Google just keeps doling out the hints about just how big mobile is becoming, and if you have a website, you best listen up.
We’ve heard a lot lately about Google’s plan for a mobile-first index, meaning that your mobile site is what Google will use to determine your rankings in search. All signs point to it rolling out en masse this year, and we know for a fact that it has already started.
Thankfully, the powers that be at Google want to help people prepare for this inevitable algorithm update, and they’re dropping a ton of hints and providing us with new tools to evaluate our mobile performance.
Google’s newest tool, appropriately called “Winning on Mobile,” lets you compare the speed of your mobile site to the speed of your competitors’ sites, and calculate just how much revenue you could be missing out on because of the speed of your website.
As we reported in our website speed article, Google’s latest research shows that the chance of a bounce increases 32% when the page load time goes from 1s to 3s. That’s a huge number! We’re guessing that this information is part of how Google’s latest tool works when calculating your potential lost revenue.
How to Use the New “Winning on Mobile” Test
There are two sections to the new testing tool. First, you can compare the speed of your own website to that of your competitors. First, make sure you’ve got the correct country and network selected for your test in the upper right corner.
Next, enter your own domain and those of your competitors to see how you stack up. Enter a domain, then click the arrow to add it to your scorecard. You can add up to 10 domains.
In this example. I entered target.com as my own domain and compared it to walmart.com, amazon.com, and jet.com. Target comes in 3rd.
Now, on to the revenue tool!
When you scroll down to the revenue tool, you’ll find it pre-populated with your domain and your speed. You’ll want to open Google Analytics to find the rest of your information. You can definitely take an educated guess, but for a really valid number, you’ll want to look it up.
For the sake of this example, I’ll make up some numbers for Target.
After you put the numbers in, it’ll make the calculations and then let you slide the dot back and forth to see how much revenue you’d potentially recoup by improving your site speed by however many seconds you choose.
Pretty neat tool, don’t you think?
The moral of this story is that Google really, really wants you to make your mobile website awesome. That’s not just the speed, but all of it.
Need help with your mobile website before the mobile-first algorithm rolls out? Contact Thrive now!
