New Mobile Site Traffic Drop

[KurtL]

With all the talk about how much mobile is important and how it is going to return its own search results, we finally decided to make a mobile site for one of our smaller websites to test the water. We put it up about two weeks ago and did Vary HTTP header method to serve the site.

Before the change, on the average week we would get 270-300 mobile visitors from organic search results and we converted 0.78% to sales.

Since the change, we are now getting about 70 mobile organic visitors per week but converting 2.47%

So what can I say but WOW. We are converting way way better but our organic mobile search traffic has dropped off a ton. Luckily our desktop and tablet traffic(we serve the desktop version of the site to tablets) has stayed the same and has not dipped.

Do any of you guys have experience or gone through launching a mobile site before? Did you see the immediate drop in organic mobile traffic and did you recover your traffic back to previous levels? If so, do you know how long it takes to recover?

I am thinking it is a big change and will take time for Google to adjust but I am not sure since the mobile version has so much less text now on the home page and on category or product list pages or whatever you guys want to call them.

[CandymanKen]

Hi-

Just to clarify, it sounds like you built a separate mobile version of your site, as in m.xxx.com. If that's the case it may take a while to get as much organic traffic as Google sees it as a new site.

Just an idea..

Ken

[KurtL]

Hi Ken,

Thank you for your response.  Actually we didn't build a separate mobile site as in m.xxx.com.  We used the HTTP vary method as seen here:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

so we are just presenting different slimmed down data to the google mobile crawler essentially.  We can't do responsive since we are not selling sku based items.  Our customers can pick multiple color, size and quantity options in many cases so it would be too difficult to make a responsive design website for mobile.

The problem I see with doing it the way we did versus responsive is with responsive, the google bot will still read all the home page and product list page text.  With the way we did it, it doesn't see that which sucks.

[RenaitS]

We are having exactly the same problem.We launched our mobile site in January and immediately mobile traffic dropped from 1500 visitors a day to around 75 visitors a day. Confused….

[KurtL]

Hi Renait, We found out that our guys forgot to install analytics on the Mobil pages so the only way traffic would count is if people visited the few pages that we didn't convert to mobile.  We fixed that and everything went back to normal over time.  We dropped a little in rankings early but bounced back with time.  Hope that helps.