SMBs Hit Hardest By Mobilegeddon

If you are a Small or Medium busi­ness owner, you prob­a­bly didn’t know or did noth­ing to pro­tect your­self against Google’s’ Mobi­leged­don.


Your NOT alone most SMBs/SMOs didn’t do any­thing to pro­tect their web­sites and online pres­ence and you will soon now be feel­ing it’s rath! Though many con­sider Mobi­leged­don to have been much ado about noth­ing, dig­i­tal agency Koozai found that Google’s mobile-focused algo­rithm has had a sig­nif­i­cant impact on small and medium-sized busi­nesses (SMB). Accord­ing to Koozai’s May sur­vey of 2,000 SMBs with 50 or fewer employ­ees, 46 per­cent of respon­dents have expe­ri­enced changes in rank­ing. From that group, 41 per­cent have seen a drop in rank­ings by at least three places, result­ing in drops in traf­fic — as much as 50 per­cent in some cases. “The hype that the Google mobile update would cause car­nage in the search engine rank­ings missed the larger pic­ture,” says Ben Nor­man, chief exec­u­tive (CEO) of Koozai. “Exag­ger­at­ing the impact meant that busi­nesses didn’t antic­i­pate that even small changes in their rank­ing can have a big impact on their organic mobile search results.“
Google takes around 200 dif­fer­ent fac­tors into account when deter­min­ing rank. So while the search pow­er­house stressed the impor­tance of mobile-optimization, it’s hardly the be all, end all of deter­min­ing a company’s posi­tion. Koozai found that 27 per­cent of busi­nesses dropped in rank­ings despite hav­ing opti­mized their sites for mobile. Nor­man says that many busi­ness own­ers are frus­trated, feel­ing like they’re expe­ri­enc­ing a neg­a­tive impact after act­ing on Google’s warn­ings. He says that speaks to how fre­quently SMBs fail to under­stand SEO and e-commerce analytics.

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“Many con­sumers today will research on mobile and then pur­chase on desk­top,” he says. “Many SMBs are miss­ing out on these lead-creation oppor­tu­ni­ties if they don’t know if their e-commerce sites aren’t giv­ing their poten­tial cus­tomers a good expe­ri­ence on mobile.” Of the busi­nesses sur­veyed, 37 per­cent were con­cerned that the algo­rithm update would impact their sales, while 44 per­cent were not wor­ried, due to the major­ity of their sales com­ing from desk­top. Nearly half the respon­dents said they were unsure about the rela­tion­ship between dif­fer­ent devices and didn’t know whether mobile had impacted any of their desk­top sales. And 12 per­cent didn’t even know whether their sites were mobile-friendly or not. Back in April, even before Google rolled out its update, Bran­don Pret­ty­man, an SEO account manager-turned-website strate­gist, pre­dicted that the small­est busi­nesses would be hit the hardest. “Small busi­nesses lack the assets and knowl­edge to make the adjust­ment on their sites,” Pret­ty­man said.

Guest Blog­ger:

Mike O’Brien
June 4 2015
Search Engine Watch