Poll: Only 11% Noticed Traffic Changes From Google Update

Another survey has been conducted regarding Google’s recent mobile-friendly update, which prior to release, had often been billed as “Mobilegeddon”. After its release it quickly beca...
Poll: Only 11% Noticed Traffic Changes From Google Update
Written by Chris Crum
  • Another survey has been conducted regarding Google’s recent mobile-friendly update, which prior to release, had often been billed as “Mobilegeddon”. After its release it quickly became clear that it was anything but.

    Search Engine Roundtable released results from a poll it ran after getting a thousand responses. The source of the poll is worth taking into consideration as we’re talking about a widely read industry blog with readers comprised of those very much in the know about SEO and search-related happenings.

    The poll found that only 11% said the update resulted in changes in their traffic or rankings, while on overwhelming 65% provided an absolute “no” response. 13% said “unsure,” and 11% said, “sometimes”.

    The poll began on April 28, which was one week after the update launched.

    “I don’t think the poll would change much today, in fact, I think that 65% number would be closer to 75% or 80%,” writes Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz.

    Last week, we looked at some recent findings from a Koozai of 2000 small-to-medium-sized enterprises across the United States, which indicated that most agreed the “Mobilegeddon” label was overhyped and unhelpful.

    Still, 45% of businesses surveyed claimed they had experienced changes to their rankings or traffic as a result of the update, and 41% of those were concerned that they had seen a drop in rankings by at least three places and had noticed a drop in traffic as a result. Some of these saw as much as a 50% decline. 27% said they had seen a drop in rankings even though they had optimized for mobile. 37% were said to be concerned that the update might have an impact on sales, while 44% were not worried as they said most of their sales came from desktops.

    12% were apparently completely oblivious to Google’s mobile-friendly test tool as they said they didn’t even know whether their websites were optimized for mobile or not. 49% said they didn’t know if sales on their desktops sites had initially come from visitors viewing their products or services on mobile.

    “While it’s had a fairly big impact across all the search results, it doesn’t mean that in every search result you will see very big changes,” Google’s John Mueller said a while back. “So that is something that affects a lot of different sites, a lot of different queries, but it is not such that the sites disappear from the search results completely if they are not mobile friendly.”

    While mobile-friendliness is certainly a signal you’ll want to take advantage of, Google also launched another mobile ranking factor even before that. It now uses App Indexing as a signal, and last week, announced the expansion of App Indexing to iOS after previously only offering it for Android.

    Here’s a Google I/O talk about that you’ll probably want to watch.

    Here’s how to make your site mobile-friendly, according to Google.

    Image via Google

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