For a very long period of time, Google has been preaching to focus on mobile experience.
When three years ago we heard that it’s a matter of a couple of years until mobile will overtake desktop, many didn’t believe. I wasn’t sure myself.
But the future is here. Mobile is HUGE, and it’s here to stay.
back to the future 2015
In order to give an additional push to webmasters to optimize their sites for Mobile, Google introduced the mobile-friendly label back in November 2014:
Three months later, in the end of February 2015, Google announced that April 21st is going to be a very big day for Mobile search results.
I don’t want to go into details of what have been announced, as you probably heard of that enough. Any SEO/Online Marketing blog has covered the topic in details in the last couple of months.
But the main thing that matters right now, is that if you won’t have that label by April 21st, you will probably see a decrease in your organic mobile traffic.
Why? because the first spots will be preserved for the mobile friendly sites.
So what does it tell me for Investing.com?
Well, despite the fact that our new mDot site will only be available around June, our current mobile site is already mobile-friendly. In fact, we didn’t change it much since it was launched in October 2009, but it sure gives us that label for the pages that generate over 99% of our traffic.
And the competitors?
In 2015, most financial sites already are mobile friendly. Those that weren’t mobile friendly on the day of the announcement, are still not mobile friendly a month later in the beginning of April.
While our organic traffic’s split between the desktop site and the mobile site is 76/24 for the desktop, we are still talking about millions of monthly visitors that some of the competitors might be jeopardizing.
Another thing to note is that despite the fact that the Mobile-Friendly label exists on a URL by URL basis, it seems that a few of our competitors still thought they could only have an optimized homepage, and leave the rest of the site for the desktop. This is a very odd decision as my statistics show me that over 70% of the organic traffic lands on the instruments (internal) pages, such as the stocks pages.
And at least two VERY large financial sites have mDot sites that are disallowed by robots.txt.
After that being said, nothing has surprised me as Google Finance. It simply is NOT Mobile Friendly.
This is how the Google stock page looks on Google Finance, with Google Chrome, on my Google phone:
So responsive or mDot?
Truth is that this isn’t the point. Go for what works best for you, but make sure to follow the guidelines.
If you want, you can also check out the latest infographic on Search Engine Land, I liked it.
My personal opinion is very straight forward. Responsive is great for simple sites, like this blog of mine which is built with WordPress. You just need to make sure you’re using a responsive theme and basically, you’re ready to go.
For anything else, especially heavy pages with lots of information, I personally prefer a “light” version (mDot) under a different URL. We already know that Google is perfectly fine with it.
Hope you guys are ready for April 21st, it should be interesting.
And don’t forget that you can test any of your pages with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.