Search Traffic and Mobile

[DishonestDave]

I developed my last website about five years ago. At that time the orthodoxy was don't pay too much attention to mobile. But now, it seems quite clear that catering for mobile is very important.

I just looked in Google Analytics and was shocked to see for January that only 37% of traffic was Desktop. However, digging a little deeper it seems a lot of this is referral traffic from foreign news sites. The UK, which is still my main market is 65% desktop. My target audience also probably has an average age of 55, which means that there is less mobile than you would otherwise generally find.

A few years ago, I got a message in Google Webmaster Tools, telling me to put a viewport meta tag on my site and that failing to do so would likely lead to lower search results on mobile.

So, my question is: does a mobile friendly layout increase traffic? And if so can you give a ballpark figure of how much traffic you think will increase?

 

[Scott Heron]

A mobile friendly site is looked favorably upon by the search engines so theoretically that in itself should increase your website traffic as the site will be placed higher in the rankings for relevant terms.

Regarding ballpark figure, not sure sorry as I dont know your target terms/industry etc.

 

[makeusvisible]

The place to start is 'conversions', not traffic.

You already have traffic, so you need to be thinking about how that traffic is behaving on the site, before you start worrying about generating more traffic.

Using Analytics you should be able to drill deeper into your stats, and see what the conversion rate is of your mobile traffic compared to desktop. If it is significantly lower then obviously you need to focus on making the site responsive (mobile friendly).

If you havent set conversion tracking up in analytics, I would suggest doing so at once. However you could also look at the bounce rate of your pages on mobile compared to desktop..... if the site isnt working well on mobile, you will likely have a high mobile bounce rate.

The above stats should inform you how many conversions per month the mobile non-friendly aspect is costing you.....and also how many people are bouncing because it is not mobile friendly.
Thus you can then estimate the potential gain in developing a mobile friendly site.

On a side note, being fully responsive is about much more than adding the viewport code to your website. Some websites can be made responsive, and some simply need totally redesigning to do so properly. We generally decide this on a case by case basis, but Id suggest number crushing the above before going down that route.

Being mobile friendly is also a ranking signal, and does impact where you appear in search, so you will definitely want to be thinking about going responsive sooner rather than later.

 

[justinaldridge]

For B2B sites, mobile can sometimes be less important as most traffic to the site happens during working hours, from desktop PCs. For B2C, mobile is very important and mobile traffic is increasing.

But, for either traffic type, from the perspective of rankings you need a responsive site because over the coming months Google will be basing their index on how the website appears on mobile instead of how it is now where it's based on desktop (even for mobile rankings).

Being mobile friendly is a big part of that so you do need to get your website developed to respond accordingly on mobile devices.

 

[PIers Ede]

The technical answer wouldn't be that it doesn't necessarily increase traffic, but it would increase conversions. There's really no way around developing a site which is readily accessible on all devices, these days. So if your business is coming from the web, you need to consider it.

Ensuring your site is AMP friendly (Accelerated Mobile Pages) could actually even increase traffic, too, given that Google is given priority real estate to pages which the tell-tale lightning strike symbol....