touchscreen interfaceIt’s no surprise that over 60 percent of all searches are now happening on mobile devices. To keep up with the times, Google has recently made changes to its search algorithm causing sites with mobile friendly experiences to be ranked higher when searched. MyCorporation recently debuted our new site to comply with the Google’s announcement and to create a more user-friendly experience. We asked our small business experts what their thoughts are on Google’s algorithm change, and how they’ve been adjusting… 

“We have NOT yet adjusted our site to meet their new changes. Simply put, most of our business is through referrals and word of mouth. Little to nothing comes from Google itself. So while we may be losing out on potential customers, we have not yet implemented a mobile design just because Google demands we do so. We’ll do it when we’re ready to.” –Joe Fiduccia, America’s Footprints, LLC

“Yes, we at Elizabeth Christian Public Relations have made sure our site is fully optimized for mobile. We’ve created a mobile version of our website, as well as restructured images and source text to make sure all content shows up correctly, per Google’s recommendations. We’re also advising our clients to do the same.” –Natalie Bidnick, Elizabeth Christian Public Relations

“We’re in the midst of re-doing our website so a short-term solution was found by using DUDA mobile, a quick way to make your site mobile friendly to avoid being penalized in my local rankings via Google. We’ve advised several clients that are in the midst of a website transition to either sign up with DUDA or a similar service to make their sites mobile friend and responsive in order to avoid losing any rankings.” –Aalap Shah, SoMe Connect

“We recently wrote an article on Google’s algorithm changes, and we deal with this issue a lot as a digital marketing agency based in Boston. Alex is constantly staying on top of the latest trends in SEO to meet the needs of our clients, so adjusting to Google’s algorithm changes is a constant concern.” –Alex Kesler, Insegment 

“I absolutely adjusted to Google’s changes. Google is a primary factor in my businesses customer acquisition strategy. If I want to stay competitive on the internet, I have to adjust.” –Senica Evans, Simplified Accounting, Inc.

“We changed illinoislawyers.com to be more responsive because of the Google change in 
April. Cost me a ton, I think it’s not as user-friendly. Ironically, their adwords site on mobile is not responsive. What’s good enough for them isn’t for others. Very frustrating, but you feel as a business owner you have no choice.” -Michael Helfand, Attorney at Law

“I’m a former IRS Agent and current owner of a professional tax resolution firm in California. We’ve taken several steps to ensure our website doesn’t fall off the radar as a result of Google’s newest algorithm change. The first action we’ve taken is to run our website through Googles mobile-friendly test tool. The test analyzes a URL and reports if the page has a mobile-friendly design. 

To ensure our website runs smooth on all mobile devices, including smart phones and tablets, we used a third-party developer to convert all pages of our site into a mobile-friendly format. As a result, our website is 100% mobile-friendly and our place in Google’s search results has not been compromised. 

For our mobile site, we have also added several Click to Call buttons to make it easier for visitors to contact us and minimized the amount of text while increasing the font size to help with readability.” – Michael Raanan, Landmark Tax Group

“When Google first went public, letting us all know that changes were about to take place and sites that were not mobile-friendly would get penalized – we immediately contacted all of our clients who did not have a responsive designed website and advised them to make changes as soon as possible to avoid a search engine penalty.” –Gabriel Kuperman, Huge Impact

“For the Mobilegeddon update we were already a pretty mobile friendly site, but made a few adjustments to our code so that we benefited from the algorithm update. One of the biggest factors of the update was load time. To optimize for load time we needed to minimize external requests, which includes syncing up multiple lines of java script and ensuring it loads asynchronously. Another piece was compressing image files so that they don’t bog down load times between scripts. Lean scripts and images allowed us to reduce site load time by a few seconds, ensuring we benefited from the algorithm update.” –Adam Johnson, QuoteWizard.com

“Since we were in the process of a complete website redesign, we focused on making it 100% mobile friendly before April 21st. We used the bootstrap framework in our new web design which made it mostly mobile friendly by default but we did have a lot of little adjustments to make to images, headers, and the overall layout of the sections.” –Peggy Emch, Timesheets.com

“My website, ccs-digital.com has been around for well over 10 years. It started out as a hobby to advise people on how to save money. Over time, visitors advised me to stock the items I was recommending and eventually it grew into an ink and toner business. I built it entirely myself using HTML, Javascript and ASP. At one point it was getting 13,000 visitors a month and appeared on the first page of Google for many keywords. 

I learned long ago never to put all my eggs in one basket, or in this case, not to depend on one company for my visitors. I came up with many other ways of attracting visitors outside of Google. So when the new algorithm hit, I didn’t expect the huge effect it had on my visitors. They dropped by more than half. However, business did not decline nearly as much since I have a loyal group of customers who refer me to their friends. I had a new website built in Wordpress, greatinkus.com to stay ahead of the trend but it will be a while before it sees a huge number of visitors. I am also not satisfied with the new site. So I am currently having another one built in magento to replace ccs-digital. I hope the mobile-friendly design will please google and using the same name which once had some many hits will allow it to recover its former glory.” –Izzy Goodman, Complete Computer Services

“I did change both my websites to be mobile friendly for Google’s changes. I thought it was going to be an awful ordeal as I have a membership site. If I changed the theme, it could warp my whole site. I had some estimates and web developers suggested I start over, but then I found wptouch plugin. Bam! It was super easy. I started creating a new site in wordpress at the first of the year so we used a new responsive theme.” –Holly Stokes, The Brain Trainer

“I create and manage celebrity websites as well as being an entertainment broker. I have Google Adsense on my websites. I did receive an email regarding becoming mobile friendly. 2 of my sites have passed Google’s tests and have been deemed Mobile Friendly by Google. The changes can be quite extensive depending on the content of your website. Tables are not to be used and all images must be responsive. Even embedded videos must be changed so that they will play on any screen. It is my understanding that if you do not comply with Google standards they will not show your company in the search results of mobile users. Ignoring this mandate could have a very detrimental effect on your business. Business owners cannot simply set and forget their websites. New content that provides value to the prospective customer should be added all the time and being mobile friendly is a must.” –Bonnie Vent, Genesis Creations Entertainment

“I realized the power of mobile sites before the change so now that it has happened I am way ahead of the game. I did do some minor tweaks but all in all the responsive site was in place prior to google’s change.” –Alan Katz, Great Officiants

“I’m a Marketing Consultant that works with small businesses in navigating the road to marketing their businesses. I’d been long hearing the ramblings of having a mobile-friendly site impacting search results when I re-did my own website to a responsive format just 6 months after I originally launched.” –Jacqui Genow, J. Genow Marketing

“Our website has been optimized to be mobile friendly. We haven’t seen any significant change in traffic for mobile specifically, but we will see what happens in the next couple of months. 

I think with Google, my advice is do what is right and do it the right way, and you will get ranked well. SEO takes patience, but it is worth it.” –Malik Akande, Uberkit

“With nearly 50% of web users being mobile there is no getting around having a mobile friendly website. And if we want to be noticed we need to pay attention to what Google wants. So yes, we took a good look at how mobile friendly our website was and even though it was built to be mobile friendly it didn’t hurt to make a few adjustments to make it more so. We want to make sure our customers can find us; both our online store and our brick and mortar store.” –Cindy Jones, Ph.D., Colorado Aromatics

“We maintain more than 60 franchise websites across the country and Canada. Since the Hummingbird update we have many changes taken (or rather, taking!) place: 

1. Complete re-write of all service and local pages to contain rich, 
original content instead of rehashing the same information. 
2. Customize content on local pages to include local resources and info related to that region. 
3. Remove restriction for outbound linkage. Focus on quality link 
sharing. 
4. Move content-creating strategy from keyword-oriented to 
user-friendly: less words, more information. 
5. Claim authorship on blog posts, guest articles, blurbs, etc. 
6. Social media campaign for headquarter and franchises started in April. 
7. Develop each writer’s professional G+ and social media profile” –Angelique Pivoine, 911 Restoration 

“Google plays a vital role to the success of my business. As a business owner having a mobile friendly site was crucial to increasing my conversation rates. My mobile traffic was doing decent before Google’s update, however the recent update has increased my mobile traffic by 50%. I made a few changes to my mobile site after Google’s update. I wanted my customers to have easy access to my products through a simple checkout. Simple, quick, and safe were my main objectives when I updated my mobile site. My mobile site has always been an important part of my business, but with the new Google update it has become the centerfold of my business. As desktop computers start becoming obsolete more users are moving towards mobile devices for their internet. Everyone who owns a business website must have a mobile friendly site. Not only will you lose potential customers, but Google will punish your search engine ranking position.” –Lisa Chu, Black N Bianco

“Feeling lucky that our website runs on WordPress, I switched to the mobile friendly 2015 theme and it passes the Google test. Not the bleeding edge of web design but we’re showing up in searches and people say they can read it on their phones.” –Giovanni Isaksen, Ashworth Partners Ltd.

“Luckily our website was already mobile friendly due to the fact that we like to take a more proactive approach to the Google algorithm shifts. However, this update did cause us to shift from an Adaptive Web Design(AWD) to a Responsive Web Design(RWD) so that the transition between devices can be more seamless. Overtime, Google has made it clear that their goal is to truly provide the most relevant search results for their consumers. So what we focus on is covering all of Google’s best practices prior to there being updates by focusing on constantly improving the consumer experience on our website. If you forget about Google’s algorithm and focus on making your website the best you can for your customers, you will win in the SERP’s in the long run.” –Sean Dudayev, Insurance Chance Inc.

“We haven’t adjusted our site, basically, it is still not mobile friendly. Why? Simply because we have more desktop searches based on our Google Analytics. Of course we need to comply, but it’s not in our top 10 as of the moment.” –Jane Dizon, Gym and Fitness

“We made changes to our website as soon as I got an email from google saying that we were not mobile friendly back in January. Our website averages about 10,000 users/month. Before we switched to a mobile friendly site, mobile traffic made up 26% of our traffic. Since google changed the algorithm, mobile now makes up 37% of our traffic. 

The one thing we did not account for, is that our pop-up registration form was not mobile friendly, so we were actually losing leads because of poor user experience. After fixing this issue, we began to see nice gains in daily leads.” –Scott Layson, Layson Realty Group

“I always intended to have a mobile friendly website, but the news of the google algorithm change prompted me to take action. The full redesign will be rolled out in the next following days, but already I’ve noticed the impact in search traffic (around 10% more traffic since last week, most of it coming from mobile devices). I started making these changes about a month ago.” –Pedro Moorcraft, TTBooks  

“I regularly get involved in conversations with John Mueller at Google, who is now the main go to person since Matt Cutts left the scene. We first got wind of the Mobile Update last year and that it was going to become a ranking factor. As a result we acted quickly and created a mobile friendly version of our site, but not before we asked as many questions as we could to better understand how the algorithm would work based on the new changes. We got some great inside info and created our mobile site accordingly. 

The changes have been very positive however our industry like many others have not been affected by the update as of yet, however there will likely be a shake up very soon, as Google employees have told us there is a Panda update in the next few weeks and not to long after there will be a Penguin one, so I fully expect other changes to roll out with those in the coming months that will be more harsh.” –Gary Lee, Your City Office

“I just finished updating my website due to the Google Algorithm changes last week. I actually redid my entire site a year ago and made sure that everything worked on mobile devices and thought I was good but when I ran the test, it said that I failed. My website guy had to go in and make a few tweaks in order for me to pass Google’s test.” –Ryan Thewes

“We’re a Web Development Firm & naturally we were responsive well before Google’s algorithm change forced the issue. We’ve also assisted many clients with the change who have approached us both before and after the algorithm update.” –Garrett Perks, EvenVision  

“Though a mobile website was already in the pipeline, we updated our website with a dedicated mobile version as soon as we heard about the mobile friendly update, when it was announced to be implemented from Apr 21, 2015. Our SEO & web design team sat down and made sure our website was all set for the algorithm changes. Surely, the mobile-friendly tag has helped increase traffic as well as business for the company. Our visibility in search increased and being ahead of the competition in our industry and region, we managed to get the most of the update.” –Srajan Mishra, TSI International

“Here at WikiJob we’ve implemented responsive design across our entire website, so that every page is deemed by Google to be mobile-friendly. We’ve also changed the design of our forum so that it’s easier for mobile users to navigate through discussions and create posts. Mobile accounts for 30% of our traffic so we want to do as much as we can to make the site as easy to use on the small screen as it is on a larger device. We know it won’t be long before mobile traffic is our largest segment.” –James Rice, WikiJob