Ep25 – Google’s Mobile Update is Coming Are You Ready?

Podcast – SEO Point

Useful references

• Google Webmaster mobile friendly update overview
• Google’s mobile friendly testing tool
• Google’s site speed test (includes mobile reporting)
• Google Analytics
• Themeforest responsive themes for WordPress

Image courtesy of comscore.com

Transcription

John: Hi guys, welcome back to another episode of the Works Media Podcast, I’m your host John Romaine and joining me is…

Sean: Sean Kaye.

John: This is Episode Number 25 and in today’s Podcast we’re talking about Google’s mobile friendly update. How you going Sean?

Sean: Good man, you’re at a quarter of a century.

John: I am, 25, no doubt.

Sean: Awesome and you don’t look a day over 40.

John: Oh gees. So what are we talking about?

Sean: Mobile.

John: We’ve got the awkward silences out of the way.

Sean: Yeah, that’s right; mobile, get into it.

John: Mobile, oh yeah, you’ve got the show notes.

Sean: Yeah, so…

John: I’m supposedly the host.

Sean: Yeah, we’ll just drive, I’m just here to – I’m here for the looking pretty portion of the show.

John: All right, well as we all know and I’m sure most business owners already know, there’s a mobile friendly update that Google has scheduled for release April 21 which is just under two weeks away and this one is supposedly going to be pretty big. I don’t know how much research or reading you’ve done on the topic but I was having a look around today and it looks like it’s going to really shape things up. What are your thoughts?

Sean: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve been doing this for a long time now and I actually can’t recall a single experience where Google has, A, flagged that a major change was coming, gave everybody the date and then actually followed it up with, oh yeah, by the way, this is significant.

So I think they know that this is not going to be a small change. I think two things out of that though, right, one is obviously it’s not a small change, it’s going to impact the search results probably significantly but I think they’ve also learned their lesson from how horrific they deployed Panda and Penguin. The fallout of that was just nonsense so I think from a marketing perspective they learned maybe if we’re going to make big changes we better flag that.

John: No, there’s some good points actually and some that I hadn’t considered and it’s interesting that you mentioned those because, you’re right, I mean, how many people were affected by the first release of Penguin back in, I think, April of 2000 and – was it 2012, 2011? I think it might have been 2012. Yeah and that really destroyed a lot of businesses so it’s really interesting that they’ve done it like this, this time around. It’s – it would have to be pretty significant for them to do that, you would think.

Sean: Well, I think it’s interesting when you read a variety of different things about it. There’s kind of a mixed message so some of it says that, you know, having a mobile friendly site is going to be advantageous. I kind of read it the other way and say having a site that doesn’t comply with what Google thinks are mobile friendly pieces.

John: Should be demoted?

Sean: Yeah, I think you’re going to suffer more of a penalty rather than a bonus. I think the bonus is implied because they’re – if you think of it from a Google perspective, right, they’re all about user experience and customer experience.

So if they’re – they’re not going to promote better sites, they’re going to demote sites that have a worse experience.

John: Yeah, that’s right. And – no, I agree. I think it’s definitely not going to be – well, your site is mobile friendly therefore you deserve Page 1, it’s certainly not going to work that way but as with any update, you know, sites go down, some sites go up so…

Sean: Well, I think the other thing that’s fascinating about it as well is it kind of reads mixed messages. So one of the messages I hear is that it’s mobile search. So does that mean that if I’m sitting on my desktop and I search for something I’ll get one set of results and mobile friendliness doesn’t really apply or if I’m on my iPhone 6 Plus or my iPad or whatever I’ll get a set of results that are more weighted towards mobile.

I don’t quite know the answer to that.

John: Yeah, no, from what I’ve read and it’s all heresy at this point but from what I’ve read and from what I understand there’s going to be a separate index; one for regular desktop search and one for mobile which, yeah – can you imagine the resources needed in order to make that happen, that would be huge.

Sean: Yeah, sure. Well it’s…

John: I guess it makes sense and, in fact, if you do a search on your mobile you’ll get that mobile friendly tag or that message within the search results. You don’t see that on desktop. So, yeah, from the way that I’ve interpreted the articles that I’ve read it appears that there’s going to be a separate mobile index.

Sean: You know what’s interesting, kind of slightly tangent but one of the things that I think is kind of fascinating out of this, when Google released Hummingbird that was kind of a rewrite of the search engine and this – you make the valid point of having one set of indexes for mobile and one set of indexes for all other sort of widescreen normal sized platforms; it’s effectively a doubling up of the index.

John: It is and that’s no joke, that’s huge.

Sean: Well, so it does play into the fact that whenever people from Google talked about the importance of Hummingbird, they didn’t necessarily talk about what it did to rankings. What they talked about were efficiency and speed of performance and that sort of stuff and this could just be effectively building on top of that, that they’ve re-architected the way they do things and now they’re able to kind of scale better.

And if that’s what actually happening I don’t think you’ll ever really know the answer unless they come out and tell you that afterward, which they may do, but if they’ve – if that’s what they’ve pulled off that’s like riding a motorcycle at 100 miles an hour down a highway and changing the tire without stopping.

Like, it really is. Like Google – imagine how much traffic they serve and to rewrite that without a blip and then double it up and not basically crush the thing, that’s a significant engineering feat.

John: You know, it is and of course they would test environments and so forth to ensure a smooth transition but, yeah, it – I mean, even with the background that I’ve got in IT, working for government, database administration, so forth, it’s almost like having two databases. It kind of goes against the whole principal of having centralized data; I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong but I guess it makes sense depending upon what a person is searching for, what type of device they’re looking on to serve up a different set of results but, yeah, duplicating the entire index that is enormous.

Sean: Well, it’s interesting and I thought about this probably last week I was having a conversation with somebody and this topic came up and one of the things was, well, this person sort of said, I don’t really understand why they’re going to all of this trouble on mobile and I just sort of offhandedly said, I can guarantee that I probably do five times as much search on my mobile now than I do on my desktop.

John: Yeah, absolutely. And this is another key point that I put down in my list is why does mobile matter? And I looked at some interesting reports and statistics before we jumped on this Podcast and from what I’ve read apparently there are $2 billion desktop PC’s globally versus five billion mobile devices and mobile usage surpassed PC usage early 2014; I think it was December/January 2013, 2014 for the first time ever and that makes sense because you can’t exactly – people aren’t carrying around desktop PC’s under their arms whereas wherever you go, for most people, they’ve got their phone with them.

So they’re searching at train stations, they’re searching at the shop, they’re searching in their car or wherever at medical centers and so forth. So, it makes sense.

Sean: I was sitting at a desk today, I had a Dell laptop running, open, not Windows locked or anything, actually just sitting there, I had a Macbook sitting next to me, open, ready to use and I swiveled sideways in my chair and did a search on Google on my iPhone.

John: Did you have your feet on the desk?

Sean: No, I had it being – fanning me and feeding me grapes.

John: Right! You know, I’ve got a bad habit, I’ll go upstairs to watch TV and I’ll be sitting upstairs, I’ll always take my phone because during the ad breaks I search around online, I look at – I perform searches in Google, I might look at Facebook, I’ll look at YouTube so – and you certainly don’t do that with a desktop.

Sean: No absolutely and I think that’s kind of – I think Google had so much data they know that, right, that people – I think if you’re hearing or you’re reading or you’re seeing that mobile usage surpass PC usage, okay, but that’s probably chronically at a date compared to what they already know, right? Because they see the volume.

I think the other thing that you sort of mentioned Facebook, I think Facebook is the game changer for Google because we all know that analytics was under reporting the amount of traffic coming from Facebook and particularly Facebook mobile for the last year or so. And now that that’s starting to get rectified, I think Google are now starting to see, holy Moses, Facebook are driving a ton of general mobile traffic and Google have to get their game sorted on mobile because it’s cool to have a search engine that has your logo in a box, that’s great, but the whole experience has to be better and you have to send people to better sites for that device, it just makes sense.

John: That’s right. Just getting back to something that you mentioned a moment ago about broadcasting in advance, the fact that they’re going to be releasing this update along with how to potentially avoid any hassles and the date of release and so forth and all of the other information that they’ve provided.

I – this update I really don’t think it could compare to previous updates because unlike say Penguin and Panda where there is intent there by the site owner to try and manipulate the search results, that’s not the case with a non-mobile friendly site; business owners might have just hired someone, built out their Web site five, seven years ago and the Web site serves it’s purpose and now as technology evolves and people are changing the way they go about using the Web, that’s a lot different to someone that’s building a lot of crappy links in order to try and game the system.

So I think that’s probably why they’ve stepped up and said, look, this updates coming just to give site owners some time to prepare.

Sean: Well also too they’re flagging it in Webmaster tools right, so we have a client who got a Webmaster tools notification that their Magento eCommerce site had 63 different pages that Google thought were not mobile friendly and, you know, this client sort of called me in a panic and said well this kind of means we’re going to have to basically rewrite our site for mobile to make this compliant and I sat down with them for 15/20 minutes and said, okay, let’s have a discussion around this and we went through the analytics and the percentage of sales that come from mobile was less than 5%.

Now…

John: Why is that? Is that because the checkout process was difficult on mobile?

Sean: I don’t think so, I just don’t – I’m not, personal opinion maybe, but I don’t think people are buying a lot of physical products on mobile. And…

John: I would have to agree with that. I know when I’m looking at something I’ll look perhaps on my phone at a book or some – whatever product it might be and I’ll get a feel for what’s available and then I’ll make the transaction on my desktop PC just so that I’ve got a bit more control over the forms and especially entering my credit card details. I don’t know if everyone else does that but that’s definitely something I do.

Sean: I think I’m comfortable buying an Amazon Kindle book off my mobile and particularly my iPad where I’m going to consume that but this particular client selling a physical product I think their target audience isn’t buying on that device. They’re not smashing in their credit card, any of that stuff, on a mobile phone. And when we were having the discussion they said well, to get this site, because it’s like Magento, right? And to get this site rebuilt for mobile to fix these 63 pages is about a $15 to $20,000 exercise.

Now, okay, 5%…

John: I thought Magento was responsive or just…

Sean: It is but the problem that Google are flagging for a lot of people is that the touch points are too close together.

John: Ah yeah, right. Yeah.

Sean: And so you’re ending up with, well, now you have to basically change the layout and that’s not an insignificant piece of business.

John: Just for the listeners, clarify what you mean by touch points.

Sean: Well, it’s the places on the screen where if you touch them that actually – it’s a link, right? It’s an onscreen link

John: Yeah, it’s like a navigational point.

Sean: Yeah, of course, and that’s – and so when you think about it, if you’re doing a million dollars a turnover rand 5% of your total volume is coming from mobile that’s $50,000. It’s going to cost you $25,000 to do that change. You have to start wondering, well, okay, yeah, it’s a positive ROI sort of but without knowing what the impact of this new search algorithm is going to be, you’re actually spending money in a vacuum. I mean, my comment to them was, well, maybe we’ll just – maybe you should just wait and see what happens and then if it’s seriously detrimental then, okay, you know. The one interesting element using this as a sort of slight case study that I’m fascinated to see how it goes is do they drive a lot of their initial traffic off mobile search and then people come back to buy on desktop and if they drop the mobile search will people not come there via desktop.

That’s something that I’m – I don’t think we can answer.

John: Yeah, I don’t know how you would go about tracking that but that’s certainly a behavior that I have, for whatever reason, adopted. I mean, I just feel more comfortable making an a transaction and entering my credit card details on a desktop as opposed to having fat fingers on my phone where I could potentially make a mistake.

So – but I’m not sure how you would go about tracking that.

Sean: Well, the only way that you’re going to be able to do it is four weeks after this change so say end of May is just do a comparison of what’s your search volume been a year ago versus this month; what was it last month versus this month? What was it a year ago, the pervious – and just do side-by-side analysis and see if you can see a variation and if you can see a scenario where, okay, we’ve had a 20% traffic drop and a 15% drop in transactions and revenue then you know that this has impacted you, maybe not directly, but it has had an immediate impact and then I think they’ll need to do something. That’s the only thing I can think of.

I’m kind of more – anybody who’s been around this for a long time I’m kind of more of a wait and see kind of guy with Google because you just never know what you’re going to get and always the first pass never is what it’s meant to be.

John: Yeah, no. I don’t know, I would tend to disagree somewhat. I was involved in a discussion over at Flying Solo and there was a small business owner that was asking, you know, we’ve got this mobile update coming, should I update my Web site and make it mobile friendly and my response to that was, why wait? Get it done that way you’re not going to have any problems and you should be okay. And everyone else was in agreeance and there was one person there that stepped up and said, look, you know, well why wait? Get it done that way you’re not going to have any problems and you should be okay.

And everyone else was in agreeance and there was one person there that stepped up and said, look, just because Google says this and that, I don’t think you need to rush off and update your site, I mean, it was only a small site, five or ten pages or whatever it was, could have been done in a matter of hours but, you know, I think there’s a big difference for site owners that have got a small site and it’s only 10, 15, 20 pages or whatever else, just get it done, go and do it. You start talking about large sites like you were talking about there where it might be a $25,000, $30,000 exercise well then you have to start asking the questions like, how much traffic is coming through mobile, what are we making in terms of sales through mobile, so there’s a little bit to consider but I would, for the most part, recommend that small business owners just, if their site isn’t responsive to just go ahead and get it done.

Sean: Yeah, look, I think if you have a WordPress site you’d be crazy not to just smash this out now, really. WordPress for all of it’s follies and foibles and certain ways that it operates, it’s pretty easy to manipulate and if – and if I can say from the experiences that I’ve seen, the people who have the biggest problem with mobile are the people who’ve really butchered their own CSS.

John: Or they’ve built custom sites, that’s another huge mistake that I see.

Sean: Yeah, absolutely. Like, I haven’t run across anyone using a standard sort of Genesis theme where they’re going to have a problem. I just think out of the box – like I think out of the box right, Genesis handles mobile navigation menus; it’s disgustingly poor, it’s really bad. It just shrinks them down or whatever. It’s ugly but it’s mobile compliant from a Google perspective they could do a better job but whatever.

So I think if you have a WordPress site realistically you’re probably okay and if you’re not, you really ought to fix it but, yeah, I think for anyone who’s gone down the path of building a custom big commerce – you know what I mean? You’re going to be – you really have to work out whether or not it’s financially a viable option for you.

John: Yeah, you know, I was just thinking then while you mentioned a large custom ecommerce site, I bumped into someone at a get together, this was last year some time, and they had spent I think about $15 or $20,000 on this ecommerce store and it was all custom built and the first thing I did was I had a look, I mean, we were all standing around having drinks, it was a birthday party and the first thing that I did was have a look on my mobile and it wasn’t responsive and I said, ah, how do you break it to someone gently that, that looks nice but it’s not responsive?

Sean: Well, yeah, and it always staggers me that in this day and age that responsive is not the default, right? So if you do anything in the enterprise technology space, right, SharePoint is a classic one so Microsoft SharePoint, you know, even the latest version, 2013, out of the box, not responsive. Like, you just sit back and you think like, do you just not realize what’s going on here, but some people don’t care and it’s okay.

John: Yeah, it’s funny that you mentioned that because I – just out of interest I had a look because I was involved in a discussion over at Moz in regards to this update and someone mentioned that Webmaster tools isn’t responsive. It is on the splash page but when you log in, in the backend, it’s not responsive.

Google Analytics exactly the same, it’s not responsive. These are Google tools and the other one which I thought was quite funny was Moz, Moz is not responsive. So, yeah, I don’t know and there was a few others in amongst my – I just had a quick look around online, Reddit was another one that was not responsive, I don’t know, it’s…

Sean: But you ask yourself the question and I guess this is where Google always gets themselves in trouble, right, but if analytics isn’t, you know, responsive, are they going to punish themselves?

John: Yeah, well look, you know, you’ve only got to perform a search in Google and remember – what was that update where anything that was ad-heavy, you know, content was way below the fold and the whole top of the page was stuffed with ads and I can’t remember which update that was, that was some time ago, you’ve only got to perform a search in Google and take a – I mean, depending upon of course what type of device you’re looking on, but I know when I perform a search here in Google and it comes back to screen resolutions and everything else, that I’m only seeing about the first three or four organic results on the screen and the rest is all ads.

So I think it’s – it’s always that case there of do as I say, not as I do. But I thought that was really funny. Two of Google’s biggest tools, most commonly used tools, Analytics and Webmaster tools are not responsive.

Sean: Yeah, and their argument to that will be, well, these are system management tools, they’re not really meant for you to be looking at them on mobile and we’re producing apps for that and that kind of stuff. Like I get all of that but…

John: I’m going to shift over to Bing. I’m going to start using Bing.

Sean: Yeah, because Microsoft have an awesome record at mobile and responsiveness as I pointed out with SharePoint already.

John: Okay, moving on, for business owners, how to go about testing your own site. There’s a couple of things that I’ve listed down here, you know, probably the easiest way for most business owners is to just pick up their phone, take a look at how your Web site looks on your mobile phone and it’s really interesting, I had a discussion with a business owner just recently, they do swimming pools, and I said, your site doesn’t work on mobile, that was my wording, and he said, what are you talking about here it is right here and he showed me and he held his phone up.

And the site was there, sure, but in order to view any of the text and navigate around you had to pinch the screen and zoom in. And I had to explain to him that the site is not responsive in that it’s not rendering the way in which it should for a mobile device and I showed him the difference between his site and say a competitors site that was responsive.

So there needs to be that level of understanding there from business owners in that they understand the way in which a responsive site renders the screen on a mobile because his interpretation was, well, I can see it, it’s there. But it wasn’t – it hadn’t adjusted to suit the screen for his iPhone.

Sean: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating, right, like I’ve had a few people that have spoken to me about it and I’ve talked to a couple of clients and stuff and I keep coming back to, you know, what does your audience do? And if you’re a plumber and you do 24-hour emergency call outs, if your page and your sites aren’t responsive you’re a Muppet because when my pipes burst at 3:00 A.M. I’m picking up my phone, I’m not jumping on the old iMac and having a browse, right?

So, it’s just like the – I had a discussion with somebody who does AdWords and this person had a client who does, who’s a plumber, and they do emergency plumbing and you know what was fascinating is all of these 24-hour plumbers, they do time based ads and they all stop running their ads at 11:00 and her client just smashes it, they just – after 11:00 until six in the morning they’re advertising with click-to-call like crazy on AdWords and it’s the same thing.

Like, you know, you’ve got to have a mobile responsive site if the people who are going to call you and buy something from you or contact you if they’re more likely to do it on their phone or a tablet you’d be a fool not to have this sorted out.

John: Yeah, absolutely and especially things like restaurants or perhaps even service stations or whatever it may be where you’ll be out, more likely to be out and about, as opposed to sitting at home.

Sean: Well, absolutely. Like, if you’re a furniture store or you have a really high visual element to your site I’m not sold that I would go down the path of heavy effort on getting your site redone. Like I work with somebody and they have monster amounts of images and it’s a very, very visually intensive site. It’s mobile friendly, it’s responsive, it – the experience on mobile is so/so but the people who are looking at their stuff, they’re not looking at it on a mobile phone, they’re looking at it on a desktop. They’ve got a specific purpose why they’re there and they’re looking for high res, high definition and that’s how the site was designed, it was designed with super high definition visual content.

So I think realistically kind of got to figure out for yourself – you’ve got to figure out for your business, does it even make sense if it’s going to be costly, like we said, if it’s going to be cheap and quick you knock it out and do it.

John: Yep, yep. No, I agree. You’ve got to look at user behavior and how your potential clients are looking for your products and services but we’ll get to that in a moment. There’s a couple more that I want to mention that business owners can use in order to determine as to whether or not their sites are mobile friendly.

The other one is Google’s mobile friendly test. I’m not sure if you’ve used this one Sean, this one is very similar to the site speed test if you just go to Google and type in mobile friendly test, Google actually provides a tool where you can enter in your Web address, hit go and Google will scan the page and then give you – spit out a report on screen and say, yes, everything’s fine and dandy and everything will have grey (ticks) beside it or no you’re going to jail, everything’s horrible. Your site is not mobile friendly. So that’s another one worth mentioning and the other one that I found just before we jumped on this Podcast actually, and I wasn’t aware of this one, was – where is it? Inside Webmaster tools, fetch as Google, you probably already know about this one?

Sean: Yeah.

John: Fetch as Google and you can actually do a fetch and render, this one is in Webmaster tools so if you log in, choose the property or the Web site that you’re interested in taking a look at and under crawl, the submenu is fetch as Google. There’s an option there where you can fetch a certain page and then, of course, select mobile smartphone, there’s the option there to view desktop as well and then hit fetch and render and that will essentially show you visually on screen how Google interprets your page and as to whether or not it’s mobile friendly.

So there’s three ways; look at your phone, run it through the Google mobile friendly tool and the other one is within Webmaster tools.

Sean: Yeah, I think it’s – I think the Webmaster tools mobile friendly site is probably the best resource for the average person. I have to say, I’ve had kind of mixed results with it. Some of the results actually look really different, what they render to what actually appears on a phone when you look at it.

John: Which one are you talking about, Webmaster tools?

Sean: Yeah, the Webmaster tools mobile friendly site so on that page when you put in a site it has like a little mobile phone and it shows you what they see on the screen of that mobile phone and it – literally I’m looking at one right now for example and it’s not actually comparable to what turns up on a real phone.

John: Hang on, you’ve got me confused. Which one are you looking at, at the mobile friendly testing tool or inside Webmaster tools?

Sean: So Webmastertools/mobilefriendly.

John: Yeah.

Sean: The friendly test page and I’m looking at a particular site where if you put in the URL it comes back and it says this page is not mobile friendly and then it shows you a little Android handset and it shows you a render of the page. And what you actually see on that device is not what you actually see on a phone. And so I have some concerns about how they’re interpreting some of this stuff even themselves and that’s where I said earlier, I think this will shake itself out over the course of the first month and they might loosen up a little bit on some of this stuff.

John: Yeah, no, you’re right. I just have – I just ran a test for my own site through both tools and the mobile friendly test tool actually renders differently than inside Webmaster tools but interestingly enough inside Webmaster tools I see the same as the mobile friendly testing tool but I also see a visual representation of how I would see my site.

So in Webmaster tools they’ve got two small screenshots, one reads this is how Google bot saw the page, and this is how a visitor to your Web site would have seen your page. So, yeah, a quick and dirty test would be to use the mobile friendly testing tool and then if you want a bit more in-depth information use the Webmaster tools but both are useful tools.

Sean: Yeah, look, I think for the average person that’s probably – because there’s some pretty technical elements to this whole mobile friendly conversation and one of them that I find I’m not terribly happy with how they’re looking at it is this whole – your touch elements are too close together because that’s kind of, in some respects, an esthetic decision that a site owner makes.

John: Well, how do they know how fat my fingers are?

Sean: Well that’s right and…

John: That could be the fat finger penalty.

Sean: Well, that’s right, yeah. That’s what you – you’ve just made that up, you should do a Facebook post and everything about it now.

John: I’ll register the domain as soon as we’re finished with this Podcast yeah.

Sean: That’s right. So, I think that – because I have one particular client who they’re getting some of this as, you know, the link elements are too close together and the truth of the matter is that that’s an esthetic decision that they’ve made and it actually looks okay and I, you know, have little pork sausage fingers and I don’t have a problem navigating on it so – and then there are pages where I know for a fact that I have to zoom and pinch and do all kinds of stuff to make it work, right, like I know that and that page, for example, might be mobile friendly.

So, I have a feeling that they’re going to – this little shakeout in the month or so and they’ll loosen some of these guidelines a little bit.

John: Yeah.

Sean: It’s kind of interesting. I wonder how much of this is Google – this is a Trojan horse for Google, like I’m always pretty skeptical of everything they do because I think they’re truly one of the most self-interested, selfishly motivated companies that have ever graced the planet, right?

John: Well, they’re getting grilled for tax evasion at the moment so…

Sean: Well, yeah, everywhere but I think by this update gives them the ability to really set the agenda for what mobile Web sites should be and it doesn’t, it shouldn’t, be lost on anybody that they also make a mobile operating system and a mobile browser and so now if they control a browser and they control the OS and they control the search results they can kind of set whatever rules they want for the rest of us and…

John: This is the time to buy Google shares.

Sean: Ah, yeah, or you’ll start getting people calling from the Justice Department in the U.S. to have yet another look at them, right? I think – I just always wonder about their motivation for doing things and…

John: It’s because they care about their users Sean that’s – just – do no evil.

Sean: Well, I started off with that, right? That was my opening gambit was that they – they’re focused solely on user experience and it was a little bit tongue in cheek but I do think they’re solely focused on Google setting platform standards for everybody.

I think Apple have taken that away from them with mobile devices. I think Apple set the paradigms, right, and that chafes Google and so this is a really great way of them deciding what’s an acceptable mobile experience now.

John: Yeah, that’s right. It shouldn’t fall just on one company to set the standards within – on the Web but something else I just want to mention as well is the site speed tool has – well, will actually spit out a report for site speed, your site speed, via mobile separately from desktop which I thought I’d just mention quickly.

But – all right moving on dude because we’re almost – well, we’re at 45 minutes and everyone gets upset when these things go over half an hour. So I’ll wrap it up with a couple of extra points here; Google Analytics. So, business owners are probably asking, how do I find out how much traffic I’m actually getting via mobile?

And this one is fairly straightforward. If you log into Google Analytics and then of course select the Web property that you’re interested in looking at, it’s under audiences on the left and then mobile and then overview.

And interestingly enough I had a look at a clients site and this particular site gets a third of it’s traffic through mobile, 33%, still the majority is 54% for desktop and then sort of tablet always dribbles in at the end at 13% but what I’ve found really interesting here for this particular Web site is that the conversion rates for mobile are double that of the other platforms so desktop is converting at 1.9, tablet is 1.39 and mobile is converting at 3.88%.

Sean: When you say – sorry, can I ask you, when you say converting, what’s the conversion element?

John: For inquiries.

Sean: So it’s an opt-in?

John: Yeah, for just no contact page because they’re tracking conversions.

Sean: Yeah, so I think that…

John: So customer inquiries.

Sean: So I think that’s a fascinating point, right, is what I’ve seen is that when the conversion aspect and the conversion element isn’t actually buying something physical, the conversion rates on mobile are fractions of what are on desktop.

John: Now, this isn’t an ecom store, this is… I just picked this one out of a hat.

Sean: Sure. But I think that’s – I think what you’re seeing there is that people are pretty comfortable typing in their username or their first name and their email address and maybe their phone number. They don’t have a problem doing that on their phone but, again, I think it comes back to what the conversion element is. But that’s interesting, that’s an interesting statistic.

John: Yeah, so it’s worthwhile business owners, definitely, take a look, jump into Google Analytics, it’s under audience, mobile and overview just to get an idea of how much traffic you’re actually getting from mobile, even if the traffic is low, I would still suggest converting your site and upgrading it, making it responsive because I can’t see this trend moving in the other direction, I can only see it getting stronger.

So I mean, I was never a fan of browsing the Web on my phone but now I can’t help myself.

Sean: Well, it’s interesting I know that since I switched to the iPhone 6 Plus my usage of my iPad, meaning in my iPad Air has diminished in favor of the iPhone.

John: All right dude, so that’s probably it for today. I think just in summary would you summarize with a few key points?

Sean: Yeah look, I think we were just sort of briefly saying mobile isn’t going anywhere and the amount of usage is going up in Australia where we are has over 100% mobile penetration so it’s not going anywhere. Mobile usage is increasing so if you get a large chunk of your traffic on mobile well you’d be a fool not to comply with this because if somebody doesn’t you’re going to get an advantage over them so you’d be crazy not to and then realistically, you know, I think business owners should do a little bit of research, understand for themselves what the impact potentially is for them and then make the call about what action they need to or may not need to take.

John: Yeah, no, I agree. You know, given that this update is less than two weeks away, I think business owners that haven’t done anything yet, haven’t taken any action and aren’t too concerned about it really need to get cracking because from what I’ve read, this is going to really shake things up.

Sean: Awesome!

John: All right dude, thanks so much for jumping on board Sean, really appreciate it. I’ll see you next episode, yeah, 26?

Sean: Yeah.

John: We need more jokes in the next episode.

Sean: Okay, next time we won’t wear cloths. That’s a big joke, that makes me laugh.

John: Yeah, I’ll be sure to keep my cam off.

Sean: Fair enough.

John: All right, dude. I’m out of here. Thanks Sean, see you mate.

Sean: Bye.

John: Bye.

The post Ep25 – Google’s Mobile Update is Coming Are You Ready? appeared first on SEO Point.