Will “Mobilegeddon” Crush Small Firms and Businesses?

law firm ranking

LawFuel has written about the major changes Google is making to its search rankings and the effect it may – or will – have on many law firm websites.

But Real Lawyers Have Blogs publisher Kevin O’Keefe, who refers to the colourfully labelled “Mobilegeddon” and considers that lawyers and their business clients are not ready for the major algorithm update. As a result a lot of law firm content, be it on blogs or websites, is going to take a major hit says Mr O’Keefe.

The changes, according to Business Insider writer Jillian D’onfro, could actually crush many small businesses and that includes a countless number of law firms.

The algorithm will start favoring mobile-friendly websites (ones with large text, easy-to-click links, and that resize to fit whatever screen they’re viewed on) and ranking them higher in search. Websites that aren’t mobile-friendly will get demoted.

About 60% of online traffic now comes from mobile and Google wants users to have a good experience whenever they click on a mobile link.

Many small businesses did not know about the change. Others put off the expense of re-doing their sites.

Small firms are not alone. Sarah Perez (@sarahintampa) of TechCrunch reports Google’s mobile-friendly update could negatively impact almost 50% of Fortune 500 websites.

TechCrunch refer to a 2013 study said that two-thirds of the Fortune 100 were not ready for mobile search. And after running some tests this year, it is clear that progress has been slow with just over half (52 percent) of the Fortune 500 operated mobile-friendly websites ahead of Google’s update.

top-20-mobile-friendly-fortune-500

To go back to Kevin O’Keefe’s blog, he reports that  that law firms are in lockstep with American businesses. Vizibility reports 53% of the 350 largest law firms do not have a mobile-friendly website. As I reported in February, 73% of the almost one-thousand blogs published by the Am Law 200 are not ready for mobile viewing.

Vizibility puts the consequences in perspective.

For law firms, mobile devices generate one-third of the website traffic reported by FindLaw customers. But this growing issue is foreshadowed by mainstream browsing which skews 50% higher than that. According to a February 2015 IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark survey, mobile traffic accounted for 46.5% of all online traffic. Even if you don’t have a lot of traffic from mobile devices today…you will.La
“What if my law firm audience for content is mostly desktop? Then there’s no reason to have mobile sites and blogs, right?” Directly from Google’s FAQ’s on mobile-friendly:
Not exactly. Statistics show that more people are going “mobile only” — either because they never had a desktop or because they won’t replace their existing desktop. Additionally, a non-mobile-friendly site may not see many mobile visitors precisely for that reason. The mobile-friendly update will apply to mobile searches conducted across all sites, regardless of the site’s target audiences’ language, region, or proportion of mobile to desktop traffic.

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