Washington: Brace yourselves: “Mobilegeddon” is coming.
From Tuesday, all Google searches entered on mobile devices will favour sites that have “mobile-friendly” websites. That move could prompt major changes to how websites are ranked on your smartphone and tablet — and have potentially harmful consequences for many businesses, particularly small retailers, that haven’t designed their sites to look good on small screens.
Google announced in February on its Webmaster Central Blog that it would tweak its search algorithm to favour web properties that are “mobile-friendly”. Characteristics of a smartphone-ready site include large text that’s easy to read on small screens, well-spaced links and mobile-friendly plug-ins.
“This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results,” the company said in its February blog post.
Brian England, owner of British American Auto Care in Columbia, Maryland, said that most of the visitors to his repair shop’s website come via Google. While he has already optimised his site for smartphones, England feels it is generally taxing — but crucial — to keep up with Google’s algorithm changes.
England says he meets regularly with his marketing specialist, only to find that things that worked one month didn’t quite get the same results the next month. “One of the challenges has been every time Google does a little tweak, suddenly all your analysis work, you have to rework it,” England said.
Zineb Ait Bahajji, an analyst Google Webmaster Trends, told the tech blog ‘Search Engine Land’ last month that the change has the potential to affect search even more than Google’s previous updates, which were aimed at catching “spammy” links but tripped up some news organisations and businesses who found themselves lower on Google’s search results.
So why another update, specifically focused on mobile? The company explained: Users “will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimised for their devices”.
Problem
On paper, that all sounds great. Mobile traffic now makes up an estimated 60 per cent of all web traffic, according to a 2014 ComScore report. And more and more of Google’s advertising revenue depends on mobile traffic. Those trends certainly indicate that a majority of consumers have switched over from desktop to mobile when it comes to the way they think about the web.
But businesses haven’t. And that’s a problem, particularly for small and medium-size businesses that don’t have the resources or knowledge to keep up with user search trends. (Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, after all, isn’t exactly a must-read for the boutique down the street.)
Roughly one-fifth of small businesses reported having a mobile-friendly website in the US National Small Business Administration’s 2013 technology survey; 18 per cent had no website at all. A Google/Ipsos survey, also from 2013, put the number of small businesses with no website significantly higher, at 55 per cent.
And if businesses fall down Google’s results for not having a mobile site, that could be a serious problem for them. The top Google search result gets 33 per cent of the traffic, according to a 2013 study by Chitika, a web advertising firm. If you fall to the second page of search results?
Forget it — the 11th-place link gets only 1 per cent of the clicks.
Lars Schmidt, founder of Amplify Talent, a consulting firm in Reston, Virginia, said Google’s move could be “make or break” for small businesses like his, particularly if those companies use search results as a cornerstone of their marketing tactics. “I think it was important before they made this announcement. I think it’s essential now,” Schmidt said. “Now it has the risk of costing you business.”
