Mobilegeddon — another iteration of Google’s algorithm made to make websites more mobile-friendly — will hit on April 21st 2015. On this day, a Google mobile algorithm update will increase the ranking of sites that are mobile-friendly. All websites which fail to perform well on mobile devices will be more difficult to find on those devices in the search results. However, they have stated that it will take a week to be fully rolled out.
How to Prepare for the Update
To prepare, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check your site’s mobile compatibility. It also provides suggestions on how the site could be further optimised. Google Webmaster Tools also contains a convenient Mobile Usability Report where you get a detailed report of the mobile user experience. If you find any errors or discrepancies in your report, you have roughly two weeks from now to get them fixed.
If your site is already mobile-friendly, you won’t have much to worry about with this upcoming algorithm. However, if you’ve not yet optimised your site, now is the right time to get it done. Some recommended actions to prepare for upcoming algorithm update are;
How to Prepare for the Update
To prepare, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check your site’s mobile compatibility. It also provides suggestions on how the site could be further optimised. Google Webmaster Tools also contains a convenient Mobile Usability Report where you get a detailed report of the mobile user experience. If you find any errors or discrepancies in your report, you have roughly two weeks from now to get them fixed.
If your site is already mobile-friendly, you won’t have much to worry about with this upcoming algorithm. However, if you’ve not yet optimised your site, now is the right time to get it done. Some recommended actions to prepare for upcoming algorithm update are;
- Be mobile ready – contact a web developer such as http://www.fiverivers.net to make the site responsive. Also make sure Google’s mobile bots can crawl your website correctly.
- Understand your mobile traffic - use Google Analytics to evaluate mobile traffic volume and quality. It will help to understand the proportion of traffic comes from mobile.
- Review behaviour metrics - analyse how your mobile traffic performs. Understand which pages need improvement using segments in Google Analytics e.g Bounce rate and time spent on the website.
