Tag: mobile friendly

The internet has already altered the car shopping experience and smartphones have gone a step further.

A recent study conducted by Autoshopper has revealed that more than one in every three people who use the internet to shop for vehicles such as cars, SUVs and trucks, have conducted a mobile search on a smartphone or tablet while actually standing in a dealership.

That represents an increase of a massive 29 percent over the number of people who were doing it in 2013.

Considering the trend toward mobile search, that really doesn’t come as too much of a surprise. After all, earlier in 2015, searches over smartphones and tablets surpassed those that took place over PCs, according to statistics released by Google. It was that trend that brought about the massive wave nicknamed “mobilegeddon” in which Google – and then later, Bing – changed their algorithms in order to favor websites that were mobile friendly, when a search was conducted over mobile devices.

Now, dealerships are paying close attention to mobile search, as it is having a considerable impact on sales.

Since Google results now favor mobile friendly websites, dealerships have discovered that if they want to be able to stand out to their customers, then this is the type of experience that they are going to have to provide. After all, the last thing that they want to do is have a potential customer standing on their showroom floor while discovering the offerings of a competitor on their smartphones because that rival had a mobile friendly website and therefore received better search results.

Of course, the experience goes far beyond search. As dealerships battle over customers, they are now trying to create a far more seamless experience between the device and shopping in person, so that the two will work together.

Not only are most dealership websites already highly optimized for mobile search, they are also designed to provide a much broader experience that will allow consumers to be able to view additional resources that will help them to make their decisions and to learn what they want to know about the vehicles that they are considering.

Although the launch of the mobile friendly search results has begun, the update is not universally live.

Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller has now confirmed that MobileGeddon – the altering of the search engine algorithm to favor websites that are mobile friendly – has now started its official rollout, but he has also pointed out that while it is completely live at some data centers, this is not the case among them all.

The Mobile Friendly update of the algorithm is under way and it will eventually cover all of the data centers.

Webmasters have started to report in with regards to whether or not they were able to detect any differences in results on the day that MobileGeddon first started, as well as throughout the week, and while some reported that early signs were detected, the majority of webmasters said that they hadn’t seen any real difference throughout the first partial week of the implementation. That said, as time continues and as more data centers are updated – and as more searches are conducted – it is more than likely that the impact of the mobile friendly algorithm will start to become very apparent in the results.

The MobileGeddon confirmations were posted by John Mueller in a Google+ live hangout.

The changes are apparently becoming increasingly noticeable hour by hour and will continue in that direction until the mobile friendly search algorithm is completely implemented across all of the Google data centers. This means that one person may be experiencing one type of search results on their device at one time, and someone else might find something completely different on their own device. An hour later, they may both see the same thing or they might still see something different. These inconsistencies will only decrease as the rollout continues.

According to John Mueller’s own description of the beginning of MobileGeddon “It’s definitely rolling out. I know in some of the data centers its already rolled out completely. So that is something where I think you will probably see that change over the course of a week, maybe a week and a half – something like that.”