On April 21st Google began to roll out the Mobile Friendly Algorithm update. This update is designed to reward sites that have a good user experience on mobile devices and penalize ones that don't. Mobile traffic could be affected in two ways:
1. Ranking Penalties
The most straight-forward way this could impact mobile organic traffic to a website is by ranking demotions on the Google Smartphone Search Engine, which all android devices use as the default search engines and many iOS devise use through browsers. Analytics company comScore reports that 60% of all web traffic comes through mobile devices.
2. Click Through Rate Factors
The second major factor that could cause a lack of organic traffic are from how your site is now viewed in the SERPs. "Mobile-friendly" tags currently show on sites that have passed Google's mobile friendly tests. This tag is designed to make users feel more confident that they will be happy with the results they choose when they click on a search result.
Diagnosing Mobile Friendly Status
There are three things to consider here: Is your traffic down? Were you impacted by the mobile update in your rankings? And how does the mobile friendly tag in the search results effect you?
1. Is My Mobile Traffic from Google Down?
Google Analytics
Now that some time has past since the update, let's look into Google Analytics for a site that is not fully mobile-friendly. I created this report by using the following settings:
Acquisition > Channels > Organic Search > Primary Dimension: Source > Segment: Mobile Traffic
You can then see the numbers for each search engine or select "Google" to see the data on the graph. You will want to set you data range from the 22nd to the current date, and then compare that data to a time period ending before the 21st. It's a good idea to compare two data sets from the same days of the week, so if you started on Wednesday the 22nd and went for 10 days, you'll want to compare to at least 10 days before the 21st of April on a Wednesday. I try to keep the days of the week the same to compare trends, for instance the site above is a b2b business that receives less traffic on weekends.
You can see in the example above that this site's Google mobile organic traffic is down significantly since the mobile algorithm launch. Not much time has past since the launch, so it's hard to say that this data is conclusive- however, red flags have been raised.
2. Was My Site Hit with a Ranking Penalty from the Algorithm Update?
Organic Rankings
I know that a lot of people are saying that rankings are a thing of the past and we shouldn't use them anymore. I disagree. They're still a great way to track fluctuations site-wide and on a daily basis. For this to be useful, you have to have both Google Organic and Google Smartphone set as search engines. Compare both search engines to each other to look big change between desktop and mobile rankings.
Google Webmaster Tools
There might be data to help you draw some conclusions within Google Webmasters Tools "Search Queries Report." It's best to filter out branded traffic since you're less likely to see a ranking decrease for keywords you "own." Since there's a lot less granularity of data from these reports compared to the ones we used above in the analytics review, you will only be able to identify high-level trends.
The filters I used for this report did not include branded searches (I hid them for this example) and a search platform filter: mobile, and Traffic: queries with 10+ impressions. I'm assuming that branded searches will be impacted less than non-brand keywords because Google is still trying to provide the searcher with what they want regardless of mobile friendliness. In the example above the data isn't mind blowing but there is a noticeable dip when you compare the peaks of this traffic pattern, which for this B2C site is on Sundays.
The traffic comparison is as follows:
Date |
Saturday April 18th |
Saturday April 25th |
Difference |
Impressions |
8,657 |
7,862 |
-9.18% |
Clicks |
957 |
830 |
-13.27% |
Disclaimer: I'm aware this is not concrete evidence. It is just another red flag.
3. How Does the Mobile-Friendly Tag Affect My Search Traffic?
So what do you do if your traffic is down considerably but your rankings and impressions have not changed? The last thing to consider here is how the "Mobile-friendly" tag is affecting the click-through-rate of your search snippet. It's logical to assume that a result that's the same in all other ways but the "mobile-friendly" tag will have different click through rates based on the fact that users can click with more confidence. So how did I test this? I used the Webmaster Tools Search Queries report to isolate click through rates from mobile and desktop. Luckily, I was able to find a keyword that had the same average ranking and similar amount of impressions on a site that does not have the "Mobile-friendly" tag. Once again, this isn't the most scientific way of measuring. What if desktop and mobile click through rates aren't similar to begin with? Anyhow, here is the data that I collected from the month of April.
Platform |
Keyword |
Impressions |
Click Through |
Average Position |
Mobile |
"Product one" |
14,881 |
3% |
5.0 |
Desktop |
"Product one" |
13,966 |
4% |
5.0 |
For reference, this is the same b2c site as the first table.
I was surprised to see a 1% CTR difference from desktop to mobile. For this site 1% equates to 148 clicks just for this keyword over one month. That's pretty astounding when you consider this site gets 200,000 non-branded impressions every month. If you were able to affect the mobile CTR site wide, you would be able to make a considerable business impact.
How to Check if Your Site is Mobile Friendly
I will keep this section brief there are many great resources and article to check for mobile friendliness on the web already.
Use the following tools:
- Google Page Speed Insights
- Google Webmaster Tools Mobile Usability Errors Report
- Google mobile friendly test
- W3C mobileOK Checker
- Preform a search for a keyword you rank for with the your user agent set as a mobile device
Factors that maybe making your site not mobile friendly
Below are the common reasons why your site may not be passing the mobile friendly test.
Tap Targets To Close Together
The human finger is much larger than a mouse pointer on a desktop. Google likes there to be 48 CSS pixels surrounding a link in all directions. This is usually an issue if your links are to small font wise or don't have enough padding or margin around them. Some mobile browsers such as Google Chrome will zoom in on an area where two links are too close together to give the user more room to select the link they wanted. It is best to avoid this and make the link large enough that it can be selected right the first try.
Avoid Plugins
Google explains this issue on their developer site, "Plugins help the browser process special types of web content, such as Flash, Silverlight, and Java. Most mobile devices do not support plugins, and plugins are a leading cause of hangs, crashes, and security incidents in browsers that provide support." Support for these plugins varies greatly across mobile platforms and it's best to avoid them.
Configure Viewport
This is accomplished by using a meta tag called "content viewport." This tag tells browsers how to zoom the page to display the content at the right size. It's simple to add this tag. You will add the following tag to the head section of every page on your site: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" /
Use Legible Font Sizes
This is referring to the size of the text on the page. Is it large enough for a person to easily read? This issue is partial dependent on the viewport being set and partially dependent on the font size that's declared in the CSS style sheet of the page. Once the viewport is set, the device will know what aspect ratio to compare your font sizes to. If the font is still too small after setting the view port, you will need to use a media query to make the font display bigger on mobile devices.
Lack of Responsive Site Design or a Mobile Only Site
Websites designed only for desktop are usually not optimized for mobile. There are two main ways that you can make your user experience mobile optimized: a responsive design that responds to browser width, and mobile version of the site located in a subdomain or subdirectory. To learn more about the strengths of each mobile version read this article.