Marketing on the WebGoogle announced that on April 21, 2015 it would start excluding websites that are not mobile friendly from its mobile search results. I have been alerting my customers to this change in Google’s algorithm for several months. Sadly moving to a ‘responsive’ mobile friendly design is expensive and beyond the reach of many struggling business owners.
The update has come and gone with seemingly little impact, but let me suggest what I think the long term impact will be.
First this is a Google update, so for now traffic from secondary search engines such as yahoo and bing will be unaffected.
Websites
- People searching for a specific business name and/or location will not have any issue finding your site. — Existing clients will find you.
- People searching for products and services you offer from a mobile device will not find your website. – New prospects will have a harder time finding you.
Local Business Listings Google.com/mybusiness, Facebook, Yelp, foursquare, … :
If you have other business listings, those mobile friendly listings will provide some ability for people to find your products and services. How your business ranks in google.com/mybusiness will be more important than ever.
Longer term, I believe as your business is found less often on mobile devices, it will be discussed and linked to less often, and ultimately loose ranking and relevancy on desktop searches.
So my message is, even if that pipeline of new business seems unaffected for now, there will likely be long term consequences. You need to upgrade your site.