Given that most of us are near constantly clicking, tapping, swiping our way around the internet, whether that’s on a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone, brands should have a website that can adapt to all devices to provide their customer with the best possible online experience.
Shockingly, however, just 36 per cent of the UK’s top 100 brands do not have a website that is optimised for mobile users, despite studies showing that the consumer’s path to making their purchase is now centred around using multiple devices.
Some sectors bring in over 40 per cent of their Google searches from smartphones, and for many others that figure sits at around 25 per cent. This is a huge number, and has increased rapidly over a short amount of time. In one study by Tecmark, mobiles accounted for just 0.02 per cent of web traffic in the UK in September 2009 – the increase has been phenomenal in just five years.
Without a website optimised for mobile devices, it is clear that companies will risk missing out on potential sales, but if they are receiving traffic from Google’s organic search, then this could be at risk too.
Google’s algorithms and search results are far from perfect, however the search giant has taken considerable measures in recent years attempting to enhance the quality of the results and make sure it is the user, rather than the marketer, who has the most positive experience while using Google.
If a user who is searching for something on a smartphone ends up on a website not tailored for mobile devices, and has to spend their time pinching, zooming and scrolling their way through a website designed only for desktop use, this doesn’t represent a good experience and Google, it seems, plans to do something about it.
In October 2013, the Head of Google’s Webspam Team, Matt Cutts, offered up some advice to his audience at Pubcon, Las Vegas, for the year to come. He said that websites will start to struggle in search if they are slow to use on mobile devices, and if companies route all users to the homepage instead of to the internal page they were trying to access, or if a user’s phone doesn’t display flash, then that user won’t see flash sites in their results.
Hot on the heels of this, Google rolled out fresh ‘user experience’ recommendations within the mobile section of its Page Speed Insights tool - initially in Beta and without any major announcement. These recommendations do not relate to speed, but instead focus on things like tap target sizes and legibility of fonts being used. This is a set of criteria that Google is likely to include when judging whether a site is mobile friendly, and they are likely to play a part in deciding where your site features in the results for people searching on smartphone devices.
For many companies, it is typical that over 25 per cent of their organic traffic comes from smartphones, this is the same chunk of traffic that is at risk of being lost by those not prepared for Google’s mobile search results to evolve and offer a better experience for users.
The update is unlikely to happen overnight, with companies suddenly finding that all those without mobile ready sites are losing traffic. The process is likely to be much more gradual than that. However, those who are not offering a good experience to users on smaller screens will start to see their mobile traffic decline.
There are certain steps that a company can take to avoid this, but you will need to work harder than just haphazardly putting together a mobile site to simply tick a box. Instead, you must understand what your users are doing on mobile and tablet devices, how they are browsing and what they want from your site, and build a user experience that caters to it. It will do no harm to run a site through Google’s Page Speed Insights tool and tidy things up from their point of view too. The most important thing you can do however is to put your users at the centre of any website and make sure they can achieve exactly what they set out to achieve on your website irrespective of the size of the screen they are browsing on.
By Stacey MacNaught, Search Director at Tecmark.
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