High Ranking & Traffic in 2015? Be Responsive

Google has recently announced an algorithm update that would have a significant impact worldwide for mobile searchers. According to the update, it will improve rankings for sites that provide a mobile-friendly experience to searchers on mobile devices.

The annotation will become part of the ranking algorithm from April 21, directly affecting the order of search results.

The mobile friendly update will only affect mobile search results i.e., searches from smart phones and tablets. Also the algorithm is applied worldwide on a real time basis which means that the algorithm update affects mobile search results in all countries at the same time.

Each page’s mobile friendliness is judged individually. This will be beneficial if your ecommerce catalog is mobile friendly and your forums section is not. The unfriendly sections won’t rank your entire site as unfriendly.

The stated goal of Google is to improve searcher’s experience. It’s annoying to search something on a phone and land on a tiny page where you can’t click accurate links without zooming the text. With this new update, mobile searchers will land on sites and can view the content without any complications. Users will find it easier to get high quality, relevant search results that are optimized for their devices.

Google has over 200 ranking criteria which it uses to decide on how it ranks pages. To be responsive will be a major factor in this. It’s evident that a site that isn’t responsive will sit below one that is mobile friendly.

How will this affect Ecommerce Performance?

Firstly you need to determine if Google sees your pages as mobile friendly. It makes no sense if you think they are mobile friendly. What matters here is what Google determines algorithmically because it has complete control over how your site ranks.

It has provided a mobile friendly testing tool which will analyzes each page that you enter and determine whether it’s mobile friendly or not.

How this update will affect your ecommerce business today depends a great deal on your mobile search performance. The only traffic and sales at risk here is organic search driven via smart phone and tablet. The worst case scenario when the change happens is that all the sales driven organic search traffic via a mobile device would disappear instantly. What is more difficult to measure is the opportunity that this algorithm update represents.

Thus in order to preserve the traffic, web designers and business owners should make sure they have a mobile optimized version of their website or a responsive design website.

• Check out Official Google Webmaster Blog – Finding more mobile-friendly search results