Does Your Mobile Site Suck? Google Announces New Mobile Search Algorithm

Being a marketing professional is increasingly becoming more difficult as time progresses. There are constantly new metrics and data for marketers (especially digital marketers) to be tracking, analyzing and optimizing. Sure there are a ton of new tools to utilize, but those tools would not be necessary if new data to measure didn’t continue to surface. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for tracking data because it allows educated decisions, but keeping up with all the change forces marketers to be incredibly adaptive. Case in point, Google. On April 21, Google is rolling out a new algorithm for their search index where a site’s mobile usage is taken into consideration in the search results. That is, if your company’s website is not mobile-friendly, you’ll most likely lose a lot of traffic. In my opinion, it’s about time Google starts taking mobile-friendliness into account on their search results pages. It’s quite inconvenient trying to gather information or surf the web on a site that’s not mobile-friendly. To be honest, I immediately click off the site if it’s not optimized for mobile use. To put things into perspective for you, 25% of Digital Brew’s traffic comes from mobile searches. If we did not have a mobile-friendly site, we would be missing out of 25% of our audience. That makes a HUGE difference. You wouldn’t want to be missing 25% of your conversions, right? Right. There are plenty of tools available to ensure your site is mobile-friendly. A personal favorite is Hubspot’s Marketing Grader or Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, and if your site does not pass the mobile test, each tool provides why and how you can optimize your site for mobile usage. As small businesses, worrying if your site is mobile-optimized or not can be overwhelming, but fear not! The roll out will take days, if not weeks, to fully implement giving you a little more time to get your mobile site up and running. Have an opinion? We’d love to hear it. Engage with us on Twitter @digitalbrew_co or say hello to info@digitalbrew.com. Cheers!