As I traveled around the U.S. last year speaking at different apartment associations about the future of search and its impact on the multifamily industry, one of the biggest areas of concern that was raised was that of mobile search. With more than 50% of worldwide search traffic now coming from mobile devices (for us at ForRent.com it's up to around 67%), and with Google making big changes to better support mobile search, if you haven't focused on it, now is the time to start.
Mobile First
Google announced in November 2016 that it be moving to a mobile-first index, which they began rolling out in September 2017. What does that mean? It means that when it's completed, their search results will be ordered based on how your site looks and performs on mobile devices rather than on desktop devices. So if your site isn't mobile-friendly, there's a good chance you'll notice your organic traffic for people looking for apartments for rent falling away as you drop further down on Google results.
Mobile Friendly
The first thing to do is to check whether your property sites are actually mobile friendly. The easiest way to do that is with Google's mobile-friendly testing tool. All you have to do is put the URL of each site in, and click the "Run Test" button. In seconds you'll either be told that it is mobile friendly or that there are issues that need to be addressed, such as buttons being too close together — which would increase the potential for the wrong one being hit. After you fix the issue(s), run them through the tool again, until you're told you've passed.
Page Speed
In January 2018 Google announced that in July it's going to make a further change to mobile search and integrate page speed into its ranking algorithm. This means that besides being mobile friendly, your site should also be fast. Ideally, Google likes to see pages render on a mobile device in less than a second. If your property sites take longer than that, then you could be negatively impacted.
How can you test? There are a few tools out there to help. The Google Page Speed Insights tool is the one that is the easiest to use. As with the mobile-friendly tool, all you do is enter your URL and it comes back with a grade out of 100. Anything in the green is good (although the higher the better). If you score below that, it will offer suggestions for improvements that you can pass onto your website development team.
For those that have more of a dedicated development team, you can also have them look at your page speed in the WebPageTest tool, which is an open source tool backed by Google. The difference with this tool is that it shows you how all the elements of your page load, so you can identify the slower or blocking items and work around them.
Getting It Right
Once your property site is mobile friendly and fast, you'll be ready for this next phase of Google's algorithm. That said, expect it to be tweaked and changed, as it frequently is, and be prepared to keep up for the health of your business's online visibility.
