One of the reasons that successful business’ online marketing can be so challenging is because the landscape is always changing. Nowhere is this more evident than with Google. If your business has had a website and online presence for several years, you may remember Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates. With those updates, Google made major shifts to their ranking algorithm. This caused plenty of businesses to suddenly lose a significant amount of traffic.
Because Google’s algorithm updates can have such a major impact on how much traffic a website receives, business owners in Omaha and across the rest of the world are generally very anxious when Google announces a new update. That’s exactly how most of the business online marketing community felt when Google announced in April 2015 that they were rolling out a mobile algorithm update.
The Impact of Google’s Mobile Algorithm Update
Based on what happened with the previous Panda and Penguin updates, most people were expecting to see major shifts in rankings across the search engine results pages. While there were definitely some rankings shakeups, the outcome of this update didn’t cause the type of massive ripples that past updates had generated.
Why didn’t this update cause the type of huge shift that so many people were expecting? Big Red SEO has two main theories based on our research and conversations with other industry professionals. The first possibility is that Google’s initial rollout of this update was limited in scope. The reason they may have only done a small initial rollout is to give businesses an opportunity to update their websites to a mobile-friendly design.
When Google makes a change like their Panda, Penguin or mobile-friendly update, it’s not something that only happens on a single occasion. Instead, the update will continue to evolve and be felt over time. So in the case of the latest mobile-friendly update, there may be a point in the not too distant future when it does have a very large impact on rankings.
The other explanation for why this update didn’t cause a lot of change is because the majority of sites that are ranking well are already optimized for mobile traffic. Although it’s impossible to analyze the billions of websites that Google indexes, based on smaller scale data analysis by both Big Red SEO and other sources, it appears that most websites that are actively investing in SEO have already converted their site to a mobile-friendly design.
Mobile is the Present and Future of Business Online Marketing
The reason that there’s a strong correlation between active investments in business online marketing and already having a website that’s optimized for mobile is because this is a shift that’s been evident for some time now. Going back four to five years ago, mobile traffic generally accounted for less than 10% of a site’s overall traffic.
But during the last three years, sites have continued to see an increase in the amount of mobile traffic that they receive. While the exact percentage can vary based on industry, some sites are seeing nearly 50% of their traffic coming from mobile devices. Since that’s a lot of potential customers in the case of business websites, it’s important for those visitors’ online experience to be just as good as someone who’s visiting from a desktop or laptop computer.
If your Omaha business currently has a website with Google Analytics installed on it, you can easily check how much mobile traffic you’re receiving. Once you’re logged in, click the Audience link on the sidebar, followed by Mobile and then Overview. By default, you can see what percentage of your visitors used a mobile device during the last 30 days. Not only will the percentage likely be higher than you expected, but if you change the default date range to a longer period, you’ll be able to see how much mobile traffic has grown in a relatively short amount of time.
The Best Way to Optimize Your Website for Mobile
Although it’s clear that mobile is very important, many Omaha businesses are unsure about how to optimize their site for smaller screens like phones and tablets. Not long ago, the options for mobile design were very limited and far from ideal. Fortunately, mobile design has come a long way in recent years. In fact, it’s no longer necessary to have separate designs for larger and smaller screens.
Instead, a technology known as responsive web design enables a site’s design to automatically adapt to a screen of any size. So whether a visitor comes to your site from a 20” desktop or a 3.5” iPhone, responsive design means that your site will look great and be easy to use. Since one of the primary goals of business online marketing is to convert visitors into leads or customers, it’s easy to see how responsive design can play a key role.
Big Red SEO Can Make Your Mobile Strategy a Success
While responsive design is a very effective and elegant way to optimize your website for mobile, properly implementing it does require a team with the right experience and expertise. If you want to get your Omaha business website converted to a responsive design in the shortest timeframe possible, Big Red SEO can help.
Because we’ve been working with responsive design for several years now, Big Red SEO knows exactly how to implement this type of design in the most effective way possible. Whether you want to update the entire look of your website or just want to be sure that your site is as easy to use on a phone as it is on a laptop, we can help you accomplish your goal in a timely manner.
Using a responsive design to make your Omaha business website mobile-friendly is the best way to keep both Google and the potential customers who visit on a mobile device happy. So if you’d like to discuss this project in detail, you can easily set up a free consultation with us by calling (402) 522-6468.