Study: how is Mobilegeddon affecting accounts?
Published: May 4, 2015
Author: Colin Guidi
Google’s already-infamous mobile algorithm update was pushed live on April 21st; reports are that it’s now fully rolled out. What many are calling Mobilegeddon is anticipated to have a larger impact than both Panda and Penguin – so we wanted to take an early look at how it’s affecting our clients.
Study notes
To study the effects of the update, we used the Searchmetrics Mobile SEO Visibility Metric – a common industry reference – and compared it with Sessions recorded in Google Analytics (the Sessions were filtered to include only organic traffic from Google, specific to mobile devices).
We surveyed four clients who show content on mobile devices in three separate ways:
– Dedicated mobile sites
– Responsive designed sites
– Dynamically served sites
Quick takeaways
– The sites that showed an increase in their Mobile SEO Visibility were leveraging site builds for dedicated mobile sites and responsive designed sites
– The one dynamically served site hasn’t seen clear benefit nor any detriment to its Mobile SEO Visibility levels
– Traffic levels for all sites do not yet show clear increased levels
– We’re only a little over a week since the update was announced; there’s a good chance we’ll begin to see latent traffic increases towards the beginning to middle of May – and beyond
Client Results
We studied four client account visuals to see the effects of the update. Below our four client examples are visuals of two companies shown as “Losers” on the Searchmetrics “Winners and Losers” report. These are meant to provide examples of what companies would see if they were negatively impacted by the update.
Client 1: Medical company with a dedicated mobile website
Searchmetrics data:
Google Analytics Sessions data (same time period):
Client 1 Findings
Winner or Loser?
– Winner
Traffic Benefit?
– Client isn’t yet noticing any increases in traffic (sessions) from their noted mobile-friendliness benefit
– Possibly other competitors in this space have also benefited from the update, which would prevent the client from displacing anyone from the search results
Website Build
– Dedicated mobile website
Client 2 – Real estate software company with a responsive designed website
Searchmetrics data:
Google Analytics Sessions data (same time period):
Client 2 Findings:
Winner or Loser?
– Winner
Traffic Benefit?
– Client isn’t yet noticing any increases in traffic from their noted mobile-friendliness benefit
– Possibly other competitors in this space have also benefited from the update, which would prevent the client from displacing anyone from the search results
Website Build
– Responsive designed website
Client 3 – Legal software vertical with a responsive designed website
Searchmetrics data:
Google Analytics Sessions data (same time period):
Client 3 Findings:
Winner or Loser?
– Winner
Traffic Benefit?
– Client saw a period of lower daily traffic after 4/21/15, only to see an increase on 4/27/15 for one of their highest trafficked days
– Too preliminary to tell, especially with corresponding rise in desktop SEO visibility metric; further trending data will allow more insight
Website Build
– Responsive designed website
Client 4 – Custom furniture retailer with a responsive designed website with dynamically served content
Searchmetrics data:
Google Analytics Sessions data (same time period):
Client 4 Findings:
Winner or Loser?
– No clear benefit seen
– Many sites have not yet seen movement from this update
– Mobile update rolled out 9 days ago as of 4/30/15; there’s the potential that this site has yet to be affected
Traffic Benefit?
– Client isn’t yet noticing any increases in traffic
– Possibly other competitors in this space have also benefited from the update, which would prevent the client from displacing anyone from the search results
Site Build
– Responsive designed website with dynamically served content
Examples of “Losers” from Searchmetrics report
Box Office Mojo
www.boxofficemojo.com/
The Fiscal Times
www.thefiscaltimes.com
