How much of your traffic is based on Google mobile search?

[MichaelCorfman]

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

[Christiaan]

For me it is about 24% of traffic that comes by Google Mobile Search to my main website.
34% of the Google organic traffic is mobile. Google organic traffic is 70% of the total traffic. So that makes that 24% of the total traffic comes from Google Mobile Search.

At the moment I am working hard to make my main website mobile friendly. My French and Dutch websites have the same layout. Because the Dutch is much more important I decided to make the changes to the French website first. That site works fine now with all the changes for mobile. Today or tomorrow I'll make the same changes to my main website.

So I hope that everything will run smoothly on April 21. If my site is more optimized than my competitors I'll get some more traffic. That is what I work for.

[wonderpunter]

About 70% of my traffic is mobile on weekends.. 60% weekdays, and though some believe Desktop is king for conversions I am in argument based on my own personal experience...

That's my organic google traffic, My site is a lot newer compared to most, but I believe this is the way forward.. you might be thining am i worried about the 3.6% loss.. but really you should be worried about the 70% gain your missing out on, Like it or not we are all going mobile.. Soon it will just be work computers for desktop.

[baldidiot]

Oops, I missread the poll and thought it said how much of your organic traffic was mobile, not how much was at risk...

Over the past year we've seen a marked increase in the amount of traffic coming from mobile (mainly sports) and it's now around the 50% mark. I'm actually in the process of converting my older sites to be responsive, which hasn't been as much of a headache as I first thought.

My aim is to have all revenue producing sites mobile friendly by early april, so fingers crossed the update will go in my favour.

[DanHorvat]

There will be collateral victims of this update. Tablets are treated as mobile devices but in reality a 10'' tablet can get you the full desktop experience.

But I'll cheer for anything that moves away from PageRank, link building, and similar stuff. Another ranking signal that takes content and quality of UX into account is good for me.

Most of my sites are mobile-friendly and those that aren't will be by April 21st. Three of them are coded manually from scratch, the rest are simply built on responsive themes or templates.

Sooner or later, Google will wipe out the scammers. These rats can't keep up with the quality guidelines.

[JackTenSuited]

Sooner or later, Google will wipe out the scammers. These rats can't keep up with the quality guidelines.

If normal whitehat affiliates can keep up why can't the spammers and scammers? if anything they're the first to adapt. changing your site to be mobile friendly can be as easy as adding a plugin to your wp site.

[DanHorvat]

If normal whitehat affiliates can keep up why can't the spammers and scammers?

Because there has always been, and always will be, a big difference in mentality between people who are willing to make the extra effort and people who are parasites.

Rats tend to find holes to hide in instead of working to keep up with the times. And, what scammers are doing today is the same thing they've been doing since the dawn of internet. I didn't notice any revolutionary advance in their techniques - that wouldn't fit the mentality.

Five years from now, they'll still be serving popunders to cheap untargeted traffic, tricking people to opt-in.

Rats. They don't care about mobile responsiveness and never will.

[WagerPod]

I think my mobile search traffic is 65%-75% however I do have the mobile-friendly tag when viewed on mobile devices.

Personally I think we will get to a stage where mobile and desktop browsers can have the exact same functionality, the only different being screen size.

[edgarf76]

I have about 50 /50 but all my sites are responsive

[sweetbet]

The vast majority of my main site's traffic is from desktop users, but I can definitely see that I will need to convert my main site to being mobile friendly if I want to remain competitive in this business.

[Christiaan]

Rats. They don't care about mobile responsiveness and never will.

The problem is that most of them use free themes. These days most of those themes are already mobile responsive.

People like us who put a lot of work in their website and code themselves have to do the extra effort to make it mobile responsive. They get it all for free...

[muffincrumbs]

1/2 of my traffic is mobile. All of my sites are responsive mobile friendly except one. I am going to be putting work into it to bring it up to date with a paid theme that I will not code myself.

[MightyTips]

Every month mobile traffic is increasing so we must look so more adapted website for mobile devices