Study: Non-Mobile-Friendly Sites Disappearing From Top Organic Results

Remarkably there are many brands and companies that still don’t have mobile-friendly sites. There are now visibility consequences, in addition to usability consequences. A new study from Moovweb asserts that non-mobile-optimized sites are now disappearing from search results.

April 21 was the formal date when Google’s Mobile-Friendly Algorithm kicked in. Since then Moovweb has tracked “1,000 important e-commerce keywords in a range of industries” to see whether and how it has impacted mobile rankings on Google.

The company found that 83 percent of the the time, the top result was mobile-friendly and 81 percent of the time the top three results were. On page one of the Google mobile SERP, 77 percent of results (or 7.7 out of 10) were mobile-friendly.

These findings immediately raise the question: when and why is Google serving non-mobile-friendly results in those remaining 20+ percent of cases?

Moovweb’s chart above shows the percentage of mobile friendly sites in each of the top 10 positions across the 1,000 keywords tested.

The company found that mobile-friendliness varied by vertical. The chart below indicates some industries were more mobile ready than others. Of seven categories examined retail had the most mobile-friendly results and transportation the lowest percentage of mobile friendly results — for the examined keywords.

While there has been some dispute and apparent variation in the impact of Mobilegeddon on different market segments, it’s beyond question that non-mobile-friendly sites are being negatively affected as a general matter.

The obvious next step for marketers whose sites aren’t mobile ready is to update them pronto. But the larger objective is not simply to comply with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Algorithm but to provide an experience that rewards mobile users and advances the interests of the company on the now mobile-centric internet.

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