- January 4th 2018
- SEO News
Why is the Mobile First Google Update Important
Transcript from Video:
Hi. I’m Geoff from Leapfrog Internet Marketing. This is to answer “Why is the Google mobile-first update important?” So, if we go back in time back to, I think, the 21st of April 2015, Google launched what was #mobilegeddon, and this was their mobile-friendly update. And what this did really was…it penalized your website if it wasn’t mobile-friendly or responsive.
So, they launched a convenient tester, the mobile-friendly test tool. If your website didn’t pass this test, you wouldn’t get ranked on mobile devices in the Google search results. Now, for some sites, this was a major problem. But there are others, let’s take Leapfrog Internet Marketing (we do search engine optimization), where this actually wasn’t a big deal. If we look at people searching, say for SEO, keywords around that, nearly 80% of people search on computers. So, even if we weren’t mobile-friendly, we were only missing out on roughly 20% of people searching on mobiles, where we wouldn’t have been in the Google search results.
Now, what’s now changing, and this is gonna launch in 2018, is Google is now coming up with this “mobile-first.” And what this means is that Google now realizes that more searches are done on mobile devices than on computers. And so, they are gonna go straight to your mobile version of your website, and if it isn’t mobile-friendly, they will not rank you on any device. So, that means you will lose rankings. They’ll lose rankings for all devices. So, in effect, you’ll lose all your rankings.
So, what does that mean? If you are not mobile-friendly at the moment, I strongly suggest you become mobile-friendly as quickly as possible. If you are mobile-friendly then relax, not a problem. If you’ve passed the test and you’re mobile-friendly, you’re ready for when the mobile-first index update launches sometimes in 2018. That’s it. If you’ve got any questions, let me know.
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