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Google recently announced that on April 21 it’s making mobile-friendliness a ranking signal for searches performed on mobile devices. Mobile-friendly sites use responsive design, an approach to web design aimed at creating an optimal viewing experience (easy to read with minimal resizing or scrolling) across a wide range of devices (from desktop monitors to mobile phones).
What does this mean for you? Simply put, if users are searching for terms related to your products or services on a mobile device, your website’s rank in the search results will be “significantly” impacted by your site’s mobile-friendliness.
More searches are conducted on mobile devices on desktops, and the amount of users conducting mobile searches is growing daily. And as of April 21, web sites failing to perform well on mobile devices will be harder to find on mobile devices. Some sites might disappear entirely. Long story short, having a mobile-friendly website is more important than ever.
Jill Kocher’s article on PracticalEcommerce is a really good “plain English” explanation of the impact this change will have on mobile search rankings and eCommerce performance.
Not sure if your site is mobile-friendly? First, take Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and in just a few minutes you will know whether or not your site will pass on April 21. With any luck, you got a cheerful “Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly” at the end of your report.
But hang on, there’s a little more to do: check out this article by Steve Baldwin, Editor-in-Chief at Didit for additional steps you can take to optimize your site’s mobile-friendly status.
If your test results weren’t very cheerful, don’t panic. Resolving the issues could be as simple as asking your developer to update your robots.txt file to remove a block on certain files (your developer will know what this means). Or it could be a mean the time has come for a website redesign to implement responsive design or mobile site best practices.
Dodged a bullet this time around? It’s still a good idea to do a periodic audit of your site. Site performance and general appearance can decline over time, impairing the experience on both mobile and desktop devices. It’s more efficient and effective to regularly review and make small, manageable updates to your site, rather than fewer, larger updates less frequently.
Don’t get left behind in the rankings on mobile searches – contact BizzyWeb today to get detailed feedback about your website from our web team. We want to help your website get found on all devices and give your customers the best user experience possible when visiting your site!
