Ready to Mobilise by May?

Do you remember last year, when Google unleashed Mobilegeddon? We do – but we were very much prepared! Purple Imp has been a long-time advocate of a ‘mobile first’ approach – websites should be responsive, fast and offer an efficient user experience. Well now, nearly a year on from Google publicly stating what we’ve always preached, they’re about to update the mobile-friendly algorithm initially launched back in April 2015.

It’s a long time to wait, as far as major announcements go. On average, Google changes their algorithms twice a day. Over the last 48 months, we have had some significant changes and major updates to contend with – all of which affect your digital optimisation strategy.

As with most Google announcements, they say a lot without really saying very much. There’s no fine detail. However, we know the update will begin to roll out at the start of May. It will be essential to monitor your traffic from mobile channels either through a package like Google Analytics, server side, or a multitude of other analytical tools. Monitoring is crucial – it will inform how you adapt your strategy accordingly.

From reading the data available, it appears the update will mimic, to a degree, the quality signals similar to the Panda update. Depending on your crawl budget, your content will be accessed and consumed at variable rates meaning this page- by- page analysis will affect sites in different ways. Therefore, the majority of sites should not see a huge drop off in traffic as per Mobilegeddon. However, if for some reason you still don’t have a responsive site; if you are not adopting a ‘mobile first’ approach; if you are not monitoring, evaluating and learning from your user behavior, then you should be very wary of the forthcoming update. It might just be the update that pushes you off the visibility cliff!

It’s always nice to get something for free. So, here’s a useful tool from Google to see how mobile-friendly your website is – but remember, passing this test doesn’t mean you are optimised 😉

If you would like to discuss your strategic optimisation or your mobile efficiency, then let’s talk.