Google confirmed yesterday that its mobile-friendliness algorithm update will start rolling out on April 21st as per its announcement in early march.
If you’ve checked your results and they’re still appearing on mobile devices without having a mobile-friendly website, don’t get too excited as Google also confirmed that this update should take about two weeks to roll out completely.
You can see how much this change to mobile search is going to affect you now. Just log into Google Analytics and go to Audience, Mobile, Overview where you will see a breakdown of your website traffic between desktop, mobile and tablet. If you don’t already have a responsive website, the higher the percentage of your mobile traffic, the more visitors you are set to lose when the algorithm has been fully rolled out.
If you’re not sure of all of your keyword rankings, you can also use this report to monitor the damage once enough time has passed. As the algorithm update is starting today, by 5th May it should be fully rolled out as per Google’s schedule.
So, by waiting until 19th May you can then do an analysis of two weeks traffic under the new algorithm versus the two weeks prior. To do this, whilst in Analytics, click the large date range on the top right of the browser, tick the ‘compare to’ option and set the previous period to compare.
As a final thought, even if you currently have very low mobile traffic to your website, this figure will only increase as time goes by due to the popularity of smart phones and the general trend towards mobile usage. Currently, over 58% of all web pages are viewed on mobile devices and this number is only going to get bigger. With that in mind, if your website isn’t currently mobile-friendly you need to start planning to make it so. The sooner the better!
