seolounge
Google says it’s mobile update was not as big as predicted as many more sites were mobile friendly by the 21st of April then expected.
Impact on Small Business Websites
All Fruitful Online clients were advised to consider getting their web developers to make their websites mobile friendly prior to the change on the 21st April 2015.
In the 2 weeks after the update we have not see any significant changes in mobile traffic for any of our clients. The majority of keywords remained at the same rank regardless of if the clients websites were mobile friendly or not.
However for mobile friendly sites we defiantly saw some big increase in rankings for some keywords. In some cases the client was ranking on page 3 or 4 or higher and has come up to page one. However we also saw some non mobile friendly site keywords do the same thing as Google ranked them for a different page on their website.
Small business websites may have been somewhat protected from this update. Google has indicated via John Mueller’s hangout that small business websites have relevant results and Google wanted to keep them in the rankings even if they were not mobile friendly. Based on the belief that small business owners may not have the funds or time to change their site before the update.
“for the sites that aren’t able to go mobile friendly yet, maybe like small businesses who don’t have the time or the money to set up their sites for that. These are results that are still fairly relevant in the search results, so we need to keep them in there some how.” said Google’s John Mueller
Overall Impact
The team at Brightedge designed a study to test the mobile algorithm and it’s impact across 20,000+ URLs.
Impact on Major Websites
The team at searchmetrics looked at 50 major websites that were not mobile friendly and 50 that were.
They found sites that were not mobile friendly lost anywhere from 21% to 89% of their mobile SEO visibility.
While the mobile friendly sites gained anywhere from an 11% to 4012% increase in their mobile SEO visibility.
They also looked at the difference between mobile and desktop rankings to see the sites that were the real winners and losers of the update.
You can see the sites and their % increases or decreases at the bottom of this blog post
Update: Impact 4 weeks out
The team at s360 in Denmark looked at 60 websites (30 mobile friendly and 30 not)
They found a 38% increase in traffic to mobile friendly websites in the 4 weeks after the update compared to the 10 weeks prior. While non mobile friendly websites seemed to maintain traffic.
We are not sure what kind of websites these are but it is interesting data. see more
For more detailed SEO advice check out my SEO eBooks.
I plan to write an eBook specific to every local industry. So please contact me to request one for your industry.
ENJOYED READING? PLEASE SHARE THIS ARTICLE
