After everyone has been talking about mobilegeddon, it’s really about time for you to check the aftermath. Actually I was going to write, how you could check your rankings and compare them before and after Google’s mobile friendly update. But before I finally got to write this post, Google actually changed the way, rankings can be analyzed within Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) – and made this post even easier.
During the last days Google has been rolling out a new view under the search traffic tab in GWT, renamed it from search queries to search analytics and added some pretty neat new features. Features that make the comparison and control of your site’s performance in search even easier.
When you now look in into your GWT account, you should be able to see the new view – or will be able to see it shortly. The biggest changes are the enhanced filter functionalities that now actually allow to beyond filtering data also to compare it in the live view. In the old version you’d had to export the results and work with spreadsheets to compare data.
In the live graph you can now choose what you want to see: clicks, impressions, CTR and/or average position. This data was included before as well, but you now are able to choose, which one of these numbers you want to display in the time-line graph.
The most powerful change though is in the metrics filter functions. You now can display the data stated above (clicks, impressions etc.) for a number of metrics and even filter and compare them. Filtering was something that could be done in the old view as well, but didn’t come as handy as it does now.
How to control the mobilegeddon aftermath?
Long story short: to check up on your performance in mobile search got pretty easy with the new features in Google Webmaster Tools. To check your overall performance in mobile search, you might want to pick a large date range (90 days), choose position as metric and filter the results by mobile devices. This should already give you a rough idea, if you are in trouble. If your average overall rankings in mobile dropped after the mobile-friendly update (which is conveniently marked in the time-line graph), you most likely ran into trouble because your site isn’t mobile-friendly.