How Google's Mobilegeddon Improved Home Depot's Business

Investing in the effort and expense to make an enterprise's online presence truly mobile-ready does have its costs - and risks - as would any commitment to a new approach. But as the following article explains, it also has benefits.

As Google and other ecommerce institutions have pointed out, making mobile work optimally requires more than just shrinking the screen for your existing web presence. JL

Mark Sullivan reports in Venture Beat:

About half of Google searches are now done on mobile devices. Only a very small percentage of companies make their sites more crawlable and indexable by Google bots. Home Depot saw a six percent uptick in clicks on mobile entries after the change.
Home Depot mobile chief Mike Amend said that when Google recently changed its search algorithms to favor mobile content — an event known in mobile circles as “Mobilegeddon” — it actually helped his company’s search results.
Amend told VentureBeat CEO Matt Marshall onstage at the MobileBeat conference that Home Depot saw a six percent uptick in clicks on mobile entries after the change. It also saw a one percent increase in the effectiveness of its search keywords.
Many companies were punished for presenting a repackaged desktop browser experience on mobile.
Amend acknowledged that many customers arriving at Home Depot online content are getting there through mobile channels. “Our focus is to be anywhere and everywhere our customers are,” he said.
It’s widely estimated that about half of Google searches are now done on mobile devices. So naturally the search company wants to rank mobile-friendly content higher in search results.
While Amend didn’t give up any big secrets to Home Depot’s success on mobile, he did say that winning in mobile search has a lot to do with following basic search engine optimization principles. Only a very small percentage of companies actually follow the accepted SEO best practices to make their sites more crawlable and indexable by the Google bots, Amend said.
Amend said that his company is just now getting its feet wet in deep linking to content within apps. He says the results he’s seen so far are good, and that he’s “bullish” on the future of deep linking.