In a recent blog post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, the Webmasters team reinforced the importance of mobile-friendly websites in search engine results. Here is what was said:
Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimised for their devices.1
Although the mobile-friendly ranking factor has always been heavily discussed topic in the SEO industry, this is one of those rare times where Google has publicly mentioned that a certain website criteria will be included as a factor in Google’s algorithm for ranking websites. The reasons for this are obvious when looking at the share of desktop and mobile web usage for this past couple of years.
Desktop vs Mobile Share 2011-2015 (%)2
The trend is pretty clear from the graph above, more and more internet usage is being done on mobile devices leaving desktop internet usage on a downward trend. This pattern applies to New Zealand as well, which seems to follow the global trend closely. The reason for this desktop (and laptop) transition to mobile is smartphones have become cheaper (and more capable than ever) over the past few years. At the same time, mobile internet cost has also gone down dramatically. Because a mobile device is by definition ‘mobile’, we have these devices on our person or close to us at all times, making it the default option when it comes to looking something up on the internet.
Broadband Subscriptions Q2 2010 – Q4 2014 (Per 100 Inhabitants)3
Data from the OECD show that New Zealand is well ahead of the average in terms of mobile broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. The gap between fixed and mobile broadband has also been expanding, showing significant growth in mobile internet usage for the past couple of years. While we expect this trend to continue, we also have to acknowledge that fixed broadband subscriptions are more often than not shared between a few users while mobile broadband subscriptions are on a per user basis.
Traffic Source 2012 – 2014 (CMee’s Client)4
The chart above shows the traffic to one of our client’s websites broken down by internet device. Traffic from desktops have declined while non-desktop traffic has increased in-line with what we find from the charts above. While both mobile and tablet traffic is growing, the former is growing faster than the latter. We expect that this year (2015), approximately 50% of the traffic to the website will come from non-desktop internet devices.
The bottom line is that this coming April, if your website is not mobile-friendly, you will see it slowly, but surely lose its rankings on Google (and other search engines will follow suit) over time, which will be a huge detriment to your business if you depend on leads and clients finding you through searches.
What can you do about it?
The first thing you need to do is to determine if your website is mobile-friendly. A large number of websites have built in mobile-friendly templates if they are built using popular content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Drupal. Here is a link to a tool you can use to test your website: is my website mobile friendly? If the result show that the page is mobile friendly, then great, you do not need to worry about making any changes. If not, you should look to update your website with some mobile pages or consider building a website using a CMS with built in mobile templates.
References
1. Finding more mobile-friendly search results, Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
2. StatCounter
3. OECD (2015), Wireless mobile broadband subscriptions (indicator). doi: 10.1787/1277ddc6-en (Accessed on 5 March 2015)
4. Google Analytics (Audience > Mobile > Overview) (Accessed on 5 March 2015).