By Mark Attwood | Marketing
OK, bit of a cocky title, I know. And possibly patronising, but that’s not my intention. My intention is to shake you up a little because Googles’ M-Day (April 21st, the date they said they would penalise non-mobile-friendly sites) has now passed, so I thought it would be interesting to look at organic traffic and keyword rankings from some of the sites we measure in our SEO software on behalf of clients and some friends. I’m preserving their anonymity with these case studies, but I assure you they are all completely genuine.
I used Google’s mobile friendly checker and data from my account at MOZ.com.
Specifically I am looking to see what happened to organic traffic and keyword rankings on and after April 21st to see how much of an effect the mobile friendly thing really has had on real businesses real websites. I have included looking at whether or not these sites are secure (ie. on an SSL, therefore giving us https://). It’s not strictly scientific, but it does pull up some very useful insights. I said “when you don’t listen to me” because I did forewarn everyone about this in a recent post.
Let’s look at the data!
Case Study 1:
Secure? No
Mobile Friendly? No
Organic Traffic Apr 29 – May 5: –43%
Keyword Rankings?
Note: we have done no SEO work on this site for over 6 months
UPDATE: Since putting this blog on Facebook, Ellie from ExhibitionPlinths.co.uk decided to go public and tell us how these particular rankings have affected her business. I did not know just how many pages she had removed in order to streamline the business, and the positive effect that has had, which illustrates a good point about how important it is to be ranking for keywords that 1. You actually want to rank for and 2. Keywords that actually bring you money.
Here is our FB discussion:
Case Study 2:
Secure? No
Mobile Friendly? Yes
Organic Traffic Apr 29 – May 5: +14%
Keyword Rankings?
Note: This website is using Attwood Digital’s Monthly SEO package which has seen it’s business increase from £36k per year to over £300k per year in less than 18 months. The only reason it’s not on SSL yet is because we are in the process of overhauling the website
Case Study 3:
Secure? No
Mobile Friendly? No
Organic Traffic Apr 29 – May 5: -15%
Keyword Rankings?
Note: we have done no SEO work on this site
Case Study 4:
Secure? No
Mobile Friendly? Yes
Organic Traffic Apr 29 – May 5: +20%
Keyword Rankings?
Note: This was a site we did extensive retrospective SEO work on January-March 2015.
Case Study 5:
Secure? Yes
Mobile Friendly? Yes
Organic Traffic Apr 29 – May 5: +175%
Keyword Rankings?
Note: This was a site we built from scratch and launched in late February 2015. It was extensively keyword-researched, built in WordPress with a silo structure and started using our Kickstarter SEO package in March. It is also in an extremely competitive market where the cost per click in Adwords is over £15!
Conclusions
It seems pretty obvious from the above samples that the most important thing you can do for your website is make sure it is mobile friendly ASAP.
It is also clear that when you do that AND make your site secure, this has a compound effect on your traffic, so get an SSL right now if you haven’t already. Read my previous post about that here.
It is also apparent (and this really was not meant to be a sales pitch), that using our SEO services at Attwood Digital has an amazing compound effect on traffic and income.
If you are interested in knowing what these are, take a look at Attwood Digital SEO Packages 2014_15.
Let me know what happened to your rankings since April 21st in the comments below.
