Google rarely does this. In February, it announced two months in advance the exact date of a ranking change. Starting April 21, pages that work properly on a phone receive an advantage in mobile search results; pages that do not, do not.
That date was Tuesday. The SEO community has been calling the update Mobilegeddon for weeks. The name is somewhat exaggerated, but the deadline was real.
We are based in Bali, carrying out web work for Crystal Divers in Sanur and preparing Ceningan Divers to open this summer. Almost every dive operator's customer here is a traveller with a phone, yet many of these businesses' websites still appear designed for a desktop monitor in 2009, because they were.
What does Google's mobile-friendly update actually change?
The facts are straightforward, and Google set them out in its post announcing the rollout of the mobile-friendly update. The update affects searches made on mobile devices. It applies to individual pages, not to entire sites. It is rolling out in all languages, worldwide, over approximately one week. It is also binary: a page either passes Google's mobile-friendly test or it does not, with no partial credit.
Desktop search is unchanged. A quality page that fails the test does not disappear. Google states clearly that relevance remains the most important factor, so an excellent answer on a poorly adapted page can still rank well.
This point is being overlooked amid the concern. For many large sites, this week is likely to pass without significant disruption. For small local businesses, the update matters more, for a practical reason: their customers already search on phones, and their competitors are often equally small and equally slow to update. If one of two dive centres in a town corrects its site and the other does not, a small ranking advantage can change which business receives the call.
More significant than the ranking change itself is what it signals. Since November, Google has displayed a "mobile-friendly" label next to results on phones. It is now linking rankings to that label, indicating that the phone is the default customer device. We expect this to be the first in a series of such measures.
How can you test your site with Google's mobile tools?
Begin with the free Mobile-Friendly Test. Enter a URL, and the tool indicates whether the page passes or fails, with the reasons. If your site is verified in Google Webmaster Tools, a Mobile Usability report also lists every page with a problem. We recommend consulting it this week if you have never done so.
The reasons provided are clear and specific:
- Text too small to read
- Clickable elements too close together
- Content wider than screen
- Mobile viewport not set
- Uses incompatible plugins (mostly Flash, which remains on some tourism sites)
This list is useful because it can be shared with an owner who has no technical background. A statement such as "people cannot tap your buttons" describes a problem anyone can understand.
Next, carry out the test Google cannot perform. Open your own site on your own phone, outdoors in sunlight, using one hand, and try to book something. This is how your guests experience it. We carried out this test on several dive centre websites this week, and the results were revealing.
Which issues cause most failures?
Most of the failures we are observing stem from three issues: the viewport, font sizes and tap targets.
Why does the viewport matter?
A single line in the page header instructs the phone to fit the page to the screen. Without it, the phone displays a miniature desktop page and requires the user to pinch and zoom. Many older sites lack this line. Adding it does not resolve every issue, but no other correction works without it.
What font size is appropriate?
For years, designers favoured small grey text, which appeared elegant on a large monitor. On a phone in bright sunlight on a boat dock, it is illegible. Larger text and higher contrast remain essential.
What makes tap targets effective?
Common problems include links and buttons placed too close together, a menu of small text links and a phone number that cannot be tapped. For a dive centre, the "book now" and "contact us" buttons are the primary purpose of the site. If a thumb cannot reach them on the first attempt, the booking may be lost.
Why are outdated themes usually the cause?
When a site fails, the cause is almost always the same: it runs on an outdated theme or template built before responsive design became standard. In some cases, it is a separate "mobile site" added several years ago on an m-dot address and not maintained since.
These sites can be patched, but this is rarely worthwhile. Our recommendation is to move to a responsive theme and rebuild the key pages properly. For most small businesses on WordPress, this represents a few days of work rather than a major expense. It is also an opportunity to remove the many pages that receive no visits.
We prefer a single, complete website redesign to correcting the error list page by page. A rebuilt site should be designed for the phone first, with the desktop version adapting to the larger screen.
What should a small business do this week?
Run the test on your homepage, your main service page and the page people use to book or call. These three pages matter more than all the others combined.
Make the phone number a clickable link. It requires a small piece of code and is the single most useful element on a mobile page for a local business.
Avoid drawing conclusions about rankings over the next few days. The rollout takes time, and no one, including the authors of the more alarmist articles, yet knows how significant the shift will be for small sites. Monitor your mobile traffic in Analytics over the next month and compare the results.
Finally, establish a regular practice: review your site as your customers do, on a phone, in a hurry, with distractions around them. Once a season, for five minutes, this review identifies most of what matters, whether or not an update is underway.