Yesterday (4/21/2015), Google announced the rollout of a long anticipated worldwide change to its search algorithm, specifically targeting searches from mobile devices. Google calls it the “Mobile Friendly Update”, while industry pundits have a more affectionate title: “Mobilegedden”.
Page quality has always been a focal point for Google. Most famously, Google’s PageRank score takes into account domain authority, page content, site speed, and user experience design. The recent search algorithm update takes all of these principles and applies them to the end-to-end mobile experience.
The number of sites set to be impacted are unknown right now… Forrester Research estimates that 62% of enterprise sites could not pass the mobile-friendly test today. Market research company Portent ran a test on 25,000 sites in late March 2015 and found 40% would fail. Whatever the true number ends up being, mobile should be a top 3 priority for your team going forward, and PowerReviews can help you get there.
3 Ways PowerReviews can help you be mobile-friendly:
1.) Responsive Design
PowerReviews has user experience at the forefront of our focus. We offer an out-of-the-box responsive stylesheet to optimize your product-detail-page review content display and collection. This CSS gives you the power to offer a responsive, mobile-friendly experience with no extra code to maintain. But don’t worry, you can still customize the look and feel to match your brand’s experience with ease. If you’re a current client and haven’t already, reach out to our Customer Success team to help you upgrade!
2.) Page Speed Performance
PowerReviews code is optimized for speed, which Google prides themselves on for their own product experiences and gives credit to sites that do the same. Our review display code (which runs as a 1st party tag, hosted on your servers) is ~ 200kb, 85% smaller than other providers.
3.) External Resources
Google has a variety of tools that PowerReviews uses with our own code development to check experience quality. To check if your site is mobile-friendly, you can examine individual pages with the Mobile-Friendly Test or check the status of your entire site through the Mobile Usability report in Webmaster Tools.
You can also read Google’s FAQ on the mobile update posted yesterday for a full list of Google approved solutions to your mobile usability woes.
With the rollout of the Mobile-Friendly update by Google, it’s clear that mobile should be a top-priority for sites. Consumers are using their mobile devices to shop, interact and explore, so give them the best experience with a mobile-friendly site.
