NAB About To Be Hit By Google
by Jim April 8, 2015
As the Google mobile update of April 21 staggers towards us like a giant lumbering 8 bit minecraft monster operated by a four year old, I’m amazed at the lack of panic. This update will slash the revenue of a lot of businesses. Big ones too. In this week’s show I take a look at a recent comment by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google who said “If these sites work on a smartphone and are really relevant for these queries, even if they are not mobile friendly maybe that’s something we should show to users anyway.” It was first pointed out in this blog post by Alex Graves on davidnaylor.co.uk.
What I’m exploring in today’s video is what his comment means to the search results in real terms. All along Google have been saying this mobile update will reward sites in mobile search that are mobile friendly. They have never said there will be a penalty. Those of us that work in SEO everyday know that this means if your site is not mobile friendly Google will put search results above your site that are. There are of course exceptions to this. In John’s video my take is that he is pointing out the exception rather than the rule.
What I discovered just before recording there is at least one big Aussie business that doesn’t seem to care, or doesn’t know what’s about to hit. How many more are there? I have to say I was surprised to discover this. Now that I’ve had time to edit the video and reflect, I think Australia’s most profitable business, The NAB is about to lose all their non brand related search from mobiles.
If I take just two phrases “Credit Cards” & “Credit Card” which they rank in the top five for, we can see that the singular has about 4 times as much volume as the plural.
These volumes are relative to each other and don’t give a real number. To get that I need to cross reference with a couple of phrases I know the approximate monthly search volume for . Having done that I can tell you that “Credit Card” gets in excess of 50,000 searches per month. When you add in variants of this phrase like “low interest credit cards” etc the volume starts to add up. Then when you add completely different phrases but relevant like “balance transfers” (which the NAB ranks 2nd for) you quickly get the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of impressions a month that they are ranking for. They will lose probably 50% of this traffic come April 21.
Brand search
This won’t be affected as with the mobile update also comes personal relevant app results. So if you are a nab customer it will give you a link to the app and their website.
Non brand related search
They will lose in the new business space. Users who are not thinking about their brand when they’re searching.
When I appeared on Skynews recently I was asked if I thought any ASX listed companies Q2 earnings would be affected by this update. Oooh yes indeedy. Yes indeedydoo. I’m already thinking of several companies to buy put options on.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
