Why brands need to get mobile ready. Now

Mobile search rankings are about to plummet for brands and companies who aren’t mobile compatible say David Coats and Chris Daley.

Google has announced planned changes to the way it ranks websites in searches made on smartphones that will mainly affect websites with common configuration mistakes. These include poorly implemented redirects from desktop to smartphone websites, and smartphone-specific errors such as unplayable videos. However, it is the underlying point of the announcement – the broader acknowledgement by Google that smartphone users are a significant and fast growing segment of internet users, and that Google has the specific intent to ‘improve the search experience for smartphone users – that is most interesting.

To give you a sense of how important this announcement is for brands, it is perhaps useful to talk through the history of mobile search rankings.

The phrase ‘mobile SEO’, as in mobile search engine optimisation, has been around for many years, however the impact of activities related to mobile SEO have always been heavily debated. That’s because differences in rankings between mobile and desktop were barely noticeable before 2011, even with Google’s blended mobile ranking construction introduced in 2009. Apart from local results being more likely, not much else seemed to be different. Google did, however, implement a lot of user experience enhancements in that time, with auto-completion being a good example of how they helped users ask the questions faster, even if the answers were, or seemed to be, the same.