Since even some mainstream news media sites are now reporting on Google’s April 21 deadline for making Web content “mobile friendly” we can assume that a lot of people outside the usual marketing circles have at least heard about the promised change in search results. There is already some panic-stricken discussion across the Web but the truth is that millions of Websites are already mobile-friendly. I don’t think we’re going to see as great a backlash against the mobile-friendly update as we did for the Panda and Penguin algorithms even though Google is warning that this update will change more search results than either of those updates.

Search Visibility Does Not Equal Search Referral Traffic

You can bet that all the search visibility tool vendors will be tracking changes in search results the week of April 21 through 28. We may get daily updates on winners and losers. But the real winners will be those sites that see an increase in organic search referral traffic, not in search visibility. By the same token the real losers will be those sites that see a decrease in organic search referral traffic, not in search visibility.

But if you are presently receiving only a small percentage of your traffic from mobile users then even if you lose all that traffic you probably won’t feel any pain, unless you get conversions from those visitors.

Conversions Matter More Than Traffic For Some Sites

And speaking of conversions, if that is really all you care about then if you are presently not earning any conversions from mobile search referral visitors this update will be a non-event for you.

Furthermore, if you are in the process of migrating your online business strategy toward a mobile-friendly solution you really do not have to think of April 21 as your hard deadline. If you were predicting a full implementation by April 30 or May 31 that is probably still a good date.

Many passive income Website owners report receiving dismal advertising revenue from their mobile channels. The worst-case scenario for these sites is that they could lose 10-20% of their advertising income by the end of April if their pages are not ready to pass the mobile-friendly test.

While no one wants to lose 10-20% in revenue, that’s a much easier hit to absorb while you figure out a feasible mobile option than an 80-100% revenue loss.

If you are making all your passive income from mobile visitors now you probably have already converted your Website.

Apps Drive More Revenue Than Advertising for Some Sites

Even among the mobile-friendly crowd some Websites have generated more revenue from apps than from on-page advertising. While these appear to be the minority to me, I don’t see these guys surging too far ahead in the first weeks after April 21 because most Websites don’t yet offer apps. It’s impossible to gauge at this time what the impact of the rollout will be on the Website+App marketplace.

If your apps are listed in the Apple and Google app stores you at least have that much going for you.

You Only Need to Convert Individual Pages, Not Whole Sites

If you have three pages on a 1,000-page site that act like income-producing landing pages, how many pages on your site need to be ready by April 21? Just three as far as I can see.

Google says this is a page-level algorithm update so if your sales funnel is pretty small and most of your content is not contributing to mobile-attributed revenue you do NOT need to rebuild your entire site to be mobile-friendly.

It may be easier to change an entire site’s design if it is already published through a Content Management System that uses replaceable templates/themes but in that case you just need to get your head out of the development cycle and install a mobile theme that works. You can develop your idea of a perfect mobile experience later on.

WordPress users have it even easier. You can convert an entire site, no matter how convoluted, to be mobile-friendly with the Jetpack plugin (which is free to install). Jetpack is owned/maintained by Automattic, the people who own WordPress. And if you install Jetpack you will find a whole lot of cool goodies for your Website. The only real drawback to using Jetpack is that you have to set up a WordPress.com account (but you do NOT have to publish a blog there).

But How Do You Know If You Need to Do Any of This?

The most important question is “who really has to make the change?” Yes, bazillions of search results will change but if you are not yet playing in the mobile search space in a profitable way you should not care about whether your site suddenly vanishes from that vertical. You have time to figure out what you want to do for mobile search.

Meanwhile, most of you will be looking at Google Analytics and boy are you going to be sorry. Google Analytics has a lot of serious problems. The amount of fake traffic that GA is capturing has exploded in recent months as more botnets target the Google Analytics javascript files (they never even look at your Website).

But Google Analytics has always had a problem recognizing legitimate mobile traffic as mobile traffic. Heck, they can’t even document all the search engines properly. There have been cases where Yahoo!’s Slurp crawler has been logged as a mobile visitor (I have personally verified this on some sites myself).

Google Webmaster Tools will be rolling out a new user interface that breaks out the mobile impressions and clicks from the rest of the data, but there is no published date of arrival for that.

Google Analytics does allow you to create filters but they are not retroactive and you cannot anticipate where the fake traffic will come from. If, like us, you track a lot of different analytics accounts you will have to replicate all your filters across multiple accounts. We have yet to fully implement a complete list of filters on every account we monitor and we have been adding filters since last year. Google Analytics is just the wrong tool to be using for Website analytics these days and we advise our clients to invest in other analytics tools.

Mobile Search to Mobile Conversion Is a Narrow Field

Many of the Websites listed in Google News have yet to roll out mobile-friendly interfaces. And some that have done this have really botched the job. Nonetheless these sites will probably remain in the Google News index despite the really bad user experience they create.

So the field of Websites that actually need to get mobile search compatibility right is much smaller than all the bloggery will have you believe. While it’s good to be found on any search platform if you have yet to figure out how to make money on mobile then you really do not need to play in that sandbox. Not yet.

Your conversions may be clicks on ads or in-app purchases or on-pages purchases or phone calls. If you can get these conversions to happen on mobile then you do need to worry about being found in mobile search, but until your mobile user experience is ready you do NOT want to burn potential customers by giving them a bad experience.

The Web marketing community will continue to sound alarm klaxons for the next few weeks and I have no doubt that some agencies will pick up last-minute and after-the-fact business for companies that did not get the memo. But the question of who really needs to worry about being mobile-friendly by April 21 is best answered by “far fewer people than most believe”.

SEO Providers Need to Look at the Business Needs, Not the Algorithm Date

If the business needs to be on mobile now it needs to be on mobile come April 30.

If the business does not benefit from being found on mobile now then it does not need to be found on mobile come April 30 (unless the business plan changes).

SEO agencies and consultants should not be pushing clients to transform their Websites for the mobile search environment unless they can show that there is a benefit to be gained from doing so. That really comes down to dollars and sense. Either the money is there for your business or it is not. If you have no real opportunity to make money from mobile then you don’t need to do anything.

If you cannot tell from the client’s Google Analytics account how much traffic is real and how much of that is mobile then you need to get them off of Google Analytics. Don’t force businesses to make decisions on the basis of faulty data.

Just because Google says this change will be huge does not mean it will affect every site the same way. Be strategic, efficient, and discriminating when making recommendations for converting Web content to mobile-friendly status. Don’t just say “do this” because Google started waving flags in everyone’s face.

Much as I appreciate the advance notice from Google on this deadline, it’s not that big a deal for a LARGE number of Websites. I would say most sites won’t be adversely affected at all.