New Study from Moovweb Shows that Mobile-Friendly Sites are Dominating the Top Google Search Results

When Google released the new mobile-friendly algorithm update known as “Mobilegeddon” (or “Google Mice”) on April 21, a lot of business websites went mobile-friendly in order to comply with Google’s latest requirements. With mobile Internet browsing now exceeding desktop Internet browsing, Google encourages businesses to go mobile-friendly if they want to maintain or boost their rankings on the mobile SERPs.

But surprisingly, some websites haven’t heeded Google’s warnings and have remained non-mobile-friendly. And so today, they are facing a serious threat as a new study reveals that the Google Mice update has gone into full swing—with visibility and ranking consequences evident for non-mobile-friendly sites.

New research from San Francisco-based mobile expert company Moovweb (@Moovweb) indicates that mobile-friendly sites are clearly conquering the top Google search results: 83% of the time, the sites that appear on the first page of the SERPs were tagged “mobile-friendly”. Moreover, the top three results were mobile-friendly 81% of the time. [See Figure 1]

The study further revealed that 77% of the results in the Google mobile SERPs are mobile-friendly. “These results appear to be stable over time. For the 6 weeks we tracked the data, the number of mobile-friendly results on the first page has hovered around the average of 7.7 out of 10 results,” Moovweb stated.

Since the rollout of the update, Moovweb has been examining over 1,000 important e-commerce keywords in a range of industries in order to ascertain how the Mobilegeddon update has affected the rankings of sites in Google’s mobile search results.

The keywords were selected across different industries, such as transportation, retail, travel and hospitality, healthcare, insurance, and education. During the analysis, Moovweb found that some sectors appeared to be more prepared for the update than the rest. “When we separated the keywords by industry, we found that keywords in some industries had a much higher percentage of mobile-friendly webpages in their top 10 keyword positions,” the company noted.

Out of all the examined categories, the transportation industry displayed the lowest percentage of mobile-friendly pages, while the retail industry remained at the top of the list. Healthcare, insurance, as well as the travel and hospitality sectors weren’t too far behind when it comes to heeding Google’s call to go mobile-friendly. [See Figure 3]

Many claims and debates have surfaced about the actual effect of Google’s mobile-friendly update on business sites, but if Moovweb’s research is any indication, it’s safe to say that non-mobile-friendly sites, in a general sense, are being hit by this particular update. The message is clear and simple: if you want to improve your site’s visibility on the SERPs, your site must meet the needs of searchers using their mobile devices for sourcing information.

 

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