22/04/15 // Written by admin

The Google Mobile SEO Update – What Does It Mean For Your Website?

Mobile SEO Update

Yesterday marked the launch of the Google mobile SEO update; April 21st has been synonymous with this update since it was first announced on the 26th of February 2015. Well that day has come and businesses within the digital marketing remit have been making sure that their clients’ websites are ready for “the biggest change to the Google algorithm in the last 3 years.”

I ran a mobile search through Google UK for ‘Used Cars’ both today and 3 weeks ago. Here is the snapshot result for the search 3 weeks ago;

March 2015 Search

Used Cars Search Pre Mobile Update

Do you see the presence of both Parkers and What Car? Both of those snippets are missing the ‘Mobile-friendly’ label. Unsurprisingly due to the fact that neither of their sites are mobile friendly.

Now have a look at that same search performed this morning (post mobile update);

April 22nd Search

Used Cars Search Post Mobile Update

Parkers and What Car? are both out of the rankings and we can see a local map result where the 3rd position previously was. The mobile update is clearly affecting search results as we imagined it would and those sites that were not prepared for the update will no doubt see a loss in mobile traffic to their sites.

If we use the above search as our example, it is clear that sites like Autotrader will have benefited from the mobile search update. With What Car? and Parkers being online competitors of Autotrader, we can pretty safely assume that this is true across the board for a wide variety of relevant mobile searches.

Google released another blog post yesterday to announce the update which also includes details of how you can check if your website is mobile friendly (if you’re not aware of this yet). There are some important things to remember about the Google mobile update though:

  • The mobile update affects mobile results only. Neither tablet nor desktop results have been affected.
  • Your pages cannot be ‘partially’ mobile friendly. They are either ‘friendly’ or ‘not friendly’. You can have some pages optimised on your site which will yield the ‘mobile friendly’ logo, whereas others may not.
  • Branded searches probably won’t be affected. Also if your page still returns the best possible results, even if it isn’t mobile friendly, it could still rank.
  • The update affects international search queries in all languages.

The bottom line here is that Google are continuing to make algorithmic changes that are aimed at creating a better online experience for their customers searching through Google. Expect to see similar types of updates in the future for site speed, user experience and in time, security too

Anthony