Why Google’s mobile-friendly tweak matters for publishers

Mobilegeddon.

That’s how people described the coming of Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm tweak this spring, stoking fears that the change would be the end of the web and search as we knew it.

The reality: Not so much.

Nevertheless, it was a good moment for brands and publishers alike to take stock in their mobile strategies — whether they were ready or not.

This update is “pushing publications to create content that people can actually read in the moment where they are,” says Jean Ellen Cowgill, president of Atlantic Media Strategies. “Much of our content consumption is occurring on-the-go, on our phones, on our tablets, and the content that we create needs to be formatted for that experience.”

Google has set out to prioritize more mobile-friendly sites in its search results and penalize those without a good mobile experience. But a few weeks into the new reality, we see that results weren’t quite as dramatic as some predicted: Only a handful of major websites were penalized, falling slightly in the rankings.

The chatter this announcement spurred has drawn more attention to the scale of mobile content consumption. And companies are responding. Bing announced that it will launch a similar ranking algorithm in the near future. In the days leading up to the update, Google announced it saw an 4.7 percent uptick in mobile-friendly sites.

Any publisher’s content and platform should be informed by media trends, Cowgill says: Users spent 60 percent of their time online on mobile devices in June 2014, compared to 40 percent on desktop, according to comScore findings. What’s more, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites are getting more app and mobile traffic than on desktop at the start of 2015, according to Pew Research Center analysis of comScore data.

“The integration of design thinking, editorial thinking, UX thinking is just going to continue to be more and more important as the devices that we use are smaller and we are able to surface content on more and more types of devices,” Cowgill says. “It’s not just a free floating story that will do well on its own right, it can do better or worse depending on the experience that you create around it.”

While Google’s nudge to mobile accessibility has inspired some businesses to reconsider their strategies, many companies have fallen short of providing users with a good experience on their devices: Forty-four percent of Fortune 500 companies are not mobile-friendly, according to research by TechCrunch.

For companies that are not prepared for a full-scale site redesign today, Google offers tools to help tweak site or content strategy in order to provide users with the best experience possible.

The Mobile Friendly Test allows companies to see how well they rank and how they can bump a site back up in the results. Small site tweaks can also act as a Band-Aid in place of an immediate redesign. Google also provides specific CMS guides that professionals can scour for quick fixes within their existing systems.

Google and AnswerLab compiled a “principles of site design” guide that answers the question: What makes a good mobile site? This research covers the best practices in navigation, search, conversion, form entry, and usability with easy-to-understand rules to keep in mind.

“Many organizations make the mistake of thinking very website-centric, thinking about the content that lives on their site and assume that it will be seen,” Cowgill says. “But actually just as important — if not more important — is that you’re surfacing content where your audiences actually are.”

Cowgill lists mediums such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium or Quora as options to consider.

If your company is at the right stage to begin a full scale redesign, it’s important to have the right mind frame and input, says Joan McGrath, the managing director of design and development at Atlantic Media Strategies.

“A shift to mobile design isn’t just a website redesign,” McGrath says. “It’s really about building relationships with individuals and, by default, thinking about how user experience design, editorial, strategy, how all those disciplines work together and meld together to deliver the experience.”

This piece originally appeared as a blog post on the AMS website. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, the Digital Trends Index, for the latest trends in media and technology.