April 21 - D-day for Google's mobile search algorithm changes based on mobile friendliness is less than a month away. If your sites meet Google's mobile friendly standards, then that day could be good news for you, assuming you are the recipient of increased mobile traffic from Google. But what if you don't meet Google's mobile friendly standards. How much of a difference will it make? How can you estimate how much of a difference it will make?
Let's take an example. The site I am looking at now using Google Analytics in not mobile friendly, and if I look at the page under audience > mobile > overview, I see the following traffic breakdown:
69% desktop
24% mobile
7% tablet
So does that mean 23% of the traffic is at risk? No, because only organic search traffic is at risk. So to understand the situation better, near the top of the overview page, to the right of where "all sessions" is shown, I can select "Add Segment" and then I can select "Organic Traffic" and click "Apply." Now I can see that while 24% of traffic is mobile, not all of that traffic is from organic search. In the example I am looking at, I can see that only 15% of the mobile traffic is organic search traffic. And 15% of 24% of the traffic is 3.6% of overall site traffic.
Now certainly I do care about 3.6% of the traffic of the site I am looking at, but not anywhere near as much as I care about 24% of traffic to the site. And, as it ends up, while most of the organic traffic to the site I am looking at is from Google, some is from other sources such as Bing and Yahoo, so actually the relevant percent of overall site traffic is about 3%.
Now, if I assume that 100% of that traffic is lost as a result of algorithm changes, and that the lost 3% of overall traffic results in a 3% decline in revenue, then the impact of not doing anything would be an expected 3% revenue decrease. Of course, as site that is mobile friendly probably is under performing for mobile traffic, so my guess is the economic impact will be less than that. And maybe there would still be some organic Google search traffic left as well, rather than none at all.
Anyway, for this week's poll, I ask you to estimate the impact of Google's algorithm changes to you, assuming it means you loose all organic search traffic from Google from mobile devices for sites that are not mobile friendly. As I explained above, you can do that by multiplying the percent of your traffic that is from mobile devices by the percent of that traffic that is from organic search, and then reducing that further to reflect how much of your mobile organic search traffic is from Google.
And if you are interested in reading more on estimating the impact of Google's mobile search algorithm changes, see the following article:
How Much Traffic Will You Lose From The Upcoming Mobile SEO-Pocalypse?
Besides voting in the poll, share the observations you make as you consider the impact on your sites.
Michael