How Mobile is Changing SEO

If merchants needed any more evidence of the increasing importance of optimizing their sites for mobile commerce, Google is about to weigh in in a big way.

Beginning April 21, Google is rolling out a "mobile friendly" update to its algorithm that the company says will have a "significant impact" on results for searches made on mobile devices. In an effort to give mobile users more useful search experiences, the new algorithm will give greater weight in its rankings to sites that are easy to navigate on mobile phones and tablets, such as those using responsive design principles.

Accordingly, less weight will be given to desktop-centric sites that can be frustrating to view on smaller screens, causing the rankings of those sites to drop. Though specifics about the changes haven't been released, experts suggest this is not just another Google update. Zineb Ait Bahajji from the Google Webmaster Trends team was quoted at Search Marketing Expo Munich as saying the new mobile-friendly algorithm will impact more sites than the Panda or Penguin algorithms.

A Big Deal
Ninety-four percent of people in the U.S. with smartphones search for local information on their phones, according to Google. Interestingly, 77 percent of mobile searches occur at home or at work, places where desktop computers are likely to be present.

How big a boost mobile-friendly sites will enjoy from the change, or how far sites will slide in Google's rankings if they don't live up to its new mobile standards all remain to be seen. After all, whether a site is mobile friendly will be just one of more than 200 criteria the search engine giant uses to rank sites by relevance.

However, with purchases made on mobile devices exploding, most merchants can't risk letting their sites become harder to find for billions of consumers. According to analysis of MarketLive's 2014 Performance Index data, consumers have embraced online shopping from their smartphones, boosting their spending by 125 percent across all product categories.

Indeed, year-over-year mobile usage surged by close to 50 percent, with fully 44 percent of all traffic to merchant sites and 25 percent of all revenues derived from mobile visits. That's an encouraging trend that shows shoppers are increasingly comfortable using their mobile devices for more than just browsing.

More merchants are prioritizing the development of optimized mobile sites and are getting better at creating seamless mobile shopping experiences. Google's algorithm update puts new urgency on the proposition and promises to widen the revenue growth gap between retailers that have embraced the mobile shopping revolution and those that haven't.

Before you hit the panic button though, do the following two things:

1. Assess the risk. The first step is to determine just how reliant your business is on the results of organic Google searches made on mobile devices, the only type of search affected by the change. Pay-per-click advertising won't be impacted, nor will Google searches made on desktops. Use analytics to identify how much traffic and revenue is potentially at risk. This will help you know how seriously you need to take the issue.

2. Test your site(s). Google is well aware of the anxiety such major changes to its algorithms creates for merchants. So the company has provided a convenient tool, the Mobile-Friendly Test to diagnose any URL in about a minute, assessing in simple language whether the sites meets Google's mobile usability expectations or has some work to do.

Merchants should take the feedback and then take action. While there won't be time between now and April 21 to perform a major site overhaul, there are still things merchants and their web developers should do to make their sites as mobile friendly as possible. Consider the following:

Add mobile pages. Google says its mobile algorithm will operate on a page-by-page basis and in real time. That means that even if most of the pages on a site aren't mobile friendly, Google's spiders will be able to find the ones that are.

Clean up mobile mistakes. Google asked webmasters about common mobile mistakes, and compiled the following list, many of which can be fixed without a major redesign:

• Blocked JavaScript, CSS and image files: In order for Googlebot to see your site as a real user would, always allow access to these files in your site's robots.txt.
• Unplayable content: This consists of certain types of videos or other content that aren't playable on mobile devices, such as license-constrained media or media that requires Flash.
• Faulty redirects: If you have separate mobile URLs, you must redirect mobile users on each desktop URL to the appropriate mobile URL.
• Mobile-only 404s: Some sites serve content to desktop users accessing a URL but show an error page to mobile users. Instead, redirect mobile users to an equivalent mobile page to avoid 404s.
• App download interstitials: This is when websites block the view of pages with a prompt to download the site's native app. Instead, use a small HTML banner at the top of the page.
• Irrelevant cross-links: This is when users are linked to desktop-optimized pages from the mobile version of the site, and vice versa. Check your links to make sure that they point to the correct equivalent page.
• Slow mobile pages: In order to avoid user frustration, ensure your mobile pages load quickly. You can check your page speed with Google PageSpeed Insights.

Take the Free Advice
Google has additional comprehensive advice to help merchants assess where they are in the game and figure out how to evolve their sites, depending on where they are in the development cycle. In addition to the mobile-friendly site assessment test, merchants can find in-depth guides about creating multidevice sites and implementing mobile SEO, from configuring sites for multiple devices to helping search engines understand site configuration. Who says nothing's free? Even the marketing team should take a peek.

Finally, Do the Work
If there were any question about how to prioritize resources, perhaps Google's vote will convince merchants that the time has come to meet the needs of your mobile customers. They're on the move, and you need to put some work in to keep up with them.

Ken Burke is the founder and executive chairman of MarketLive, an on-demand e-commerce platform and solutions provider. Ken can be reached at ken@marketlive.com.