Less tech-savvy Internet companies have at least one reason to celebrate next month, as Google is set to roll out a fresh diagnostic tool that is intended to help small businesses in particular ramp up their web traffic on mobile devices.
With the new tool, small businesses will be able to perform a quick diagnostic check on their websites by simply typing in their URL to the tool and see how their sites perform, assess if the sites are faring well with competitors and identify ways for improvement. After the diagnostic assessment, Google will provide explanations and insights about why specific websites do not fare well on mobile devices and give suggestions to help the businesses improve their mobile presence.
The goal is to help speed up the businesses’ mobile Web performance and make them work better as a result. Mobile-friendly, in other words. But will it really improve the mobile performance and presence of small businesses?
The way the tool works is pretty much proactive. It will provide information to small businesses in order to convince them of the significance of resolving issues such as slow website and increased load times. There is a price to pay for every increase in load times with a website; it will result in a decline in page views, percent conversions and user satisfaction, which is to say that your website is performing poorly.
In 2015, Google made similar efforts to urge businesses to improve their mobile performance by ranking more mobile-friendly websites higher in search results. Mobile-friendly sites refer to websites that use larger text and support page resizing, among other web-friendly features. But the initiative led more to negative results for small businesses than to the improvement of their mobile sites.
Instead of helping small businesses, the mobile-friendly campaign decreased the traffic to smaller companies. Months later, not many websites have adopted the mobile-friendly campaign, meaning that Google still failed to convince everyone to adopt its recommendations.
In order to compensate for the loss of organic traffic, small businesses decided to purchase more mobile-search ads. But it would not make sense in the end if the mobile sites of businesses would not improve still because users would not subscribe to their service or buy their products.
Test My Site with Google, the tool’s name, incorporates a design and look that are not far from previous free testing tools developed by the search giant. This is part of Google’s efforts to improve consumer experience as majority of Google searches now come from mobile platforms. But it must also make sure that small businesses are not impacted negatively this time.
