for being mobile friendly? You can fill in the url of your site on Google’s Mobile-Friendly test form.
You may find the following links useful:
5 WordPress Plugins to Help Create a Mobile Friendly Website
The Definitive Guide To Technical Mobile SEO
Joomla! Extensions Directory – Mobile
Conclusion
Google is going to focus on the mobile market, more than ever. After April 21st Google will add a “mobile-friendly” tag to all optimized websites. If your site is not mobile friendly at this point, you’ll get a warning in your Webmasters account. Fix it as soon as possible, before April 21!
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