The short answer to the question of ‘How will I know if the recent Google update will impact my business?’, is to pose the counter question, ‘Do you have a website?’ If you have a website, then you will be impacted by the 04/21 Google update.
Over time, every business with a website will be impacted by the ‘mobile friendly’ requirement for search engine ranking. However, Google has indicated that it will not be a catastrophic shift in rankings on 04/21, the update will be rolled out over time. If you are still curious as to whether your business website is ‘mobile friendly’, please follow the link to JRS Mar/Com’s #Mobilegeddon page.
The impact to your situation specifically will determine the priority on upgrading your site to a ‘mobile friendly’ site. Your haste should be directly proportional to the amount of web traffic your site is receiving via mobile device. Mobile device in this instance includes tablets, and mobile phones. To do this, you need some sort of analytics tracking software installed on your site, I happen to use Google Analytics and find it more than suits my needs.
If you are already tracking your site traffic, then you can begin to make informed decisions on the necessity of an immediate ‘mobile friendly’ website transition. If a significant portion of your traffic is from mobile devices, then you should update your site as soon as possible.
If you do not have a mobile friendly site and you are attracting a significant amount of mobile traffic, over time you will begin to lose your search engine ranking. This loss in rank will make it difficult for people to locate your site through search. That is not to say that if your traffic is coming from other sources (i.e. newsletter links, social media links, etc…) you will lose traffic, that is just to say that you will not be listed as high on Google’s Search Engine returns.
How you go about making an update should be discussed. Simply transitioning dated content to a new, ‘mobile friendly’ interface will not serve to improve your rankings on Google Search Engines. This is a perfect time to identify which strategy you will be adopting and incorporating a complete Content Marketing Strategy, as well as incorporating new keywords that you can begin acquiring rank for.
A Content Marketing Strategy should include all of the available media including social channels, print channels, your website, and any other mediums for distributing and linking content.
JRS Mar/Com is available to navigate you through this process.
