Is Your Website Mobile Friendly?
With Google releasing their last update on 21st of April, is your site mobile friendly? If your site is not mobile friendly there is a strong probability your website will be penalized and this could cause your website rankings to plummet.
What is the new update all about?
Google will be ranking 'mobile-friendly' sites higher (on searches made on mobile devices) in the next update, with 80% of Internet users using smartphones to search online, this is a big deal!
Google explains more:
“Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”
What is a "mobile-friendly" site?
Mobile-friendly or Responsive web design, lets your customers view your website and its content in proportional to the screen size it’s being viewed on. If a potential customer can’t use your site properly on a smartphone or a tablet, there’s a good chance that your unresponsive site will interrupt their buying cycle.
In fact 57% of people won’t recommend a business with a bad mobile site. So a fully responsive website which allows user friendly viewing regardless of the device you are using, is key!
The new report by ComScore says that, for the first time ever mobile devices have exceeded the amount of users who exclusively use desktop devices.
These proves that mobile devices are becoming more and more that mobile devices are the way forward.
How can you check if this affects you?
Google released two tools that can help you check if your site is ready for their upcoming update.
First up using Google’s very own Mobile Friendly tester you can check to see if your website is mobile friendly. CLICK HERE
Next you can check the speed of your site across all devices using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. CLICK HERE
What happens if my site is not ready?
With 50% of your traffic from Google coming from mobile devices you need to mae sure you are up to date. Ask your web developer to update your site and make sure you are responsive across all mobile devices.
If have just had a new website but didn’t opt for fully responsive, than you need to make sure you have a mobile friendly version of your current site. This is not as cost effective as a fully responsive, but at least you won’t be penalised by the search engines.
