Mobilegeddon: Are you Ready?

You may have seen the news about Google changing their se arch algorithm to account for ‘mobile-friendly’ results. Excitable folks in the news media are portending significant shifts and swings in search results, with some fortunes dashed, primarily due to the fact that those websites that are not responsive (those that do not re-size and re-configure depending on whether a desktop versus a mobile phone is displaying them) will suffer.

For reference, even just a few shifts in position for a consumer site or keyword can mean millions of $$ in revenue. Yet, the exact ‘weight’ that Google has applied to mobile friendly sites in their rankings is not public, nor are some other details.

The good news is that we have been aware of this change since February. Knowing that 99.5% of mobile users will not proceed past the home page if it is not responsive web, we have been taking ‘mobile-first’ very seriously within Cisco. As a result, all new web design and publishing over the last year-and-a-half has been built with a responsive, mobile first framework. In addition, we’ve prioritized the pages and areas within Cisco.com and are converting templates, designs, and content to be mobile-responsive based on traffic and importance.

The challenge is that there are still legacy portions of Cisco.com that are not yet mobile friendly. This includes many of the product pages within the site (although 5000 product support pages are mobile-optimized).

We have a long way to go until all 500,000 Cisco.com pages, across all 85 country sites and 45 languages, are mobile-friendly. But we are making steady progress and moving forward by maximizing the resources available while ensuring the highest quality digital experience. While we are methodically moving these pages to a mobile framework, the long-term solution is to redesign and rebuild these pages with mobile in mind from the beginning. Until the transformation is complete, we estimate a 3-5% reduction on SEO traffic to these pages as a consequence of today’s Google change.

If you manage a web presence, you’ll want to move to a mobile-friendly responsive web design and implementation. If you consume search and websites from a smart phone, you might notice a change in Google results and a more rapid conversion and broader availability of mobile-friendly web content. And if you are using Cisco.com specifically and need some assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out via click-to-chat or click-to-call functions on our pages (look for one of the following types of “contact us” or “let us help” offers).