Drop in Mobile & Tablet Rankings

[simonukss]

We have pretty strong rankings and have done since we launched our business in 2004. Over the past two months, we have seen a strong growth in rankings after a bit of a drip last year, however over the past week we have seen a significant drop off in organic traffic.

Further analysis has shown that this is coming from mobile/tablet traffic, as the desktop traffic has been fairly consistent. There does appear to be a drop (across all main keywords) on mobile/tablet, but again there is no noticeable drop in desktop rankings.

I am obviously aware Google treats these differently, but we can find no obvious reasons why this might have occurred. It is almost as if some sort of penalty has been applied on mobile/tablet only. There are no warnings or obvious problems in webmaster tools and our mobile/tablet site is mobile optimised.

At a bit of a loss and would appreciate a bit of guidance in where you think we should start to understand what is causing this and how we should go about correcting it.

Thanks in advance for the help.

[Andy-Halliday]

It would affect all your mobile / tablet rankings and wouldn't affect your desktop rankings as much.

Like I said it could be your competitors have improved theirs, rather than yours getting worse, if you can work out when roughly the decline started to happen - ask your devs what they rolled.

[simonukss]

Thanks Andy, there is some good advice here. We are an ecommerce site and I think in terms of against our competitors - yes, we do deserve to be ranking there.

Page load speed is a very good shout though, we will certainly approach this angle. Is it feasible Google could apply a sitewide mobile/tablet penalty for this if it wasn't meeting the standards?

Cheers,
Simon

[Andy-Halliday]

Assuming your mobile is mobile friendly, have you added anything to the site recently to affect page load speed.

Page load is a much bigger ranking factor compared to desktop traffic.

Or it could be your competitors have improved their page load speed or improve their content. Ask yourself honestly - does your content deserve to rank number 1. If the answer is no - then start producing 10x content and the rankings will follow.

First place to check is the page load speed in WMT.

Thanks

Andy