Google Mobile Search Update
It is early days yet to draw any firm conclusions as to what effect the Google Mobile Search algorithm update is going to have on traffic and rankings. It has certainly been a much talked and speculated about change leading up to the 21st April which is the date Google ‘officially’ included the update in its search results.
I manage two retail websites which are not Responsive and fail Google’s mobile ready test https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ . They do reasonable traffic and sales on a daily basis so I decided to monitor these in detail to see what changes (if any) will come out of the update.
Just looking at a handful of keyword rankings from one particular location is dangerous. Search has got a lot more sophisticated and sites are being found for many more keywords than in many cases is practical to track. Results vary depending on where you search from and how you have your browser setup.
With these particular two sites I am monitoring the traffic split across browsers for Mobile, Google Chrome, IE, Firefox and Safari. I am also including the completed orders against each day’s traffic. I have plotted the results from the 1st April to ensure there are enough ‘unchanged’ results to compare against.
SITE A TRAFFIC – (click on the graph to get a large image)
SITE B TRAFFIC – (click on the graph to get a large image)
Being retail sites the curve shows a regular increase in traffic over the weekends which you would expect. My initial observation is that there has been no massive change in traffic (yet). There may be a small downturn in Mobile traffic but it also looks like there is a comparable upward movement in Google Chrome and IE.
What is more interesting is there is an increase in completed sales for both sites on the 22nd and 23rd.
So could this algorithm change be affecting Desktop search as well as Mobile Search? On the face of it these results for the last two days certainly seem to reflect that with Desktop rising and Mobile falling.
But what is causing the increase in completed sales? Possibly because the sites are not really designed to complete sales on a mobile device however with the traffic up from desktop browsers the visitors are completing their purchase on that platform?
Currently this all pure speculation and far too early to draw any firm conclusions but I wanted to show my initial observations that ‘MobileGeddeon’ as it has been nicknamed has not arrived (yet).
I will be updating this in a week’s time so we can see if there are further changes.
