How mobile-friendly is your site? From late April, it could have a huge impact on your traffic acquisition from organic search sources.

Google is soon to expand its search algorithms to include mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor in response to the growth of searches performed on mobile and tablet devices. Unlike many algorithm updates in the past, Google has provided many hints that mobile-friendliness will dictate search result performance.

Read on to discover more about the latest search algorithm update and some handy tips to get your site prepared for mobile-friendly search performance.

Be Prepared

Before rushing to redevelop your website to be mobile-responsive, be aware this update will be run in real-time and be administered at page level, rather than site level.

From April 21 2015, sites will only benefit from the mobile-friendly algorithm update after Google has crawled their site and noted the change.

That means the urgency of redesigning your site to be mobile-friendly is most important for sites which are rarely updated and crawled less frequently by Google, as it will take longer for Google to note the adjustment and rank the site accordingly.

So if you have a site and 80% of the pages are mobile friendly; these pages will benefit (after Google has noted the change) while the other 20% will be disadvantaged.

What to do

It is important that you first check to see the state of mobile-friendliness of your site. We suggest getting in touch with your webmaster and asking them to review your GWMT Mobile Usability report for errors.

Next, check your Crawl report in GWMT in order to gain an understanding of how often your site is crawled. This will give you have indication of how quickly you need to transition to a mobile-friendly site.

Step by step

Remember that the algorithm update is administered on a page-level basis. That means you should prioritise your most important pages to be 100% mobile friendly to begin. Consider pages with the highest user activity and pages where the user performs a conversion to begin.

Then, utilise Google’s Mobile Friendly Test in order to analyse what needs to be corrected. This tool provides an invaluable guide as to what needs to be edited in order for your web page to be considered mobile-friendly.

Be realistic. Take into account the size of your site, complexity of your design/template and your resources before committing to be 100% mobile-friendly by April 21. We always recommend making critical adjustments like this after a significant phase of testing and planning in order to ensure a smooth transition to mobile readiness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Melissa Rauff is an audience acquisition specialist and co-founder of Audience Lab, an independent digital consultancy specialising in data-driven channel strategies. Audience Lab assists brands in finding, engaging and retaining the most important people to their business, their customers.