Google Rankings Boost for Mobile Friendly Sites

Mobile Friendly

by | Mar 26, 2015 | Mobile Marketing, News

Mobile Friendliness Even More Essential as of April 21st…

As we mentioned in our February 16th post entitled “We are Living in a Mobile World,” mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, and touchscreen laptops are increasingly becoming the dominant way that people access online media, and therefore a responsive website design is becoming increasingly important (and a much easier-to-maintain alternative to having separate PC and mobile sites).  It is estimated that over 60% of all Google searches occur on a mobile device, and Google sets the search engine standard.
On April 21st, this will be even more essential to the optimization of your site.  Google has announced that on that date, they will begin to roll out a new algorithm worldwide that will take mobile access even more into account than before in how they rank and list websites.  In fact, Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji announced that this change will exert a major impact on search engine results than the past Panda and Penguin updates did. It is possible that they may also begin to include mobile apps and tools in their results in addition to websites.  Those sites that are not mobile-friendly will be moved to the end of the line of search results, making them virtually invisible to the public, since the average person searching never goes past the second or third page of results at most.
To check how well your site works on mobile devices, go to the Google Mobile-Friendly Test Page. If you see a message “Awesome! This Site is Mobile-Friendly.” then your website is mobile friendly and you are not affected by this update.

While the details of the update are at this point unknown, here are some things that can help your site to not fall off the rankings during “mobilegeddon”:

  • Make sure that Google’s mobile bots can crawl your site; if Google can’t see you, you may as well not be there.
  • Check all of the pages of your site for mobile friendliness and ease of navigation. If users can access the home page but nothing else, then that is unproductive as well.
  • Make sure that everything on your site is functional from a mobile device.
  • Utilize the two Google-provided tools, the Mobile-Friendly Test and the Mobile Usability Report (found in Google Webmaster Tools) to assess the mobile friendliness of your site.

Here at ITVibes, all of our newest designs are responsive, and we can optimize your site to keep it more visible so that your potential and existing customers and clients can find you with ease.  For more information, contact us today.